Routine Acts of Outrageous Generosity

 We Christian folks have been called to be a generous people, not measured by the amount we might be able to give but by the spirit of our generosity.  Jesus shared about a woman who had next to nothing but gave it from her heart.  Her gift probably didn't make much of a difference to anybody but God; but then isn't our whole life about living in response to God? 

The apostle Paul told the early church "For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich" (2 Cor. 8:9).  Because of what Jesus has done for us we can't keep it contained.  And, it's not just about money, even though our culture seems to be obsessed (overly obsessed) with money.  It is about living in response to the incredible and amazing grace of God. 

           

Someone said we ought to practice random acts of kindness.  I don't think this is true at all.  There ought to be nothing random about kindness or generosity.  When one knows that he or she deserves nothing from God but judgment but has received, instead, love, acceptance, and forgiveness, heaven, if you would, how could one be random in generosity? 

           

The ways of God in our lives ought to compel us to live lives of outrageous generosity, generosity with our resources, our kindness, our mercy, our forgiveness, our love.  Christians can't be cheapskates and seriously think they are walking in the steps of Jesus. Somebody once said, "Find a need and meet it."  This is the spirit of generosity. 

           

Let's choose to live in response to the self-giving of Jesus.  We can't do everything but we can live in the spirit of generosity, with our eyes fixed on Jesus.

God's Outstretched Arms

 Our God is a reconciling God.  It seems that God is always reaching out in healing and restoring acts of amazing grace, to draw us to Himself.  We don't have to be separated from our Creator.  His love has driven Him to us, in the context of our humanity, and reached into our lives restoring us and reconciling us to His very life.  Jesus is God's supreme reconciling response to our lives.  In fact, Jesus is God's response to the deepest needs of the human heart.  In Him, we are not separated from God, alone because we have been disconnected from our Creator.  Instead, Jesus is God's outstretched arms, extending to us a grace and mercy and love that staggers the imagination.

           

When God could have written us off He included us.  When He could have judged us and rightly sentenced us to the kind of life deserved by those who would sin against God and who, in their nature, fall short of His glory, He died upon the cross of Calvary so as to draw us to Himself and to make a place for us at His table.

           

Now we are called to participate with God In His reconciling life.  His love fills our hearts and moves us to be to others what God has been to us.  He didn't hold our sins against us, and we extend the same grace to everyone in our world.  Jesus is for everyone and we are called to stand with Him as He extends His crucified and resurrected life to the entire world.

           

What a God we serve!  What an awesome God to love us so fully and freely that we are privileged to share with others the greatest news ever to come down the historical pike.  In Him we are free to resign as manager of the universe and become voices of grace and mercy.

           

What a God!

God's Incredible Pledge

 Christians believe we are children of two worlds.  We are of the physical, flesh and blood, mortal world of the cosmos and we are of the spiritual world in which God is covering His people with "a house, not made with hands, eternal in the heaven" (2 Cor. 5:5).  We believe the mortal is a gift from God into which He pours His very life so that even as we dwell today in the world before us, we also dwell in the life of God who at some future moment will work in such a way "that what is mortal will be swallowed up by life" (2 Cor. 5:4).           

I, for one, find this to be exhilarating.  We live in an "earthly tent," experiencing the sense of temporary, moral, broken, and human, a life that can be taken away from any of us at any time.  Yet, we live in this "earthly tent" filled with "the Spirit as a pledge," the Spirit who fills our life with "good courage" (see 2 Cor. 5:1, 5).

Are you living in a spirit of "good cheer?"  Every Monday when I check in for a weekly physical exam just after a radiation treatment, Dr. Moorhouse asks me, "How is your spirit?"  Each week I have truthfully responded, "It's good."  It is good because God is holding me within the embrace of His grace through the abiding presence of His Holy Spirit.

In this "earthly tent" world "we walk by faith, not by sight" (2 Cor. 5:7).  Some times it hurts to live in the world.  Man's inhumanity to man is at epic proportions.  Wars and rumors of war, countless hostilities both physical and political, and suffering of countless kinds are a part of the story of daily living in the world.

Sometimes we might want to run away from it all, but this wouldn't be wise.  Instead, may God help us to live, whether here or in the heaven of which Paul speaks, with a zealous "ambition" (2 Cor. 5:9).  Heaven holds much intrigue for me, I'll be honest; but so does living in a temporal world embraced by grace, energized by God's power, and filled with the Spirit, who is given to us as a "pledge."

Lets leave the future to the God whom we trust with all our heart.  In the mean time, lets pursue life walking by faith, with a passionate ambition to be pleasing to God.

Life in GOD'S Life

Life within Life.  This is the way of Jesus.  Our lives are lived in His life, covered, if you would, by the amazing grace revealed in Him.  This is good news, according to the Bible.  The apostle Paul reminds us that our life is what he calls an "earthly tent."  It is temporary and mortal.  It won't be forever.  However, "if our earthly tent is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heaven" (2 Cor. 5:1).

           

I have been facing "earthly tent" issues recently because of health issues, very conscious that my body is temporary and mortal.  Even if God should give me many more years, a day will still come when this old body will expire.  As many years or days as I have left God helping me, I will live for Him and Him alone.  On that day when the Life in which I have been living my life is revealed, it will not be a sad day for me. 

           

The abiding presence of the Holy Spirit daily reminds me that my life is covered by the God of all grace, the God who emptied himself of all but love and actually died for me on the cross of Calvary.  Whether I am here or there does not matter.  What matters for me as I live in an earthly tent is that I "walk by faith, not by sight"  (2 Cor. 5:7).

           

I have been asking God to remind me everyday  that "momentary, light affliction is producing…an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison" (2 Cor. 4:17).  I can live with that; I can live in day-by-day victory with that. 

Life in HIS Life.  That is living.  I'll take this every time.