Why Give? How Giving Reveals More Than we Imagine.
Giving season upon us. In the next few days and weeks, we’ll be invited to buy gifts, make donations, and otherwise celebrate the winter holidays. It will undoubtedly stir emotions. (There’s nothing like a black Friday crowd to make you rethink your life choices.).
In light of this season I thought it’d be helpful to share a conversation my daughter and I had a short time ago. We’d just finished our morning routine of listening to a prayerful recitation of Luke 21 on Pray As You Go, a fantastic prayer app for busy people, and were discussing what we’d heard.
In Luke 21, Jesus is sitting by the treasury in the temple watching the community offer gifts to God. Then, as now, all the eyes are on the big donors whose contributions inspire the crowd. Quietly, and without fanfare, a widow deposits two small coins in the box, and for the first time in the story, Jesus is stirred with emotion. He celebrates the widow as having given, ‘more than all the others,’ because her gift was, ‘all she had to live on.’
Our conversation went something like this…
Me: Why does God care about what we give?
Daughter: Because he's a jealous God and he wants us to give our best to him.
Me: Ok. What are possible other reasons?
Daughter: I don't know.
Me: Can you think of how giving relates to the character of God? (Insert meandering conversation finally landing on John 3:16.)
Daughter: Oooh!
Me: What is it?
Daughter: Maybe God cares about giving because He gave something really important.
Me: I think you're right. So…when we give generously, sacrificially, and freely for the sake of others what are we doing?
Daughter: We're showing the character of God.
Me: When we give in a selfish, ungenerous, and stingy way do we reflect God's kingdom "on earth as in heaven"?
Daughter: No!
Me: So, why does God care about our giving?
Daughter: Because he wants us, and other people, to know what he's like... generous, loving, and sacrificial.
In all my reflections on giving up to this point, I’d imagined that we should give to demonstrate our character. Our giving tells our community that we are generous, thoughtful, responsible, and socially minded. But what if our giving actually reveals the character of God? What if the best reason to participate in giving is because it shows an anxious, needy, and distracted world what God is like?
This year I’m going to try to give a little more like the unnamed widow by:
1. Setting aside $200 to give to strangers anonymously.
2. Involving our whole family in giving.
3. Regularly asking, “How does this gift help the receiver to know what God is like?”
What are your best giving experiences? How have they shaped your practice of generosity?