DAY TEN - MARCH 15 GREED: SPIRITUAL HOARDING “We are not cisterns made for hoarding, we are channels made for sharing.” – Billy Graham Here is a great mystery of faith: that what is ours is not ours and that what we give away actually leads to more. It’s a great paradox, to be sure. And to people like us, to people so concerned with and so steeped in scarcity, it makes no sense. You and I were not created to store up the vast wealth of God’s goodness. We were never intended to keep vast stockpiles of grace and mercy and tenderness—like anyone can store that stuff anyway! We were designed and fashioned to give it away. Oscar Hammerstein famously wrote that love is not love until it’s given away. The same can be said of gentleness and of forgiveness, and it can really be said of all of the “good stuff” of life. For too many, though, Christianity has become a game of winners and losers, of insiders and outsiders. It’s become a competition about who can look the best and sound the best as we chime in with some overused cliché. At its heart, though, faith—real faith—isn’t about winning; it’s about choosing to lose. It’s about sharing and helping and giving. You see, ours is not a gospel of upward mobility; it’s one of a downward humility. Though the path seems hard (impossible even) and lonely, it is the only sure way to God: to pray, to hope, and to work for the betterment of our neighbors. For when we hoard the spiritual gifts that we’ve been given, when we refuse to share the goodness and blessings that God has bestowed, the strangest thing happens: We begin to lose them. The more and more we amass, the less and less fulfilling they become. In the end, we become embittered and lonely; our only companions: the empty prayers we offer. In that place, God can seem so distant. And we don’t understand. We wanted to be closer to God. We prayed and we opened ourselves to his presence. So often, though, what we fail to do is to receive God’s goodness with a spirit of humility. When God blesses us, we have a tendency to think that it’s because of something we did (or because of something we refused to do), and we can start to believe that we deserve to be blessed. We try to take ownership of something that isn’t ours to own, because the things of God can never be owned; they are ours for a season so that we can use them and steward them and share them with others. To download a full version of the 47 Lenten Devotional visit bit.ly/1fqkBSr
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 12:20:03 +0000
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