Luke 6:37-38(NLT)
“37 Do not judge others, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn others, or it will all come back against you. Forgive others, and you will be forgiven. 38 Give, and you will receive. Your gift will return to you in full—pressed down, shaken together to make room for more, running over, and poured into your lap. The amount you give will determine the amount you get back.”
Giving, being unselfish, and pouring into the lives of others is more than a wonderful gesture. The practice of giving is a commandment from God. Giving is His nature, and as His children, it must be our nature as well. It begins in the heart, and once it is expressed outwardly through our actions, the act of giving becomes a powerful instrument of change, transforming the hearts and lives of others as well as our own. Jesus Christ makes it plain in Luke 6:37-38 that the practice of giving is a law, and it is immutable. This means it can’t be manipulated or changed by anyone. Giving initiates a process where the outcome is predictable. If we give, we will receive, and what we receive will be in proportion to what we have given. This is a profound lesson of love.
In the Old Testament, our Heavenly Father was adamant to instruct His people to follow His statutes, commandments, and instructions. Doing so was the only way He could bless them. In Leviticus 18:4(NLT), He told them, “You must obey all my regulations and be careful to obey my decrees, for I am the LORD your God.” In Deuteronomy 5:32(NLT), through Moses, He instructed, “You must be careful to obey all the commands of the LORD your God, following his instructions in every detail.” And in Joshua 1:7(NLT), He told Joshua, Moses’s successor, “Be strong and very courageous. Be careful to obey all the instructions Moses gave you. Do not deviate from them, turning either to the right or to the left. Then you will be successful in everything you do.”
God is a Righteous Judge. He does not bless any and every action or effort that an individual undertakes. God blesses His Word, because His Word is alive, righteous, and true. His Word achieves His plan and purpose. He said in Isaiah 55:11(NLT), “It is the same with my word. I send it out, and it always produces fruit. It will accomplish all I want it to, and it will prosper everywhere I send it.”
Hebrews 11:6 tells us that God is a Rewarder. This is what He does. He rewards! He compensates! And He is more masterful at it than any of us can imagine, but He does not reward disobedience. He rewards those who obey and have faith in what He says. It’s amazing because He doesn’t make this complicated, yet we have somehow made it far more complex than He intended. His ways are not burdensome, they bring life to us and everything we set our hands to do. 1John 5:3-4(NLT) declares, “3 Loving God means keeping his commandments, and his commandments are not burdensome. 4 For every child of God defeats this evil world, and we achieve this victory through our faith.”
In Luke 6:37-38, our Lord and Savior frames the heart God expects us to have in order to live our best blessed life. It’s two-pronged. First, he addresses the issue of forgiving others. This is essential to living a Christ-like life. It’s speaks to the condition of an individual’s heart. If we are committed to forgive in the way God has commanded, our hearts are humble and pliable. And this humility and flexibility are required to please Him and fulfill His requirement that we have a heart like Christ. Forgiveness is a gift we offer others that have hurt us in some way. We forgive them because God has forgiven us. We freely offer what has been freely offered to us. This demonstrates that God’s Word and love are first in our lives.
The second prong teaches us about the law of God regarding our giving-actions. It teaches us how we can align our existences with His blessings by being obedient to this law. Through freely giving, we set a boomerang in motion. It has the potential to anchor us in God’s blessed and continuous cycle of giving and receiving. The thing that we must also come into consciousness about is that just the opposite takes place when we fail to heed God’s instructions about giving. Rather than setting ourselves up for blessings, when we don’t give, we are moving in the opposite direction of them. Through selfishness and the refusal to give according to God’s instructions, we set a negative cycle in motion. This is a condition that causes situations and circumstances to always work against our greater good.
The refusal to give will always produce fruit that are equal to that refusal. A lack of forgiveness and generosity will yield the negative situations and circumstances that support it, and these will continue to keep a person cut off from the blessings they desire most.
Many women are praying to receive God’s best but have not postured themselves to give God their best. The law of giving and receiving is one of God’s ways of positioning His kids for greatness and a fulfilling life. We must open our eyes to how our attitude towards forgiveness and giving are tied to whether we are accepting or rejecting what God has in store.
He tells us in Malachi 3:10(NLT), “Bring all the tithes into the storehouse so there will be enough food in my Temple. If you do,” says the LORD of Heaven’s Armies, “I will open the windows of heaven for you. I will pour out a blessing so great you won’t have enough room to take it in! Try it! Put me to the test!” Here in the Old Testament, God is teaching us about tithing into His Kingdom as a way of blessing us through His law of giving and receiving. He’s showing us the immutability and endurance of His laws, and if there is any doubt in our minds about them, He challenges us to test them out, and find out for ourselves that His Word and Ways are true.
Cutting to the chase, many of us aren’t giving God enough to work with. We’re refusing to rally our faith to give and sow in the way that God instructs. When it comes to being generous and sowing into His Kingdom, some of us still think that if we give our little bit to Him that He will allow greater lack to exist in our circumstances. We refuse to believe in His supernatural provision. When it comes to forgiving those that have hurt us, we allow fear and resentment to close our hearts, because we refuse to believe that God will keep us safe. All of this is a lack of faith, and it goes against the strategy that God has given us for an abundant life. We must believe that God will reward our giving, and this must be backed up by making forgiveness and giving the motivation of our hearts.■
Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
“Are You Giving God Enough to Work With?”, written by Kim Times, edited by Fran Mack for Sundie Morning Sistas ©2022. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord!