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God's Overzealous Abundant Generosity

God’s Overzealous Abundant Generosity

January 20, 2019 by brianmichaelsteck Leave a Comment

Celebration is the theme of the winter winter for our family. We welcomed a newborn into our home this past fall, enjoy family and Thanksgiving bounty, birthdays for two of our kids and Christmas, all within the matter of a few short months. This weekend we watched our youngest son turn 2 and melt with delight as he opened plush teddy bears and plentiful gifts.

As parents, we feel caught between wanting to lavish our children with presents, so they can see a glimpse of how much we love them, while not wanting to spoil them and feed the “me-centric” spirit of our culture.

So while we watch our little ones gleefully open presents, we ponder whether it’s better to just hide some of the remaining presents for the next birthday or holiday, so as to space out the seemingly overwhelming abundance.

What would you do?

But today, as more toys were opened in celebration of the precious life of my son — filling up all the remaining square footage of our modest but beautiful home — I couldn’t help but wonder, “God, how do you see us? How do you give gifts?”

I felt the resounding sense that God’s generosity is not sufficient or adequate, but His love is zealous, abundant and outrageously generous — ‘gratuitous’ as my ultimate frisbee buddies might call it.

God’s love is more than enough. It’s fierce and overwhelming.

And yet, because I know His character, I know that he holds back as well. He didn’t hold back in Christ, but he holds back in all that he wants to give us… frankly, because we can’t handle it.

If God were to give us all of His love at once, we’d simply die. Really. I mean that. It’d be like a supersonic shockwave of unrelenting, exuberant love.

How do I know that?

Look at His word. I challenge you: read the Bible cover to cover this year and as you finish the last chapter, I dare you to tell me that you don’t see an unrelenting love of a Father who is passionately pursuing his faithless and undeserving children — because, while we don’t deserve His love, it is ours — helplessly ours. We can’t run from it or hide from it. He just loves us.

How can he not though? We are made in His image.

Just like my son is made in my image, I can’t look at him and not see me. I see my nature and likeness engrained in his essence, and I love what I see.

I’m not perfect as a dad — in fact, those that know me know that I’m nowhere near perfect. But even as an imperfect father, I want to give the world to my kids. I want all good things for them. Even if that means seasons of pain because their is greater life and pleasure on the other side of that temporal disappointment and challenge.

And if I, as an imperfect father, want such good for my kids, how much more does God have beauty and goodness and abundant life in store for us?

Today, pause and open yourself to God’s overzealous, abundant generosity. He is crazy about us, and if He holds back a gift, know that it’s only because He loves us enough to not let His love destroy us.

“Lord, we serve You, an unrelentingly loving Father who knows what’s best for us, even when we don’t understand it. We can’t comprehend your goodness towards us. Help us to receive your generosity and enjoy you fully, while knowing that there is always more. We love you Daddy-Father.”

Filed Under: Worship Tagged With: Father Heart of God, Generosity, love

Ending Welfare

August 8, 2012 by brianmichaelsteck 5 Comments

The topic of poverty is set within some deep waters, as only some can identify with it, most would like to avoid it and no one seems to have the answers for it. I can’t say that I’m any better off than the majority, as I have always had my needs met, in honesty must admit that I love luxury over scarcity and at best my ideas are lofty and idealistic. Nevertheless, poverty is a concern to me. My heart goes out to those who are barely getting by, and my anger is stirred when I see the disparity between the rich and the poor. “Ending welfare” is both a concept and an indicator of the greater task at hand — ending poverty.

 

The Situation

A recent report titled How America’s Losing The War on Poverty explains that roughly “16 percent of Americans live at or below the poverty line.” That means that 84 percent live above the poverty line. With some CEOs raking in 380 times an average worker’s pay in America, you begin to realize that there are two different stories going on.

America went through some hard years recently with the “housing crisis”, but we still come nowhere close to the type of poverty that most live with around the world. Poverty, by third world standards, is living on less than $1-2 per day. When you compare that with “Poverty in America” being $23,000 per year for a family of four, it begins to look as if we are the “CEOs” of today’s global economy.

There is absolute poverty and relative poverty. In America, even the poorest only suffer from relative poverty, and oftentimes there are opportunities available to end that poverty — unlike children and families living in the dirt out in the fields of Somalia or India.

Briefly, before we move on, let me be clear that in my opinion, America’s view on wealth and need is grossly distorted. NPR’s article that I mentioned earlier stated “On top of that, 100 million of us — 1 out of 3 Americans — manage to survive on a household income barely twice that amount. How is this poverty crisis happening?” I don’t know if the frustration that is aroused in my by this type of comment is common to others, but I think that it’s ridiculous to think that families living on $46,000 per year are “managing to survive”. When you’ve got a car, a phone and a choice of what kind of cereal you want to eat in the morning (which is what $46k can afford), this is simply an absurd statement that reveals the true state of the American mind.

 

So, what do we do about it?

“Give your money away and all live happily ever after.”

Well, that’s the simple answer. But in reality, it’s not far from the truth. A major problem that I see is that at some point, the Church stopped being the Church. Christians stopped reflecting Christ.

When this happened, the government saw the people that the Church used to take in, pray for, heal, feed, protect and provide for, and people said, “There’s a lot of hurting people. We should do something about it.” But unfortunately, American’s looked to the government to fix it. So the government started a lot of programs, like welfare, medicare, medicaid, social security, etc.

We have come to learn that these programs are now underfunded and, in the case of welfare, a larger detriment to the people they are trying to help. By this, I mean that when the idea of selling food stamps for drugs or making the decision to be unemployed because welfare provides enough to get by — when these behaviors are the result of our “help”, we are obviously no real benefit at all. Yes, this may be the case of some people’s poor decisions may ruining it for others, but I believe that the task of feeding the hungry should never have been placed on the government’s shoulders. Christ clearly told his followers to take care of that; that generosity and caring for the needs of others would be a mark of a true believer.

Welfare is a sign that the Church has departed from Christ. I believe that ending welfare, by the Church meeting the needs of the poor, is part of the Kingdom of God coming on this earth.

The way that legislature works, trying to pass even the simplest laws into effect can take months and thousands of dollars worth of salaries of politicians and lobbyists. So trying to change our society from the top down is a large waste of effort.

Instead, I think Christ modeled a grass-roots approach. He gathered some simple fisherman to spread the news of the Kingdom of God, so it’s fair to say that a group of passionate, educated people such as ourselves might have what it takes to take on a poverty-sized challenge.

 

The Church being the Church

The Church must return to being the Church that God intended it to be. From the earliest onset of the Kingdom of God on earth, we were given the command to manage well what we have been entrusted. We are to be stewards of our resources — time, money, energy, intelligence — to accomplish God’s will. His will is that all should come to know Him and that His Kingdom come to earth as it is in heaven, where there is no weeping, death or poverty.

This means that Church needs to step through the barriers of welfare, crossing the lines of responsibility and take on the needs of those around them. And perhaps, we must take on the needs of those that are not around us as well. With the abundant resources that we have been given, we often chose to live in communities of people with similar resources, so the problem of poverty is nowhere to be seen. It may be that we need to move into parts of town that are hurting, or at least spend time there, so we can become acquainted with the needs around us.

 

The grass-roots approach

But this lifestyle change and responsibility swap will not happen if we wait for our preachers to tell us from the pulpit. The sad truth is that most preachers will avoid delivering the full weight of what needs to be said because their own livelihood depends on whether or not people like what they are saying; and who likes to be told that their lifestyle is too comfortable and they need to pursue a radical faith if they are to have any sincere faith at all?

No, this lifestyle change happens at home and in the heart. It begins by God changing our hearts and opening our eyes. It looks like leaders of the household, men of God, rising up and guiding their families toward a more fruitful and sold-out existence as a family. It looks like sacrifices made in the home and the budget that enable generosity as it as never been seen before.

When families are changed, they change those around them, including the local church. And in the words of Bill Hybels, “When you change the local church, you change the world.”

 

A dream for tomorrow

I truly believe that it can happen and that God will support our efforts if we begin to pursue His will and love others as Christ modeled servant-hearted love. I believe that our money and effort extended to the needs around us — the single mothers, the widows and the orphans — can snuff out the fires of relative poverty in our neighborhoods, causing the government to see that the problems no longer exist. In order for this to happen, it must spread in a wide-scale fashion, but it must also stir deeply in our own hearts and minds, so that every decision we make runs through a filter asking, “Does this purchase or decision enable me to reflect the love of Christ, bring the Kingdom of God and steward my resources in the most God-honoring way possible?”

When we do this, we will be changed — and we will ignite a type of blaze that engulfs the comatose, zombie-like pursuit of vain luxuries fueled by self-centered consumerism and perpetual commercialism in our lives today.

Filed Under: The Kingdom Centered Mind Tagged With: Authentic Christianity, Generosity, Government, Injustice, Kingdom of God, Poverty, Stewardship, Surrender, Welfare

A Generous Kind of People

August 9, 2011 by brianmichaelsteck Leave a Comment

YouVersion has an excellent selection of scripture reading plans. I’ve used a few of them in my time with the Lord and it has been really good for me. Currently, I’m reading through a selection of verses on the topic of biblical generosity.

My first observation when I began reading was that the verses didn’t seem to be directly about generosity, or at least how I was expecting them. Instead, they catalogued references to God’s generosity towards us. As I thought about this, I realized how important that is; if we first grasp the generous love that God has towards us, then responding in generous love comes about more naturally, and not as an obligation. We serve a God who is stunningly benevolent towards us. Take a moment to be reflect on what God has blessed your life with and let Him move you.

The body of believers I gather with regularly has been talking about how God is a reaching, restoring and reproducing God. Recent conversations have revolved around the restoring aspect as it relates to local and global injustice. This caught my attention this morning as I read about generosity and the scripture repeatedly referred to ways that God is just and how He thinks about our behavior towards those in need. It became very obvious that this is important to God and that our stance on injustice has something to do with our understanding of generosity.

A discussion last night uncovered a definition of injustice that makes sense to me: Injustice is what makes you say to yourself, “That is not right.” For me, some of those things are single-moms struggling to make ends meet and no one to fight for them; children in verbally, physically or emotionally abusive homes; an elderly man spending the last 20 years of his life alone, while he lives in a suburban home on a street where Christ-followers live; a woman feeling as if her only way to be noticed is to wear low-cut shirts and hang out at the bars, or come dangerously close to death by overdosing, cutting or eating. These things make me cringe and cry out inside, “That is not right!”

Originally, I thought that injustice was only starving babies on distant continents or dictators exerting harsh and oppressive control — that is injustice and it must end. Yet, I’m discovering that not all injustice is out of our reach. Most of it is next door or across the street.

A generous kind of people is one that has encountered the restoring love of God and invites others to be swept away in God’s redemptive stream of life. I long for the label of “Christian” or “Christ-follower” be one that stirs pictures of people who are actively involved in writing a story marked by making right the things that are “just not right” and seeing the Kingdom of God come in fullness.

Parting thought: If you were to take a step toward removing the barriers that keep you from a just lifestyle, what would that barrier be? If you were to make one decision that advances the Kingdom in relation to injustice or invites others to join with you, what would that decision be?

In short: What is holding you back? How are you moving forward?

Filed Under: Discipleship Tagged With: Generosity, Injustice, Kingdom of God, Mission Church

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