A Lifetime of Giving

Key Scripture: 2 Corinthians 9:10-11 NIV
Now he who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will also supply and increase your store of seed and will enlarge the harvest of your righteousness. You will be enriched in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion, and through us your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God.

There is a difference between seed and bread. Some giving directly feeds people or answers immediate needs whilst other giving provides for future crops or needs to be met. Sometimes the giving provides storehouses or the means of distributing the bread or seed.

Either way the provision of bread or seed comes to us from God and we are called to distribute it or invest it as God leads which, by process, enriches us to be generous and gives God praise.

Haggai prophecies– ‘Is there yet any seed left in the barn?’ [chpt. 2:19a] This seems to imply that seed in the barn is OK until the season in which it should be sown. Without being sown it cannot produce a harvest. I read that a well-known but relatively minor TV sitcom actress had passed away leaving $10m in the bank. I thought, ‘well done, but what was the point of having it in the bank well after we have gone?’

As we contemplate the possibility of retirement in the future we know that our ability to give will change. We rejoice, however, in the fact that we have been able to sow seed into God’s work for fifty plus years and we get the privilege to see that bear fruit into the future.  Our prayer for the future is ‘please Lord, just give us enough to live and enough to give’.  What is your prayer?