Thursday, October 13

For an audio version of this, click here.

2 Corinthians 9:6-8

Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously. Each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things, at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.

For the first five years of our marriage I kept the checkbook. But accounting really wasn’t my strongest suit, so I just managed the checkbook the same way I had as a single guy – I estimated. Yep, that’s right, I estimated. When I wrote a check I simply rounded it off to the nearest dollar in my records – and figured it would all come out even in the end. And when I received our monthly bank statements – I didn’t bother looking at them – I simply stacked them neatly, and unopened, in a box. For some reason, five years or so into our marriage, my wife needed to know something that required her to open one of our bank statements. She ended up going through all five years of unopened statements and discovered that we had $700 of interest in our account that neither of us knew about! I told her, “See, my system works!” But from that day on, my wife handled our checkbook!

Now, even though it was completely accidental, that story does illustrate what could be called “The law of the harvest.” The law of the harvest is, simply put, “you reap what you sow.” It’s a law that every farmer knows. You sow corn, you reap corn. You sow a lot of corn, you reap a lot of corn. The law of the harvest tells us that you can’t sow corn and expect soy beans. Neither can you sow a few seeds of corn and expect to reap a bumper crop. It just doesn’t work that way.

The same is true in our personal and spiritual lives. If we sow kindness and love, we tend to reap kindness and love. If we sow financial discipline we tend to reap financial security. And, as Paul writes in 2 Corinthians, if we sow generosity we tend to reap God’s generous blessing.

Most of us have some kind of “investment strategy.” We may invest in retirement funds; we might invest in college funds for our children; we might even invest in the stock market – but most of us invest in something. We do so because we believe in the law of the harvest. We invest our resources in all these different ways because we believe that our investments will grow over time – and that the more we invest, the more we will eventually receive.

But do we think of generosity as an investment? If I am honest with myself – there are times when I think of generosity as a kind of “loss” rather than an investment. When I give money or other material resources, I am tempted to see my gift as a loss that I will never get back. But God is trying to teach me – and us – to see that the exact opposite is true. It is when we hold tightly to what we see as our money and resources that we actually forfeit his blessing; and it is when we give generously that we guarantee ourselves an abundant return!

Read these verses again:

Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously. Each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things, at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.

God has promised to bless our generosity with his abundance. Are you willing to trust his promise? Ask him to teach you to sow more generously that you may experience his grace and abundance!

Pastor Brian Coffey