Receiving and Giving in Balance

What has God given me?

What do I give to God?

We can’t give if we haven’t received. The first and most important practice for any of us is to let God love us and fill our lives with His goodness. Each of us needs continually to be reinvigorated and re-inspired spiritually. We need to be fed by the ever-flowing waters of God’s grace and abundance. Our lives of discipleship can get out of kilter if we are only giving or if we are only receiving. We need to seek that balance in our lives where we are both fed and in turn we turn outwards and feed others.

Reflect upon your own spiritual health: do you need to spend some time with God and let Him rebuild you, refill you and nourish you? Without that source renewing us we become dead in our faith and practice. In turn if we only get fed but never give from our own abundance we are betraying the grace that we have been freely given.

God wants us to live lives of abundance and grace; God gives good things that never run out: faith, hope, love, charity, forgiveness, joy, mercy, peace, compassion and everlasting life. God invites all of us to share more and more in his Kingdom and he calls each of us to leave behind the burdens, fears and possessions that weigh us down.

As we travel through life we can accumulate fears and burdens. We may put our trust in the wrong places even in the wrong people. What might God be asking you to leave behind in order to travel light with Him? God calls us all to leave behind the transactional and commercialised values of this world and to enter into the free grace and mercy that abounds in God’s generous kingdom.

Our financial giving must flow out from our giving of ourselves to God. God doesn’t just want our money; he wants us, all of us. He wants us to give financially not out of guilt, but out of thanksgiving and joy.