Every good and perfect gift

We have nothing to give that didn't first come from your hand,

We have nothing to offer you which you did not provide

Every good, perfect gift comes from your kind and gracious heart

And all we do is give back to you what always has been yours.

Who has given to you that it should be paid back to him?

Who has given to you as if you needed anything?

To you and from you comes all things O Lord

And all we do is give back to you what always has been yours.     Matt Redman

We do truly come into the world with nothing and we leave taking nothing with us.  We arrive as naked babies and we depart leaving all we have accumulated over the years behind us.

In this materialistic world we place huge value on things, our possessions and who has got what. We admire the rich and their lifestyle and despise the poor. Yet as Christians we must get hold of the truth that everything we have comes from God’s kind and gracious heart.

‘The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it’ the Psalmist declares in Psalm 24:1. God and God alone is the Creator and whilst his creation may be very pleased with their efforts at creating things including wealth from what he has provided, the reality is that even these abilities come from him (Deuteronomy 8: 18).

When God gave Moses the instructions for building the tabernacle and all its furnishings, he anointed Bezalel ‘with skill, ability and knowledge in all kinds of crafts – to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut stones, to work in wood and to engage in all kinds of craftsmanship (Exodus 31: 3 – 5). Moreover God appointed Oholiab to help him. Their skills came from God.

It can be rather galling to think we are not as brilliant as we thought and that everything we have has not come from our own efforts. However actually getting hold of this truth that it all comes from God is very liberating. 

God has given us gifts and abilities because he wants us to use them both for our enjoyment and to bless others. If we let God use us, our abilities become liberated from what we can do to what God can do through us. I am sure Bezalel was amazed at what God enabled him to create.

Even in the area of wealth creation, God will use us to be a great blessing to all around us. We all know ‘it is more blessed to give than to receive’ (Acts 20:35) and it is indeed a great joy to give gifts or money. Our world desperately needs people who can handle wealth correctly and the first step in that is acknowledging it didn't come from us and our own labours in the first place. When we realise everything comes from God, it is so much easier to pass it on to others, knowing that God will always pour in where we have poured out.

The Bible is full of assurances that God will satisfy our desires as we trust him (Psalm 37: 4 and 145: 19 as examples). We never need fear being generous.

We have nothing to offer God that didn't come from him in the first place. Our very breath is a gift from God.  God wants to bless us with so much more but the key is to realise it all came from him and with thankful hearts try to become a giver with a heart like God’s because he is the ultimate Giver. 

It's the thought that counts

It is more blessed to give than to receive.  Acts 20: 35

There is no doubt that when giving a gift, it is the thought that counts.  Some of the best gifts I have received have had small monetary value but huge value in terms of the thought behind the gift. One Mother’s Day I received four gifts from my children, none of which had great monetary value but each of which said a huge amount about the giver. Each child had taken a great deal of thought to give me something that would bless me and therefore each gift was very precious to me.  Amongst the gifts was a CD compilation of my favourite worship songs put together by my younger son. The thought behind it was amazing that he knew the songs I liked and as I listened to it for the first time, I never knew what the next track would be and so the gift became a blessing over and over again.

It is very hard to give something to someone who seems to have everything. The Royal Family apparently only gives small gifts to each other at Christmas. The Queen was reportedly delighted when someone gave her an apron. She loved it and whoever had given it had thought about it and knew it would give her pleasure.

God has everything and it all belongs to him. In themselves the Trinity are complete. They need no one or nothing more but yet they draw us into this complete relationship of love. Their love is so overwhelming they want all of their wonderful creation to enjoy it. So what can we bring to the One who has and is everything?

The answer of course is the only thing we have to give – our lives, our hearts and our love. So many people want to live independently of God not realising they are denying themselves the greatest gift that has been given to humanity – a relationship with God. What else could anyone want? Everything else pales into insignificance.  Yes man’s greatest treasure so often is his freedom and his independence, not realising that actually he is not living free but in bondage to sin, pain and suffering.  Only a life given freely to the one who gives life can lead to true freedom for mankind.

Jesus gave us all he could give; his life. The greatest gift we can give is our life given back to the one who loves us so much he died for us so we could enjoy fellowship and true freedom with him.

The desires of our heart

Trust in the Lord and do good;
dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.
 Delight yourself in the Lord
and he will give you the desires of your heart. Psalm 37: 3 – 4

There is something in each one of us that is rather suspicious of our desires feeling they will be fleshly and that God would not give us those things as they would be bad for us. However I am not sure that is the case.  Imagine your child really, really wants a bicycle or a Wii or some such for their birthday or Christmas and it is within your capability to give them this. Most parents would do this, knowing that the huge pleasure their child would have at receiving their desire would also bring joy to their own heart.

As parents we do not want to spoil our children but we do want to bless them with the things they desire.  God, as the perfect dad, must also want to bless his children with the desires of their heart. He doesn’t want to spoil us but he knows better than we do how to give us good gifts without making us selfish.

When I was still a young Christian, I felt God say to me one day, ‘What would you most like?’  Now I could have, like Solomon, asked for wisdom but almost immediately I said, ‘I want to travel Lord’.  God has taken that desire and over the last 28 years we have been to so many places both on mission trips and on holiday. Indeed for 11 years in a row I went on a short term mission trip as well as having some enviable holidays.

We do not have lots of money but God has blessed us again and again with travel opportunities and paid for them!  He has given us the desires of our heart as we delighted ourselves in him. I am asking God now to open up fresh travel opportunities and mission trips as I feel there are many more places I would like to go to. 

On another occasion, my father took the family to a show in London. It was amazing and on the way home I thanked God for the opportunity to do something we could never have afforded then. His reply surprised me. ‘You wanted to go, didn’t you?’ I remembered that I had said to God almost in passing that I would love to see a show in London and he had remembered and answered my desire.  There was nothing spiritual about it – it was just a desire I had.

I know now that I can trust God to bring about my desires in his own way and time and if they really are ‘bad’ for me, he will withhold them like any good Father would. We do not have to be afraid of our desires and ‘crucify our flesh’ so we have no desires. As with so many aspects of the Christian faith, it is a balancing act between ‘your will not mine’ and God giving us the desires of our heart.

The key is to seek the Giver not the gift. It is delighting ourselves in him, loving him for who he is not what he can give us. No Father wants a child to be looking at his hands to see what is in them but rather to be looking at his face and then finding his hands are full of blessings.