C.S. Lewis once commented on our tendency to guard against the error we are least likely to fall into. Faced with a flood, he says, we break out the fire extinguishers.
And so we guard against what we think are the pressing temptations of our day, and over time we come to think that the temptations are great and glaring, and we conclude this simply on the basis of all the warnings we hear about them. We never hear warnings about the ditch on the other side of the road, and perhaps that is the ditch we have actually tumbled into.
When was the last time you heard a caution against being too stingy in your gift giving? And how many warnings have you heard about a consumerist tendency to spend way too much? Now I grant that throwing a bunch of money around is not the same thing as true, open-handed generosity, and we do have a good bit of that. It is not as though that is a non-existent problem.
But at the same time, I can safely say that our besetting sin in this nation is not that of being far too open-hearted and open-handed. We are too accustomed to comparing ourselves to others, less generous than we, and not to the heart of God. God is positively wasteful. He does unnecessary things, and He does it all the time. We look at what He has done, stupefied, and we say what recipients of gifts often say. We look at the universe, and say, “You didn’t have to.” And this is exactly correct. This Christmas imitate Him. Do what “you didn’t have to.”