Base Line Generosity

Gratitude for God’s liberality toward us is best displayed in liberality toward others.

If we think that we can learn gratitude best when buried under a pile of gifts, but that other people need to learn it by husbanding scarce resources, we are demonstrating that we have learned virtually nothing.

God does not dispense His blessing with a tea spoon or an eye dropper. He is lavish. He is prodigal. He scatters abundance. We look at this, and then look at the blinded sinners who refuse to express gratitude to Him, and instead of thinking that they are doing it wrong, we conclude that God is doing it wrong. We will show Him a more excellent way.
And so we adopt a tight-fisted stance toward others, especially those who are close to us, and we say things like “for their own good,” “teach them the value of a dollar,” and so on. But in this we do not know our own hearts—we do not give because it hurts us somewhere to give.

If generosity is coram Deo, before the face of God, then wasted gifts aren’t wasted. The cup of cold water given in the name of Jesus might have been squandered in the earthly sense, or the person who received may have been entirely unworthy of it. It may have been wasted on him, but that doesn’t mean it was wasted.

C.S. Lewis says somewhere that the only books we will have in Heaven are the ones we loaned out that didn’t come back. There is a principle of open-handedness here that is not as easy to master as it might first sound. It is, of course, possible for generosity to lack a discipline that it ought to have. But don’t ever make the mistake of trying to get generosity into your discipline instead of getting discipline into your generosity. Generosity is the base line.