The world of the generous gets larger and larger; the world of the stingy gets smaller and smaller. Proverbs 11:24
“The world of the generous,” Eugene Peterson translates Proverbs 11:24, “gets larger and larger: the world of the stingy gets smaller and smaller” (MSG). This is more than a principle of financial stewardship, it’s a basic truth of life. Generous people generate things. And, consequently, their worlds are more varied, surprising, colorful, fruitful. They’re richer. More abounds with them, and yet they have greater thirst and deeper capacity to take it all in. The world delights the generous but seldom overwhelms them.
Not so the stingy. Stinginess is parasitic, it chews life up and spits out bones. The stingy end up losing what they try so desperately to hold. As Jesus warned, those who store up treasure on earth discover, to late that such storage is merely composting. Or, as he warned in the parable of the talents, trying to preserve a thing intact never accomplishes even that much. Hoarding is only wasting. Keeping turns into losing. And so the world of the stingy shrinks. Skinflints, locked into a mind-set of scarcity, find that the world dwindles down to meet their withered expectations. Because they are convinced there isn’t enough, there never is.”
Mark Buchanan in The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2006) 83.
How would you describe your world? Is it getting larger or smaller? The paradox of the Christian faith is that we gain nothing unless we risk everything. Only when we lose our life do we find it. When we share richly, we find we abound with God’s abundance. Don’t go through life merely composting. Abandon the scarcity mind-set. Put to work what God provides, and somehow God makes everything larger and larger. We have found this to be true in our lives! And the abundance we enjoy is never for hoarding as we lose whatever we keep. Buchanan sums it up aptly when he reminds us that this is “more than a principle of financial stewardship, it’s a basic truth of life.”