“I have received full payment and have more than enough. I am amply supplied, now that I have received from Epaphroditus the gifts you sent. They are a fragrant offering, an acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God.” Philippians 4:18
“St. Gregory writes of four things needful for a man who hears the word of God and keeps it.
The first is that he should have mortified himself to all stirrings of the flesh, and having slain all transient things in himself, should himself too be dead to all transient things. The second is that he should be wholly and entirely raised up in God with knowledge, with love and with true inwardness. The third is that he should never do to anyone what he would not like to have done to him. The fourth is that he should be bounteous both with material things and with spiritual goods, giving both generously.
Many a man appears to give, but in reality gives nothing at all. These are people who give their goods to those whose possessions are greater than their own, where their gift is perhaps not wanted, or they give it where they obtain some service for their gift, or where they are given something in return, or where they expect to be honored. Such people’s gifts can more properly be called begging than giving, for in truth they give nothing.
Our Lord Jesus Christ was free and poor in all the gifts that He bounteously gave us: in all his gifts He never sought His own: rather did He desire only the praise and glory of the Father and our salvation, and He continued suffering and giving himself for true love until his death.
If now a man wants to give for the love of God, let him thus give away material goods purely for God’s sake, with no eye to profit or exchange or any transitory honor, and let him seek nothing for himself, but only God’s honor and glory, and to help his neighbor in God’s name, if through need he lacks something.
And so too he should give spiritual goods, wherever he knows that his fellow Christian is willing to receive them in order to better his life for God’s sake – and for this he shall not seek any thanks or reward from that man or any advantage, nor should he want any reward from God for this service, but only that God may be glorified. In this way he should be free in his giving as Christ was free and poor in all the gifts He gave us. If a man gives thus, that is true giving. Whoever has these four things may truly have confidence that he has heard God’s word and kept it.”
Gregory of Sinai as cited by Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1328) in “Sermon Eighty-Nine” in The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, translated and edited by Maurice O’C. Walshe (New York: Crossroad, 1987) 432-433.
I am praying my service to Pastor John and the Chinese church in Qingdao, like Epaphroditus to Paul and the church in Philippi, is a “fragrant offering, an acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God.”
Read today’s post again. It’s so rich. So deep. So powerful.
I pray God helps you grasp the four things needful and serve as a conduit of true giving. I pray this for me today and for each one reading this wherever you are.
Reading Gregory of Sinai, directs me to see what is ‘needful’ in The Philokalia next. His writing are found there.