But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Luke 6:35
“We all intrinsically know that God can provide what we need and that He loves us the same whether we’re rich or poor. But then why do we often label the rich with the misnomer blessed and, practically, don’t expect the poor to be generous? I would like to suggest that we all just take a collective deep breath and courageously strive to live at rest with God. Generosity includes giving to and receiving from God as we understand our place as trusting conduits of His supply…
God’s rest does not mean that we get everything we want when we want it. It means that our reliance on God becomes personal. We sit with Him and let Him know that we love Him and trust Him in order to be an accepting conduit of whatever He gives us to supply the ministry that he has planned for our lives. He knows what we need and often wants us to ask. Our rest, God’s rest, is contentment in our relationship with Him.”
Barbara Shantz in “Learning to Live at Rest with God” in Giving: Growing Joyful Stewards in Your Congregation, vol. 19 (Richmond: ESC, 2017) 10-11.
Today I am privileged to preach twice at a church in Seoul this morning and once in a church in Anyang this afternoon on the same text I preached on last Sunday, Luke 6:27-36. The message of this text is summed up in today’s Scripture verse, and as my friend, Barbara Shantz rightly notes, we cannot do what Jesus asks of us unless we enter His rest and serve as trusting conduits.
Only when we are content in our relationship with God, can we give and receive His supply freely and in so doing be described as children of the Most High. If we are not at rest in our giving, we often go to one extreme or another. We either give and try to control people with our giving by expecting something back, or we refuse to give because we judge them as undeserving, ungrateful, or perhaps even wicked.
The profound idea at play here is that the rich and poor can only be generous and openhanded when their hearts are at rest and content with the provision of God. My students this week are realizing that God cares less about what we give and more about what we hold back and what that says about the state of our hearts. How’s your heart? Are you a trusting conduit at rest with God?