Randy Bury: Prayer for Living Generously

Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. James 1:17

God,

Without You, I have nothing. Every good and perfect gift comes from You — but sometimes, I view the gifts You’ve given me as something I deserve. Sometimes I am tempted to hoard my wealth, time, and resources instead of sharing them with others. Ultimately, I know that I am blessed to be a blessing — so please help me wisely steward the gifts You’ve entrusted to me. Turn me into someone who lives — and gives — generously.

Amen.

Thanks to faithful Daily Meditations reader Randy Bury for sharing this prayer with me. I could not locate the author, so I am thanking him for sharing it. And that’s really what generosity is all about.

Randy was blessed by a gift and did not let the gift stop with him. That’s our temptation, to store rather than share blessings of all kinds. What have you received recently as a gift that you could also share?

And let us consider the implications of the Scripture to our generosity as well. The “Father of the heavenly lights” as James describes our good God provides us abundantly all that is good and perfect.

But what does light do? It casts shadows. It is ever changing. And yet, He is not. He is consistently good and perfect to us. This is the basis for all enjoyment and sharing: our Father is abundantly generous.

Father, make us generous as you are generous!

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. Galatians 2:20

“Silence means rest, rest of body and mind in which we become available for Him whose heart is greater than ours. That is very threatening; it is like giving up control over our actions and thoughts, allowing something creative to happen not by us but to us. Is it so amazing that we are so often tired and exhausted, trying to be masters of ourselves, wanting to grasp the ultimate meaning of our existence, struggling with our identity?

Silence is that moment in which we not only stop the discussion with others but also the inner discussions with ourselves, in which we can breathe in freely and accept our identity as a gift. “Not I live, but He lives in me.” It is in this silence that the Spirit of God can pray in us and continue creative work in us… Without silence…the creative energy of our life will float away and leave us alone, cold, and tired. Without silence we will lose our center and become the victim of the many who constantly demand our attention.”

Henri Nouwen in You Are the Beloved: Daily Meditations for Spiritual Living (New York: Convergent, 2017) 136.

Part of taking a break is sitting in silence, making sure you are centered, and remembering where any creative energy comes from. It’s not rooted in what we do but who we are in Christ. From there, our lives can become generous and abundant gifts.

I am just starting to feel rested, both physically and emotionally. I’ve been asking God in silence to fill me with compassion and wisdom for service, and He reminds me that I must seek only His will and life and everything else I need will be there in abundance.

Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth. 1 John 3:18

“In Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, a wealthy woman asks an elderly monk how she can know if God exists. He tells her no explanation or argument can achieve this, only the practice of “active love.” She then confesses that something she dreams about a life of loving service to others. At such times she thinks perhaps she will become a Sister of Mercy, live in holy poverty, and serve the poor in the humblest way. But then it crosses her mind how ungrateful some of the people she would serve are likely to be. They would probably complain that the soup she served wasn’t hot enough or that the bread wasn’t fresh enough or the bed was too hard. She confesses that she couldn’t bear such ingratitude — and so her dreams about serving other vanish, and once again she finds herself wondering if there is a God.

To this the wise monk responds, “Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labour and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science. But I predict that just when you see with horror that in spite of all your efforts you are getting farther from your goal instead of nearer to it — at that very moment I predict that you will reach it and behold clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who has been all the time loving and mysteriously guiding you.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov (Planet PDF ebook) 110-111 as recounted in part by Peter Scazzero in Emotionally Healthy Spirituality (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014) 165.

As I reflect during a time of resting, I resonate very much with the notion that we can easily fall into the trap of loving in dreams rather than loving in action. Or as I have heard others put it, we must serve people not as we desire but according to their real needs. It’s not easy as it sounds.

It’s filled with empathy and compassion. Love in action is only possible with God’s help. And it is also the pathway to show the living God to a lost and broken world.

As you think about your generosity today, sit with God and consider what it would look like to put yourself and all the resources you steward to work in a manner that aims to serve the real needs of people around you. As God leads you, step into that space.

God will show up in a a powerful way. He will be with you and in you and in the work.

“Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” Luke 22:42

“I wonder if there are twenty men alive in the world now who see things as they really are. That would mean that there were twenty men who were free, who were not dominated or even influenced by any attachment to any created thing or to their own selves or to any gift of God, even to the highest, the most supernaturally pure of His graces. I don’t believe that there are twenty such men alive in the world…

Everything you love for its own sake, outside of God alone, blinds your intellect and destroys your judgment of moral values. It vitiates your choices so that you can­ not clearly distinguish good from evil and you do not truly know God’s will..

How many there are who are in a worse state still: they never even get as far as contemplation because they are attached to activities and enterprises that seem to be important. Blinded by their desire for ceaseless motion, for a constant sense of achievement, famished with a crude hunger for results, for visible and tangible success, they work themselves into a state in which they cannot believe that they are pleasing God unless they are busy with a dozen jobs at the same time. Sometimes they fill the air with lamentations and complain that they no longer have any time for prayer, but they have become such experts in deceiving themselves that they do not realize how insincere their lamentations are.

They not only allow themselves to be involved in more and more work, they actually go looking for new jobs. And the busier they become the more mistakes they make. Accidents and errors pile up all around them. They will not be warned. They get further and further away from reality and then perhaps God allows their mistakes to catch up with them. Then they wake up and discover that their carelessness has involved them in some gross and obvious sin against justice, for instance, or against the obligations of their state. So, having no interior strength left, they fall apart.

How many there must be who have smothered the first sparks of contemplation by piling wood on the fire before it was well lit. The stimulation of interior prayer so excites them that they launch out into ambitious projects for teaching and converting the whole world, when all that God asks of them is to be quiet and keep themselves at peace, attentive to the secret work He is beginning in their souls.

And yet if you try to explain to them that there might be a considerable imperfection in their zeal for activities that God does not desire of them, they will treat you as a heretic. They know you must be wrong because they feel such an intense appetite for the results which they imagine they are going to accomplish.

The secret of interior peace is detachment. Recollection is impossible for the man who is dominated by all the confused and changing desires of his own will. And even if those desires reach out for the good things of the interior life, for recollection, for peace, for the pleasures of prayer, if they are no more than the natural and selfish desires they will make recollection difficult and even impossible.

You will never be able to have perfect interior peace and recollection unless you are detached even from the desire of peace and recollection. You will never be able to pray perfectly until you are detached from the pleasures of prayer. If you give up all these desires and seek one thing only, God’s will, He will give you recollection and peace in the middle of labor and conflict and trial.”

Thomas Merton in New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1961) 203-208. This post comes from my getaway reading. I love the writings of Thomas Merton, my favorite contemporary monk.

Jesus constantly tested the disciples and modeled the way for them by His actions. Likewise, He tests us and points the way too.

He wants to see of our journey with Him will result in us attaching to things or not. As we walk in obedience we may not attach to things, but we sometimes attach to the results of service to Him, again, instead of to Him. The first disciples did this and so do we. Or we may even attach to the peace we see Him exhibit on stormy seas. That word picture seems fitting as I look out the hotel room widow and see the big waves on the ocean. As I contemplate my own life, I have wrongly been attaching to things, results, and even peace. Maybe you concur?

What does this have to do with generosity and why am I leaning into this idea today?

If we walk closely with Jesus we see that His greatest act of generosity happened after He surrendered His will to God’s will in the garden. He pursued only one thing, the will of the Father. We too must seek only one thing, God’s will, then everything else falls into place. Then our living, giving, serving, and loving will similarly reflect the Father’s generosity.

I came on this getaway asking God for a peaceful time and a for a double portion of wisdom and compassion to do my work serving a the broken and suffering around the world. Already, He has revealed to me simply to seek His will and therein I will find more wisdom and compassion than I can fathom for He is those things and more in abundance.

And here’s the link to generosity. Today, and every day, we must set aside our will and detach from the gifts of God, results that come from service to God, or even rich blessings like peace, and attach simply to God’s will. Why? His will is matchlessly good, perfectly peaceful, infinitely wise, and endlessly compassionate.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:28-30

“Self-care is never a selfish act. It is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on this earth to offer others. Anytime we can listen to our true self and give it the care it requires, we do it not only for ourselves, but for the many others whose lives we touch.”

Parker Palmer in Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2000) 30-31.

Taking extended time to rest and be refreshed is not something I am very good at. I don’t have much experience doing it. Few do. For most of the world, pausing for ten days is not possible, so I am thankful for this privilege of enriching rest.

Thankfully, Palmer reveals the secret to self-care regardless of whether we get to take a holiday break. We have to listen to our true self and give it what it needs. When we nourish our true selves we are positioned as healthy stewards to offer the world our gift.

What does your true self need?

Now to Him who is able to establish you in accordance with my gospel, the message I proclaim about Jesus Christ, in keeping with the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God, so that all the Gentiles might come to the obedience that comes from faith—to the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ! Amen. Romans 16:25-27

“This final chapter in Romans is remarkable because it contains no theological argument or even pastoral advice. It is simply a greeting in which Paul remembers and names church companions for whom he is grateful. Many he simply names. Some of them he recalls for quite specific reasons. Paul is a connector among actual people who are living out their faith in concrete ways. This text suggests to me that concrete efort in connecting the church in its parts is urgently important. Such letters of friendship in the church constitute care packages of gratitude and hope.”

Walter Brueggemann in Gift and Task: A Year of Daily Readings and Reflections (Louisville: WJKP, 2017) 254.

I forgot to upload the new header photo yesterday. Here it is today. We often forget things that are important, don’t we? Notice what Paul remembers. Read Romans 16. He remembers the names of many people in the church in Rome.

How do you do with remembering the names of the people you meet? What does it communicate? I think it sends a strong message. Each one matters. In that light, it may be the most important thing we can recall.

Then after greeting people by name He concludes the chapter with this blessing. Let’s follow the pattern. In the coming days, learn the names of the people you meet and sow a blessing in their hearts of gratitude and hope.

Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness. Lamentations 3:22-23

“That we ought to give ourselves up to God, with regard both to things temporal and spiritual, and seek our satisfaction only in the fulfilling His will, whether He lead us by suffering or by consolation, for all would be equal to a soul truly resigned. That there needed fidelity in those drynesses, or insensibilities and irksomenesses in prayer, by which God tries our love to Him; that then was the time for us to make good and effectual acts of resignation, whereof one alone would oftentimes very much promote our spiritual advancement.”

Brother Lawrence in The Practice of the Presence of God: The Best Rule of Holy Life (London: Epworth) 3.

God provided a room with a view. Enjoy the new header photo from Hilton Garden Inn in Kauai.

I was struck by the beauty of the sunrise this morning and reminded of God’s faithfulness in a world filled with suffering and brokenness. I almost felt guilty to be experiencing rest and refreshment when the world has so much need and pain.

God reminded me to give myself to Him in resignation. Full stop.

In so doing, I may experience renewal and consolation on retreat. It also means that this respite may position me to endure suffering according to His will. Whatever He puts before me comes into view as a test of my love for Him.

And, what He has made clear to me is that the next year will be more challenging than the last.

So, in response, on this retreat I am asking for a double portion of wisdom and compassion to navigate suffering and consolation with resignation to do His will. He assured me that I could ask for more and He would supply for service because He is generous.

So, when you give yourself in resignation, don’t be like me and ask too small. I’m learning.

The Israelites did as they were told; some gathered much, some little. And when they measured it by the omer, the one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little. Everyone had gathered just as much as they needed. Then Moses said to them, “No one is to keep any of it until morning.” However, some of them paid no attention to Moses; they kept part of it until morning, but it was full of maggots and began to smell. So Moses was angry with them. Exodus 16:17-20

“Earthly goods are given to be used, not to be collected. In the wilderness God gave Israel the manna every day, and they had no need to worry about food and drink. Indeed, if they kept any of the manna over until the next day, it went bad. In the same way, the disciple must receive his portion from God every day. If he stores it up as a permanent possession, he spoils not only the gift, but himself as well, for he sets his heart on accumulated wealth, and makes it a barrier between himself and God. Where our treasure is, there is our trust, our security, our consolation and our God. Hoarding is idolatry.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Cost of Discipleship (New York: Macmillan, 1979) 194.

It is challenging to minister in the generosity space in America, because it is a society known worldwide for boasting that accumulated wealth is good stewardship. It’s actually cancerous behavior because it creates a barrier to God and, later, eternal regret.

Imagine meeting the Lord and explaining your hoarding. But I had to save for a rainy day, Lord. At that moment, you reveal your trust was in yourself rather than in God. Instead, He wants you to trust Him to give you what you need when you need it in the only moment you ever serve as a steward: today.

But I had to save for retirement. If you want my comments on that, I have one-page white paper I can send you. The short answer is that retirement is a modern concept and not a biblical one. Anyone who stops working and relies on accumulated wealth is, in the words of Jesus, a rich fool.

If that comment offended you, it’s not my words but the truth that hurts. Hoarding manna did not work in the wilderness and accumulating wealth will only hurt you today. It hurts because it reveals both disobedience and misplaced trust.

Hear me. I don’t want this post to come across as harsh judgment but as gracious warning. Bonhoeffer realized the cost of discipleship, but I think few people in modern times do. For most people, cultural patterns trump obedience to Jesus. Is that you? 

Obedience does not mean we won’t have fun, and it is the only pathway to life.

I am taking a long-awaiting, much needed holiday with my wife, Jenni, to celebrate that we launched both kids. Sammy got married in October 2019 and Sophie in January 2020. We planned to visit Hawaii on points and miles in April-May 2020.

Thanks to COVID the trip was delayed a year. It’s actually our first 10-day trip together since our honeymoon nearly 29 years ago. We are doing it not from accumulated wealth but from points, miles, and God’s gracious provision in real-time, because He is good.

We place our trust, security, and consolation in God whose goodness is unfathomable, whose provision is abundant, and whose instructions are clear. He says not to hoard. It’s idolatry. It separates us from Him and shows our misplaced trust.

That’s where generosity comes it. While we are on this earth, so that the one that has much does not have to much and the one that has too little does not have too little, we get to share generously.

Those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God’s love for them. Jonah 2:8

“The purpose in idolatry is always the same. It is to displace God, to replace Him by gods of our own liking and, insofar as they are substitutes, to control them. We thus seek to become God through our gods.”

David F. Wells God the Evangelist: How the Holy Spirit Works to Bring Men and Women to Faith (Authentic, 2000) 20.

Special thanks to my friend and brother, Michael Blue, for sharing some quotes from this book with me yesterday. Good stuff.

This one shed light on our fleshly pattern. We pursue pleasures, power, and possessions and try to find life in them.

And the one thing we need to control these idols is money. That’s why the desire for money is the root of all kinds of evil.

So what does this have to do with generosity?

The only way to avoid seeking to become God through our gods is to diffuse the power money has over us is by giving it away.

The best part about letting go of worthless idols is that it frees our hands grasp God’s matchless love for us.

If anyone is poor among your fellow Israelites in any of the towns of the land the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward them. Rather, be openhanded and freely lend them whatever they need. Deuteronomy 15:7-8

“The requirement of generosity toward the poor. The attitude of the Israelites toward the poor in their community was to be one of warmth and generosity. The humanitarian spirit of the address comes clearly to the forefront in these verses, for the requirement of generosity extends beyond the letter of the law and points to a proper attitude which was to characterize the people’s dealings with the poor. Note, however, that it is not charity, in the sense of almsgiving, that is advocated here; it is a charitable attitude to be expressed by lending the poor man whatever he needs.”

Peter C. Craigie in The Book of Deuteronomy (NICOT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976) 237.

Special thanks to Daily Meditations reader, Edward Spencer, for alerting me to read this text from Deuteronomy coming out of my study of the Good Samaritan.

If you want to check out my sermon on Luke 10:25-37, click to view it.

Requirement is a strong word, but it is fitting. God expects His people in the Old Testament and Christians in the New Testament to have a charitable attitude toward those in need.

How do we cultivate a charitable attitude to fulfill such a requirement? It starts with realizing all we have came to us by charis or grace. Once that sinks to our heart, it can sync with our hands and feet.

Reflect on God’s blessings to you today. Then consider how you may bless others.

I get to serve a group of leading U.S. seminary administrators today, hearing their challenges, discussing their situations and sharing insights from research.

What do you sense God has in store for you? Serving others generously is not optional. It’s why Jesus redeemed us as a people for Himself and empowers us by the Holy Spirit.