How We View God Impacts What We Allow Ourselves to Receive from Him I never liked the idea of mindset. It seemed a little too woo woo for me. It was as though I was depending on a positive attitude or self-fulfilling prophecy instead of relying on God to provide what I needed each day, […]
Each Day We Must Seek God for the Provisions We Need Asking God to supply us with our daily bread at one time mystified me. It seemed like a vain repetition (Matthew 6:7) for something that didn’t matter to me. Yet when I learned the context of this request, it made sense. Two thousand years […]
Discover What Paul Might Mean by This Curious Phrase There is a curious phrase in the Bible: “grace of giving.” It occurs only in Paul’s second letter to his friends at the church in Corinth. Without it appearing elsewhere in the Bible, there are no other verses we can use to grasp a better understanding […]
Examine Our Motives When We Give Paul writes a succinct reminder to Jesus’s followers in Corinth. By extension it also applies to us. It’s about generosity. He says “Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously,” (2 Corinthians 9:6). Generosity produces blessing, whereas stinginess results in scarcity. In […]
We Must Take Care of the Poor Among Us As we read through the law of Moses in the book of Deuteronomy, we come across a command that says that we are to “give generously to them and do so without a grudging heart” (Deuteronomy 15:10). We might have the inclination to dismiss this command […]
Prosperity Is Not a Bad Word, and We Must Start Embracing It as Good A popular pastime today is to decry prosperity as an evil that plagues the world. These folks think that all people who prosper are greedy and selfish—though some are. They advocate taking from those who have and give to those who […]
On my post last April, I pondered how any effort to curtail water usage on my part could serve to help those halfway around the world who are thirsty. Alas, there is no direct solution (but I did suggest a course of action). This discussion reminded me of the prodding I heard as a child […]
When it comes to giving to others there are two schools of thought. One is to give to whoever asks and the other is to be good stewards of the resources God has given us. The problem is, both of these are taught in the Bible, so which is it? The answer, as with many […]
When we give something to others, there should be a spiritual element to our generosity. It’s more than just to be nice to them or to feel better about ourselves. There’s a spiritual aspect in giving that can honor God and connect us more closely with him. There’s also a spiritual aspect in receiving. Just […]
I’m weary hearing about the top 1 percent, the wealthiest people in the USA. While too much has already been said about this from a political, social, and philosophical standpoint, I see it as a spiritual issue. For most of us in the US, the bottom 99 percent, we need to guard against a spirit […]