Generosity and Faith

Generosity and Faith ~ Episode 164

Some people are just naturally generous and in this episode, we are going to talk about generosity and faith and a way to deepen your love for God which in turn will translate into your love for others.

Sponsor Media Angels, Inc. – One More Child book — A Few Minutes With God

Other episodes you may enjoy:

Thanksgiving and Faith 

Thanksgiving and Trust

Recently I was thinking about the book the Five Love Languages. In this book, the author, Gary Chapman discusses the different ways that we say I love you, and this is especially important for couples.  I’m going to share just two with you that actually apply to my life and that of my husband. My husband‘s love language is to spend time with me, he thinks that expresses his love for me and he does this with something he considers valuable, and that is his gift of time. My love language is to bake you something or to give you something I am a gift-giver I love thinking about what will make someone else happy whether it’s something that I put effort into in making or something that I buy. As you can see these two things are different. And as my husband likes to say isn’t it wonderful that God made us so different. That definitely is a positive spin to what could possibly be a difficult situation.

But when I think about generosity it comes in all different shapes and sizes. When we look at each other in the human sense generosity comes from something that we personally think is valuable or important and often if we are honest it is something that makes us happy. So, it that really being generous if we get something out of it? That is food for thought. But, when I think about generosity as a focus of faith it is so much deeper.

When we look at our lives objectively we can see that often we gather things that we can’t possibly use. Have you ever cleaned out a closet of clothing? Have you ever looked at things that you may have purchased for your children and more than half of the things were never worn? We gather these things so many of which we can never use. But the gift of faith the gift that God has given us? That is the gift that just keeps on giving.

Let’s look at just one tiny aspect of the generosity of God and that is faith. Faith is freely given to all, but few accept it. If you are thinking, Felice you are wrong! My church is huge, many accept the gift of faith–then, my question is where were all the faithful when they shut our churches down? We hid in our homes afraid. I was one of them. However, if I told you in January of 2020 that our churches would not be at full capacity by November 2020 when I am recording this show, what would you say? You would have a hard time believing me. I am not condemning you -or me, it is just what happened in our lives and some of our church leaders and pastors are now in court suing for the constitutional right to worship, freely. This is a gift of the generosity of our faith that we took for granted. Never again will we do this. So, back to faith–yes, it is freely given by God but what do we do with this gift?

I personally want a deep sense of faith, and I am going to pray this for you.

1. The faith of knowing that God is in charge of our lives.

2. The faith of knowing that the Lord will never leave us.

3. The faith of knowing that God is in the here and the now.

4. The faith of knowing when we are weak that Almighty God is strong.

5. The faith of knowing that the battle against evil has already been won by the birth, life, death, and resurrection of our Savior Jesus Christ.

If we know these things we will have a deeper sense of the generosity of the gifts God has given us and the truth that these become in our lives.

God’s gift to us can never be repaid and that is another thing that is different about the gift of faith. Usually, if someone gives us something we can gift them with something back. In a way, it almost negates our generosity. And if you give with the thoughts of what you were getting back, that further dilutes generosity. Generosity from the Lord is in the fact that he died for our sins, that he gave us everlasting life. Look around you, is this all there is? For those who are Christian, we believe there is more.

This world that God has given us has its ups and downs and many of the ups are from Him and the downs are from things and choices that we make. The saying that “God is good all the time and all the time God is good,” is a refrain the Christian say, but the question is do we believe it? If you have strong faith the answer is yes, and it’s not because we say it over and over again so that then we believe it. No, it is because we truly believe in our hearts that God can only give us things that are good. Do bad things happen in our lives? Of course, they do, because God has also given us free well.

Another amazing gift of the generosity and love of Almighty God is the gift of free will and how that allows us to do what we want in our lives, and that want can include the love of our Lord, but we love the Lord because we want to. We can choose not to do that. That is also part of our free will as well. Whenever I have a hard time grasping the concept of the free will that God gave us I think about forcing someone to love me. We all crave love in this life. We want people to like us and those close to us, to love us. However, we want this freely, right? We don’t want this to be forced and so it is with Almighty God.

We can never understand the mind of God all we can do is strive to do the best that we can do each day. As the holidays are coming up as I record this show, I think about all of the things that I will do soon and maybe you as well. I will shop, I will bake, I will buy or make some gifts, and I will be with those I love. But what will I do as a gift for Almighty God? The one thing I want to share with you again and again because to me this has been an a-ha moment and one gift that we can give Almighty God is to give Him our will. Why? Because we have the free will do to this and HE gave us free will, so we can give it back to Him as a form of humility. Do this takes deep faith. Do you have the faith that surpasses all understanding?

Friends, that is what I’m going to pray for you during this season. To have faith to have trust in Almighty God and all that he will provide for you!

Let’s pray

Dear Lord, I praise you and I thank you and I give you all of my will to do with as you please help me my God to understand the gift of generosity, to understand the gift of faith, to understand the gift that you have given me and allow me my God to be aware of these gifts. I ask my God, for the prayers that I have in my heart for those I love in my life and for myself… and I praise you and I thank you in Jesus’s Name. Amen.