‘No good thing will He withhold from those who walk uprightly.’ Psalm 84:11 NKJV
In a sense, it’s impossible to ‘sacrifice’ anything for God. If you get back more than you gave up, have you sacrificed anything at all? The eternal reward always outweighs the temporal sacrifice. On Judgment Day, our only regret will be whatever we didn’t give back to God. It may seem counterintuitive, but the key to self-fulfilment is self-denial. The selfish part of us has an allergic reaction to the word deny. It’s tough to do when we live in the lap of luxury. We don’t just tolerate indulgence in our culture, we celebrate it. But the fundamental problem with indulgence is that—enough is never enough. The more we indulge ourselves in food or sex or the amenities of wealth, the less we will enjoy them. We have bought into the consumerist lie that more is more. We mistakenly think the more we give, the less we’ll have.
But our logic is backward. You ultimately lose what you keep, and you ultimately keep whatever you lose for the cause of Christ. Author Mark Batterson writes: ‘The more you give away, the more you will enjoy what you have. If you give God the tithe, you’ll enjoy the 90 per cent you keep 10 per cent more. You’ll also discover that God can do more with 90 per cent than you can with 100 per cent… One of our life goals as a family is to reverse tithe and live off 10 per cent while giving away 90 per cent. When we get there, I’m confident we’ll enjoy the 10 per cent we keep 90 per cent more. It’s the sliding scale of joy.’
SoulFood: Gen 1–3, Jn 12:12–19, Ps 102:1–11, Prov 30:18–20
The Word for Today is authored by Bob and Debby Gass and published under licence from UCB International Copyright 2024
