“He who dies with the most toys… still dies.”
~anonymous

Last Friday my wife made plans to hang out with her friend Joli in Worcester. Since Worcester is about an hour east of where we live, and I drive by it on my way to work in Natick, that day my wife rode in with me and dropped me off at work in the morning. She then drove out to Worcester, hung out with her friend, and then picked me up in the evening.

In the morning, though, as we drove in to Natick, we realized the car was low on fuel, so I pulled into a gas station a couple of blocks before my office to fill up on gas so that my wife wouldn’t have to worry about fuel during her drive out to Worcester.

I know, am I not sweet? My wife said so too when I got back into the car after I pumped the gas, she said, “Aww, thank you honey!”

I said: “Well, shucks sweetie, no problem. I figure, it’s about 29 miles from Natick to Worcester, and 29 miles back, so that’s, let’s see, 58 miles, and let’s add in another 5 miles so you can have some leeway if you wanted to go to a bookstore or something, so hey I filled up just enough gas for you to go about 63 miles.”

I know, am I not sweet?

I know, I didn’t have to put in the fuel for the extra 5 miles, but hey, I love my wife I told her too - “There honey, doesn’t that make you feel loved, to know that I provided the extra fuel for you to have another 5 miles in your mileage budget today?”

Alright, alright, I’m kidding I filled up the tank for her!

But, it got me thinking - imagine if we treated people we love like that, stingy and calculating in how much we give to them?

Some say the church is the bride of Christ - imagine if Christ treated his bride this way, giving her just enough to do the task He has appointed for her to do that day?

Some actually view God this way - that He blesses us with exactly what we need, no more.

This is a convenient way of viewing God for those of us who love to explain Him because it offers a way of viewing resources that is efficient and purposeful, according to our modern mechanistic understanding of resource utilization. We’re all about good stewardship and frugal living - with other people’s resources.

I read a powerful book about 3-4 years ago called “God’s Smuggler” by someone called Brother Andrew. It changed my way of thinking about “poor” Christian service agencies. In it, Brother Andrew describes something called the “Royal Way”. To paraphrase very loosely, the Royal Way describes the way the King provides for His servants that are about His business. He doesn’t expect His servants to go around begging for money and resources - He is actually angered by such drivel, because He is a Royal King, the King of Kings in fact, and His servants have no need to beg from anyone if they really trust His Kingship. And when He provides, He provides ROYALLY.

What if our mechanistic understanding of resources misses the point of God’s deep mystery in giving extravagantly and richly more than what we could even dream of? What if God is disappointed when we expect from Him exactly what we ask, and then we feel really guilty when He gives us more than we ask for?

I mean, it would probably be an improvement if we expected exactly what we asked when we ask God - it often seems like we ask without really expecting anything at all, instead we ask expecting fully that WE will have to work hard to provide the bare minimum for ourselves.

I remember some parents in my previous church getting into a frenzy when my friend John the youth pastor took the senior-high teens on a serving trip to inner-city New York City, and they got a great deal on accomodation that let them stay at a Hilton. The well-intentioned parents missed the point of the royal provision of God and got into a tizzy about a missions trip team staying at a luxury hotel brand like the Hilton. I guess they wanted their teens to learn that being on missions with God means living in shabby conditions and being poor, perhaps by learning that God does not provide luxury for His servants.

I wonder what kind of God it was that we taught them about through that experience - certainly not the God that Jesus taught about, you know, when He rebuked the parents in His audience by asking them if they would give their child a stone if their child asked for bread?

“If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!”

I grew up in the Middle East, in Yemen, and while it was not an oil-rich country I did learn something about the magnanimity of generous giving from my friends and from the people my dad worked with. These were graceful people, generous but not ostentatious or grandiose in their giving. Their Islamic faith called for them to give alms to the poor, and they did so without self-aggrandizement. The result was that when they gave, they gave without thinking twice of the amount or recognition. They gave simply, quietly, and generously.

I remember my dad remarking on how unstingy Yemeni people were in their sharing of resources and gifts to each other. My parents grew up in poor households in India, where the pressure of educational prowess and social competition for scarce resources made them both very stingy and frugal with how resources were used. They remarked that the Yemeni people had, to translate a Tamil phrase loosely, “a generous hand”.

It wasn’t like we got showered with $100 bills - the generosity showed itself in just the gracious ways Yemenis treated each other to their material possessions. And we often noticed the generosity only when we were back in India and observed quite different ways - for example, in the Brahmin community in south India, it is common to have a separate set of coffee cups for visitors. These cups are made of stainless steel, the same size and shape as the regular household cups, but the visitor cups have a much thicker base, which means the visitor gets a lot less coffee than he thinks he’s getting.

In Yemen, though, when you visit someone and get invited to share tea with them, you get a clear glass cup, same tea, same size, as the one the host drinks.

My dad often remarked that he wanted his children to learn from how magnanimous Yemenis were in giving, instead of learning how shrewd and calculating his Indian environment was when it came to resource-sharing.

Bringing it back to my story of measuring the fuel for my wife’s trip to Worcester - what if God isn’t interested so much in our ability to give wisely and measuredly, but by our faith in giving recklessly and magnanimously and, yes, even luxuriously?

And, I’m not just asking about money here - in this consumer society we tend to think that money alone can solve problems - but I’m asking about giving recklessly of that which is ours to give: food, clothing, shelter, transportation, music, books, a place to stay, a place to cry, whatever we can give to serve another.

And I’m not just asking about giving away the el-cheapo junk we want to get rid of, either, I’m asking about recklessly giving away our very best : our top-notch, high-quality, most expensive, made-to-last, luxury items of high taste and value; our best time, our best counsel, our finest wisdom, our most sacrificial friendship efforts?

What if we gave of ours and ourselves with a no-holds-barred generosity, a reckless generosity that is not beggarly but a royal generosity?

If we give only money but not ourselves, what kind of blessing are we?

God said many things about money, but the most striking thing He said is often misquoted - it’s not that money is the root of all evil, He said that the LOVE of money is the root of all evil. If we go around blessing others only with money, is it not possible that they will be seduced by the love of money, and not by the love of God?

God calls us not to be remote ATMs but to be mobile temples, His temples, His conduits of blessing - we cannot be a blessing to someone unless we are in their lives.

I’ve often been uncomfortable with the measured way we give to charities and to missionaries here. What if we are called to measure with a “generous hand”, recklessly giving more than what we think we can afford to give?

The point is often made in Christian circles that one of the few instances where God challenges us to test Him is in the area of financial giving - or “tithing” as it is often called. And, I have to bear witness here - this is indeed one area where Alexis and I have personally experienced God’s divine hand at work in rewarding us for our often-times hesitant obedience in giving. And the result has been that we now have a lot of joy and carefree pleasure in giving recklessly

I’ll make the obscene remark that we now find it a lot easier and joyous to give money than to give of our time, our things, our toys. Yes, we give money away joyfully and forgetfully even, not keeping track of what we have given to whom, so we would love to reach that same state of joyful reckless giving in all areas of our lives as we strive to serve others around us.

What if tithing is much much more than simply being about “ten percent”?

How stingy and unloving are we when we count our blessings - not only those our God showers upon us, but especially when we measure out the quantity and quality of how we bless others?

What if there is a recklessly loving God waiting for us to experience the unexplainable joy of giving recklessly?