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Grace, Gratitude & Generosity
by Charmaine Braatvedt, Ministry Assistant
Sunday 17 Aug, 2003
Today I would like to talk about the
three elements of what I have called the Spiritual G- Force:
Grace
Gratitude and Generosity.
Gravity is the force that draws
everything into the centre and in spiritual terms I believe that centre to
be God.
When Geoff and I first got married we decided to go on our big OE.
We set off with only enough money to sustain a shoestring budget,
5 pounds a day for the UK
and $8 a day for the States.
By the 2nd month of the trip we were taking great strain and
decided to look up a contact Geoff’s mum had given us in the States to
catch our breath. We were
needy in that I was sick, we had wants, in that Geoff was keen to
explore the possibilities of trying study in the America and we had
desires, to travel.
When we arrived at the address in Boston we found more than
we’d bargained for. The contact was a senator who lived in a big house
and was a very important person with a flagpole in the garden.
With hearts in mouth we plucked up
the courage to ring the doorbell and as we waited for a response we both
felt overawed by the grandness and came to the sickening conclusion that
this was a bad idea.
As we were about to heel it down the
road, the door opened and the gentlest kindest looking man you could
ever wish to meet, greeted us. He gave us a great big generous welcome and insisted on us
staying with them. That was
the only time in my life I have slept in satin sheets!
The family not only went to a huge amount of trouble to meet our
needs they generously supported our wants and desires also.
We were blown away by their kindness and I remember that on one occasion
I said to Bill Saltonstall, “I am just so grateful for what you are
doing for us, how can we ever repay you?”
He looked at me and said with a
glint in his eye, “don’t even try, I have all I need and more, do
the same for someone else one day. That’s what I want you to do.”
It was then that I had one of those defining moments and that I began to
understand the connection between grace, gratitude and generosity.
In the readings today we learn a lot about grace, gratitude and
generosity, the elements that make up the spiritual g-force of our lives
I am going to focus primarily on the Old Testament reading
of Deuteronomy 6: 4 -14 commonly known as the Shema.
It forms the basis of the Jewish
faith and is the first piece of scripture that a Jewish child is taught.
Jesus affirms this as the basis of
the Christian faith also in
Mark 12: 28-33 when he is asked what
the greatest commandments are.
So what about the three elements of
the so-called g- force?
Let’s explore each of these three elements in turn:
What is Grace?
From my reading I have learnt that
Grace is understood to be the steadfast
love and loyalty, the mercy and the kindness, the goodness, that
emanates from God to us in an unconditional way.
It is the undeserved
favour that God shows us and which we can never show God, because
God is sufficient unto God.
God does not need anything. We
cannot do God a favour.
It is a bit like Bill Saltonstall who said to me, “I have all I need,
you can’t repay my kindness.”
Grace
is what God pours out into the world.
It was grace at work
when
God created the world and the first humans,
when
God chose Abraham to be the ancestor of His people,
when
God gave Moses the law.
Grace
as we read in John 1 became incarnate in the world with Christ.
God’s
free choice to bestow his favour on the world,
based not on our righteousness but as an outpouring of his love.
Whether
we recognise it or not, we are all beneficiaries of God’s grace.
“The Lord your God has brought you
into the land that he swore to your ancestors, a land with fine large
cities that you did not build, houses filled with all sorts of goods
that you did not fill, hewn wells that you did not hew, vineyards and
olive groves that you did not plant.”
This was true for the Israelites,
and it is also true for me, as I was reminded when we first came to this
country as immigrants.
Grace
is the love of God that cares, stoops and rescues.
It comes to us in many forms:
as
God’s provision,
as
the gift of repentance for surely only God can create a new heart, as
the gift of faith,
as
the ability to notice God’s hand in our lives.
And
when we open our eyes and look for God’s grace, we see it everywhere,
in every breath that we take, in
the fact that we were given our very lives before we’d done anything
at all to deserve them.
Our good fortune is not our due, it
is God’s grace.
And what then is our response
to God’s grace?
If we have a state of mind that sees
God in everything is evidence of grow in grace and constantly manifest a
thankful heart”.
This brings us to the second element
of the spiritual g-force:
Surely our only appropriate
response to God’s grace is gratitude.
To do as the songs says: “Give thanks with a grateful heart”.
When we realise that God is
the real giver of all good things,
surely all that is left for us to do
is to drop to our knees in a spirit of thanksgiving and love for a God,
whose nature is to give of himself
and even, in the person of Jesus, to
give himself.
But is that what we do?
We read in verse 12 a word of
caution.
“Take
care that you do not forget the Lord?”
Why after all God has done for the
Israelites does the writer of Deuteronomy find it necessary to remind
the people not to forget the Lord? He
is about to give them prosperity? Surely
they will remember him!
Here is the common human failing.
There is a danger in prosperity that
we would all do well to acknowledge.
When we are prosperous, we tend to
forget God. You see,
gratitude grows best in winter, not summer. It was at the height of his
prosperity that King David committed his greatest acts of
unfaithfulness. So we must
be on our guard, lest we forget God’s goodness and grace.
We constantly live under the threat
of idolatry and apostasy
i.e. of abandoning our faith, our
vows, our principles, our faith community.
God created all of us with a
capacity to worship and a need to worship.
However he also gave us free will
and who or what we choose to worship is our choice!
The bible cautions us, “Do not
forget the Lord”, “Do not follow other gods”. God is the real
giver of all, everything comes under God’s beneficence including our
possessions, our talents, our time, our very beings.
So how do we demonstrate our
gratitude?
The Bible is very clear, Hear O
Israel:
“The Lord is our God, the Lord
alone.
You shall love the Lord your God
with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might”.
Paradoxically, this love for God is
a command.
How
can we be commanded to love?
Because this love is a choice.
We
choose to establish an intimate relationship with our gracious God
and the love that grows from that
choice infils our whole beings, heart , soul and mind.
And how do we show this love for
God? Jesus was very clear
on this, by sharing God’s love with our neighbour.
Generous
love for God and our neighbour is our
grateful response to grace.
This is the 3rd aspect of
the g – force : Generosity.
We worship the Lord with our love
offerings.
Giving is the visible sign of love.
God so loved the world that he gave.
Love and thanksgiving go hand in
hand with giving.
Giving of your time, money, talents
and self, are necessary aspects of a loving and grateful response to
God’s grace.
On a personal note, I have never
forgotten Bill’s generosity and this remembering has caused me to show
acts of kindness to others.
So generosity is the outward
expression of love and gratitude. The old adage holds true:
We may give without loving, but we
cannot love without giving,
and
when love gives, it delights to do so, this is why God loves a cheerful
giver, because it is a sign of love to be so.
I read somewhere, that for the
Christian, thanksgiving
is good, but thanks-living is better.
This is what stewardship means:
It is the Christian’s response to
God’s grace, whereby we give of who we are and what we have,
·
to
maintain God’s church as a place of worship and a community of faith,
·
and
to enable God’s ministries of love to be carried out into the world.
In so doing
we pay forward our
gratitude for the love and the blessings we receive from God by enabling
others to experience his steadfast love and to recognise his undeserved
favour in their lives.
So in a nutshell,
Good stewardship is when
we
recognise God’s grace,
We
respond with gratitude
And
this causes us to invest generously of our time, money , talents and
selves ,
In
sharing the good news of God’s grace with others.
This is the spiritual g-force that
draws us into God,
Grace,
Gratitude and Generosity.
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