God of Abundance

In all of human history, scarcity seems like a certainty. There has rarely ever been enough food to comfortably support more than the world’s population. Economists tell us that resources are finite well, human desire is infinite, and as long as this is true, scarcity will be a fact of life. We adapt ourselves to this way of life. There may be things that we do that aren’t kind or that don’t square with our ideals and we do them anyway because we have to look out for ourselves and for those we love. But in the Bible, we read about a God who blesses his people. Can God’s blessing change the seeming immutable reality of scarcity in our world? I want to look in this sermon at how God’s promise of blessing should change the way that we interact with others and with our stuff. 

The story of scarcity 

In Genesis we see the ideas of scarcity and abundance interacting. God creates a space of abundance for humanity to live in. He gives them only one command, not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of Good and evil. But when the serpent comes to temp Eve, he pretends that this is due to the reality of scarcity. He implies that while God has provided bountifully for their physical needs, they have deeper needs for wisdom and that God is denying them a way to fulfill that need. God, he says, is holding out on them. It turns out that God’s command: came from a place of love, not of scarcity. However, the perception of scarcity causes a reality of scarcity. Humanity is cut off from God who is meant to be the source of their abundance. The consequence of this is that food becomes very difficult to acquire. As God pronounces judgment on Adam he says:

“Cursed is the ground because of you;

    through painful toil you will eat food from it

    all the days of your life.

It will produce thorns and thistles for you,

    and you will eat the plants of the field.

By the sweat of your brow

    you will eat your food

until you return to the ground (Genesis 3:17b-19a, NIV)

Now the times of abundance are over. But it doesn’t take very long before God turns the page on this cursing. Nine chapters later, God promises. Blessings to Abram.

“I will make you into a great nation,

    and I will bless you;

I will make your name great,

    and you will be a blessing.

I will bless those who bless you,

    and whoever curses you I will curse;

and all peoples on earth

    will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:2-3, NIV)

Abraham is destined to be blessed, and he will be a source of blessing to those around him. But like any of us, Abraham has a hard time believing that God will keep his promise. 

Part of being a great nation is having children and Abraham’s wife Sarah is past childbearing years. So with Sarah’s encouragement, Abraham takes Sarah’s servant girl, Hagar, as a concubine and fathers a son named Ishmael. Ishmael. God makes it clear that that’s not how he intended to keep his promise. And so Sarah in her old age fathers Isaac. But Sarah resents Hagar and sees Ishmael as a threat to the future security of Isaac, so she demands that Abraham banish Hagar and Ishmael. As a concession, God allows this to happen, but he makes clear to Abraham that he’s going to bless Ishmael and make him into a great nation. God’s blessings are greater than Abraham and Sarah are giving him credit for. 

This theme of competition continues to sow discord in Abraham’s family. Isaac favours his older son Esau over his younger son Jacob, although God has revealed to Isaac’s wife Rebecca that Jacob is going to be the greater of the two of them. Not believing that God can keep his promises, she Cooks up a plot to have Jacob intercept Isaac’s blessing. When Isaac is old and unsure of how much time he has left to live, he decides that he wants to bestow his blessing on Esau. He sends Esau out to find some game, prepare him a meal that he’ll enjoy, and receive his blessing. Hunting Rebecca prepares a meal, and counsels Jacob to put on Esau’s clothes to go and receive the blessing from Isaac, whose eyesight is bad enough to fall for this. No sooner had Jacob received the blessing and departed than Esau returned and Jacob’s treachery is laid bare:

Isaac trembled violently and said, “Who was it, then, that hunted game and brought it to me? I ate it just before you came and I blessed him—and indeed he will be blessed!” When Esau heard his father’s words, he burst out with a loud and bitter cry and said to his father, “Bless me—me too, my father!” But he said, “Your brother came deceitfully and took your blessing.”

Esau said, “Isn’t he rightly named Jacob [Jacob means deceiver]? This is the second time he has taken advantage of me: He took my birthright, and now he’s taken my blessing!” Then he asked, “Haven’t you reserved any blessing for me?” Isaac answered Esau, “I have made him lord over you and have made all his relatives his servants, and I have sustained him with grain and new wine. So what can I possibly do for you, my son?” (Genesis 27:33-37, NIV)

From what Isaac says, we might expect that Esau is going to be destitute. In his rage, Esau plots to kill Jacob once Isaac dies. So Jacob flees for his life and spends the next 20 years in Aram. Eventually, God instructs him to return and he does so with some level of trepidation. When he’s told that Esau is coming to meet him with an army of men, he’s greatly alarmed. So he arranges to have Esau met with large flocks and herds that he gives as a gift to placate his brother’s wrath. But the meeting, when it occurs, goes much differently than he had expected:

But Esau ran to meet Jacob and embraced him; he threw his arms around his neck and kissed him. And they wept. Then Esau looked up and saw the women and children. “Who are these with you?” he asked. Jacob answered, “They are the children God has graciously given your servant.” Then the female servants and their children approached and bowed down. Next, Leah and her children came and bowed down. Last of all came Joseph and Rachel, and they too bowed down. Esau asked, “What’s the meaning of all these flocks and herds I met?” “To find favor in your eyes, my lord,” he said. But Esau said, “I already have plenty, my brother. Keep what you have for yourself.” (Genesis 33:4-9, NIV)

Jacob had inherited the specific promise that God had given to Abraham, but Esau’s life shows us that God’s blessing is greater than that one promise. The tragedy of Abraham’s family is that they’re constantly competing for a blessing that turns out to be limitless. This same tragedy happens in the church where we fail to believe God’s promise that his children can live abundant lives. If we understood this and believed it, and acted upon it. I believe our world, and the church would look very different.

Why aren’t we experiencing abundance? 

When we look around us and see a world with pervasive, poverty, famine, and even unhoused people in our midst, we might question the idea of whether or not God can provide abundance. Provide abundance. Does rain in our world, but God is bringing his people into abundance. 

Desiring the wrong abundance 

God’s promise of abundance does not mean that he promises to give us everything our hearts desire. This is because our hearts often desire the wrong things. This is especially obvious in the Prosperity Gospel, the belief that God promises to give anything to his children if they ask with faith. If God gives us everything we ask for, we often find ourselves focusing on the treasures of this world rather than on heavenly treasures. This teaching also sanctifies our selfishness and callous indifference towards the poor and suffering around us. After all, if I see a person who lacks, I can convince myself that they only lack because they don’t have faith to ask God for a solution to their problem. I certainly wouldn’t feel the need to sacrifice anything of myself to help a person who simply needs to ask God with faith for the solution to their problem. So this distortion of Christian teaching increases selfishness, but abundance happens when we increase in love. When we love, we naturally share with them. We think of a person who sat down with his family to eat a meal and ate all the food themselves. They ate themselves silly and then went to the bathroom to throw up so they could continue eating. At the end of the meal. They have consumed all of the food and the rest of their family goes hungry. Such a person would be behaving abusively. But when Jesus tells us to love our neighbour as we love ourselves, he’s saying that we ought to extend the same courtesy to the people who are far off as to the close people. And so if we live in extravagance while we live in proximity to people who are without their basic needs being met, we are doing the same thing. This is the story of Lazarus and the rich man. When Lazarus gets to the afterlife, he is rebuked by Abraham because he did not share in his good things with Lazarus who used to sit at his front gate. He saw his neighbour in need and was not moved to pity him and share what he had. If we love our neighbour as we love ourselves, we need to be willing to forgo our excess to provide basic needs to others. If people are our treasure, then in loving them we will find greater blessings than we will receive from material possessions. If however, we seek material. Blessings first, we may find ourselves possessed by our possessions. This is what we see in the story of the Rich Young Ruler. This man comes to Jesus and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus tells him to keep the commands. He insists that he’s done that. Jesus congratulates him but tells him if he wants to be perfect, he should sell his possessions, give the proceeds to the poor, and then come and follow Jesus. But the man is unwilling to do this. He is being offered the greatest blessing imaginable, to follow Jesus, but he is unwilling to part with his worldly possessions and the status that they give him because he is possessed by his possessions. 

Doubting God’s faithfulness 

There is a second reason why we are not experiencing God’s abundance and blessing and that is that we fail to trust in God’s blessing. We can’t predict the future, so if we don’t trust in God’s blessing, we will spend all of our time trying to protect ourselves from every possible eventuality. We will live as if there’s scarcity even amid God’s abundance. In the early months of the pandemic, there was a major shortage of toilet paper. It’s not that covid made people go to the bathroom more, but as people stocked up on household goods, somewhere someone saw that there was not as much toilet paper as they might expect, and they started to hoard it. Economists looking at this after the fact said that there always was enough toilet paper, Pat when people started buying more than they would need to protect themselves from not being able to get it when they needed it. Next time, they created distortions in the supply chain. So many people had far more toilet paper than they needed and, some people had not enough. 

We can fall into this trap in all sorts of ways. One example is with our retirement savings, we save up and save up because we aren’t sure if we’re going to live to be 100. If I have enough money saved up to live comfortably until I’m 85, I still can’t relax and afford to be generous with others because what if I need to live longer on what I have squirrelled away? This of course fails to understand that God is looking after his children. I don’t mean to say that we shouldn’t take appropriate responsibilities to save up for retirement, but if we are unable to be generous, and trust that God will look after us, but are instead living in fear and anxiety of an unknown future, then we are not experiencing God’s abundance as he desires.

Living Abundantly 

How can we live consistent with God’s promised blessing?

Prioritizing People

We can all probably imagine ways we might spend large amounts of money. We could have bigger houses, more cars, swankier vacations, newer Tech, and all those toys. I’d love to have a wall covered in high-quality guitars, or a whole bunch of new camera equipment. But in the end, I don’t think these things would enrich my life in the way that I anticipated. I can’t play more than one guitar at a time, so any subsequent guitars I get have diminishing returns. And after the initial thrill of acquiring them, I’m not going to be any happier. If I rate my happiness at a seven before the guitars, it’ll probably end up as a seven again after I have the guitars. But now, I’m worried about losing what I’ve acquired. So I have the same level of overall satisfaction with life, just now I feel more anxiety about the things I might have to give up. So my life doesn’t seem much richer despite the increase in my material prosperity. 

What actually does increase my satisfaction is my relationships with people. When people are generous with me (in a non-manipulative way) that increases my overall satisfaction. I don’t suggest that we buy friends, but if we are willing to share ourselves, including our time, our attention, and our resources with others, we build mutually loving and mutually beneficial relationships. These relationships, I would argue, are more beneficial to us than the material goods that we might have to forego to build these relationships. We invest in people, not stuff. I think this is what Jesus has at least partially in mind when he says: 

No one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. (Mark 10:29-30, NIV).

We may forgo material. Blessings, but our relationships with our brothers and sisters in Christ are a greater blessing than what we might be required to surrender. On top of that, we have a family to stand with us in the case of persecution, which the early Christians certainly expected to receive. 

Cultivating confidence in God’s blessing 

Well, we often seek comfort in life, we need to get out of that comfort zone to grow. In our appreciation of God’s blessings. Abraham was probably comfortable living with his family, but God told him to go to a new land. Abraham took a risk by believing in God, but God proved himself faithful. Of faithfulness that allowed Abraham to trust God when God commanded him to sacrifice Isaac. He wasn’t sure how God would sort that out, but he knew that the god that he followed was trustworthy. In the end, God provided a substitute and proved once more that he was faithful. Maybe in difficult times, you’ve experienced God’s faithfulness. Perhaps you lost your job and God helped you find one that worked better for you. Maybe you had a task that was beyond your ability to do and God gave you strength. In those places of uncomfortable risk, God proves his faithfulness to us if we venture with him into the unknown.

I wrestled with this when I tried to decide how I would act with the other churches in town. The temptation when your livelihood is tied to the financial success of your church, is to do whatever needs to be done to ensure that your church comes out on top. If we give into this temptation, we treat other churches as competitors in a common market rather than as collaborators in a common family. But I wanted to test if God would be faithful to us. About 2 years ago we decided to have a barbecue where we invited people from the other churches in town to come and discuss how we can engage in mission together. The lowest hanging fruit that we came up with was to communicate what was going on at each other’s churches. That’s why I advertise Bible studies and youth groups at other churches rather than just advertising what we’re doing here. We made a deliberate decision to act as if God’s blessings for the church weren’t a scarce resource to be hoarded, but in abundance to be shared. And what happened? In the months that followed that meeting, all of the churches represented at that meeting grew. God’s blessing is big enough when we trust his faithfulness.

Conclusion

God is in the blessing business, but that doesn’t mean that God will stoop to give us the blessing we’re after. He has something better to give us. But we often insist on pursuing a lesser blessing and find ourselves working at cross-purposes with God as he tries to bless us. So let’s commit to seeking the blessing God desires to give us. If we do this, we’ll discover that though scarcity exists in the world, we can experience God’s rich abundance.

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. (Ephesians 3:20-21, NIV)