"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?" Matthew 6:25-27
God is Himself Life and Abundance. God is a constant flow of Giving and Receiving. Here’s the classical picture of God. Father, Son and Holy Spirit, each in a constant, joyful, happy, abundant, not needing or desiring anything more, flow of giving and receiving and giving again that which has been received.
This is kind of a crummy picture because it should be beautiful and flowing and enticing and make you want to be in that flow. Instead it’s the best I could do with Microsoft Word. But that’s a good metaphor for our lives! We’re limited by our finiteness and our sin and blindness to the great reality that is God. So in that way it’s a good picture!!!!
Here’s
the point. Jesus says the real world, the world that actually
exists right around us, a world of abundance and of giving and receiving
that abundance, is the actual world within which we live. Why? Because it’s a
God created world and that world mirrors God. Within that world, however, we
see and experience fear and scarcity and therefore become takers and keepers
simply because we can’t see, because we don’t believe, because we don’t
trust, because we don’t think that what God gives us is good enough.
It’s
hard to buy this, isn’t it? But
those who do buy it, those who see beyond the immediate, those who are happy
with what they have from God now, those who live in the flow of giving and
receiving among others who themselves are givers and receivers and give back
again, those who do not fear death or poverty or suffering because none of that
is final, those are the people who live the abundant life of life God. They’re a little bit like the birds, chirping away even when things are
tough.
Notice
the illustration above. If you turn
any of the three two way arrows into a one-way arrow you are then left with the
kind of life disruption that rules our world today.
“Lord, I want to live in your world of
giving and receiving, not in the little world of taking and keeping.
Help me see how I am actually most alive in your generous world of life
and abundance and actually far less alive in what is so often my little world of
taking and keeping. Amen”
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