Learning to Give Like God
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I don’t know of another passage of Scripture that is more well-known or more beloved than this passage I just read for you. It’s one of the first verses of Scripture that most folk learn “by heart” because it conveys the core message of the Gospel and the means by which we secure eternal life.
But there is a part of this most familiar verse that too often gets overlooked because even though we have learned the entire verse “by heart,” we have not allowed certain parts of it to sink deeply enough into those places where passion gets translated into action. I’m referring, of course, about the part of the verse that speaks to the manner in which “God gave.” “God gave His Only Begotten Son.”
Why is that so? Why is it that we have not locked in enough on the notion of God as a giving God so that it moves us to become better givers ourselves? Why is it that we have seen this verse more from the standpoint of what we receive from God and we never give sufficient thought about what we might give in response to what God has given us?
I think a good part of it is because of how giving is not our “first language.” That is to say that while God is at His core a “giving God,” we are not. We are not at our core giving people. We are receivers, accumulators, even hoarders. We store up things for ourselves so that most of the time things have to be pried away from us before we let them go. Generosity is something that does not come naturally to most of us, even those of us who call ourselves people of faith. But I don’t know that we can fully appreciate this signal passage of Scripture until we focus our thoughts on what it means when it says, “God gave.”
The context of the passage is important. Jesus is speaking with Nicodemus, the Pharisee and member of the Jewish ruling council who has come to Jesus “by night.” Nicodemus knows that there’s something different about Jesus, something special, something that is of God. “For no one,” says Nicodemus, “could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him.”
As with most of the conversations Jesus has with persons in the Fourth Gospel, things don’t stay on the surface for very long. And, sure enough, here Jesus moves the conversation deeper until Nicodemus becomes befuddled over Jesus’ insistence that to see the Kingdom of God, a person has to be “born again.”
And just when you think that Jesus has lost Nicodemus in what Nicodemus thinks to be obscure and cryptic rhetoric – people being born of water and the Spirit and the Son of Man being lifted up like Moses lifting up the snake in the wilderness – Jesus brings things back to basics, and what more basic message could there be than John 3:16? “For God so loved the world that He gave. He gave His Only Begotten Son.”
The energy of that verb “gave” in the Greek, the original language of the New Testament, is most telling. It carries the notion of our being staggered and taken aback at what God gave out of His unconditional love for a world that most of the time seems pretty much oblivious to God’s presence. In fact, we might actually translate the sentence to read, “God so loved the world that he ‘really’ gave.”
In other words, God didn’t simply “send” His Son into the world in that same way that someone might send someone else to convey an important message. That happens all the time in business and politics. The principal in the organization can’t be present so he or she sends a representative, a “stand in.” But when a person instead “gives” something, that person is investing himself with the person on the receiving end. That’s why when the verse tells us that “God really gave His Only Begotten Son,” it intends to stagger us at the depth of the devotion God showed in reaching out to redeem this world by sparing absolutely nothing on our behalf, and it intends to move us to consider what we might give in response to all that God has done for us.
It’s like the story of the husband and wife who were getting ready to go to a memorial service for the son of a friend of theirs. The young man was in the armed forces and had been overseas in combat and killed in action. Their son, on the other hand, had finished his tour of duty, and had come back to resume his life at home. At the memorial service, during the eulogy the minister mentioned that the family was choosing to honor their fallen son by dedicating a window in the church as a part of a building campaign the church was doing, which would no doubt cost the bereaved parents tens of thousands of dollars.
The wife turned to her husband and said, “What a beautiful thing to do to honor their son.” Then suddenly she turned back to him and with an ashen look said, “What are we going to give?”
“What are you talking about?” the husband said. “We don’t need to give anything. Our son came back safe and sound.” To which the wife replied, “That’s exactly what I mean. Our friends lost their son, and their giving in response. We got our son back, and we’re not giving anything?”
It would have been far less costly for God to have simply turned His back on the world and to have allowed it to flounder in darkness and despair. But that’s not who God is and that’s not how God acts. God loves. God gives. God saves.
The question this morning that we must answer is not about who God is; it’s instead about who we are. Are we a people who are so staggered by God’s benevolence that we cannot help but respond with gifts of our own? Are we a self-emptying people because we are joined to a self-emptying God? Or, are we a people who presume upon God’s grace, a people who think we ought to get from God what we deserve, a people who are so focused on what we are about to receive that we never give a moment’s thought to what we might give to advance God’s Kingdom purposes in our world?
If we for a moment fail to become the former, if we fail to give God His due because we prefer to assume the importance of our so-called needs, then something inside us dies, as surely as if our hearts were to stop beating.
But if we could instead learn to respond to God’s generosity with some measure of generosity of our own, then we would find strength and we would find courage and we would not perish, but from now on we would have eternal life.
Let that word sink into the deep places of your heart and then into your outstretched hands and ultimately into a lost and dying world, a world which God loves so much, and expects us to love it too.