“You will be enriched in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion, and through us your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God.” (2 Corinthians 9:11)

We serve a generous God, who desires that His children would be rich enough in every way.  God does not just bless us for our enjoyment or to only meet our needs, but also for the good of others.  God’s blessings towards us are not intended to only result in our thankfulness, but to enable us to be generous. His blessings give us the ability to demonstrate God’s goodness to others and this will result in their thankfulness towards God, too.

Acts of generosity, big or small, always generate miracles of life.  Generosity begets generosity and creates a circular flow of compassion and gratitude.  Sharing is the true language of interdependence, and life invites us to be generous both in giving and in receiving.  When we live out of a spirit of sharing, we come to know the full meaning of loving-kindness. Sharing is not to be thought of simply in material terms, for there is also the generosity of judgment, of patience, of forgiveness, of gentle presence.

It is not just receiving a gift that can make us thankful. Giving also instills gratitude in the giver. That gratitude gets translated into more generosity. It is cyclical and addictive.

Today we stand between the two major holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas, which really offer the soul an invitation into gratitude and giving.  These two qualities relate to one another.  Our faith is a lifelong expression of gratitude, and that gratitude manifests itself in the form of generosity to others.  Most people think generosity begets gratitude; but in fact, it works the other way around – gratitude engenders generosity. The evidence of true thankfulness is the act of giving from the heart.

The Gospels tell us to cultivate a life of gratitude and generosity.  Expressing gratitude as generosity can take many forms:  words, of course, but also financial support, and action. We can be generous with our time, treasure and talent.  There is another type of generosity that we can practice which is particularly appropriate in an organization such as AWESNA – and that is generosity of spirit, putting others before yourself; being nonjudgmental; projecting an air of serenity and compassion in our demeanor, and seeking to understand rather than be understood.

Let us ask God to enlarge our hearts and our imaginations that we may be thankful for what His generosity has done for us that will lead us to be generous with gentle words, with time freely given, and with kindness toward all.  May we be filled with the Holy Spirit that we may learn and practice generous gratitude and grateful generosity today and every day.

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Under His Wings

Elizabeth M. Role, PhD

Psalm 91: 3, 4a (NIV) – Surely, He will save you from the fowler’s snare and from the deadly pestilence. He will cover you with His feathers, and under His wings you will find refuge.

Psalm 91 is a protection covenant.  God promised that He will save us from the fowler’s snare, the trap of the hunter of birds.  I am not sure if you have tried to trap an animal, perhaps using a mouse trap.  The more common mousetrap is a glue trap. We usually place a bait like a piece of cheese at the center of the wood with very sticky adhesive around.  Once the mouse gets into the adhesive surface, it cannot move, thus, it cannot maintain its body temperature and it suffers from hypothermia and eventually expires.  Or the trapper would come and kill the mouse.

This is what the devil does to God’s child.  He knows what will most likely hook us and he knows exactly which thought to put into our minds to lure us into the trap.  God promised that His child who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will be delivered from the snare laid by the fowler, the trapper, Satan himself. God will deliver us from the deadly pestilence, too. 

A pestilence is any “virulent or fatal disease, an epidemic that hits the masses of people, any deadly disease that attaches itself to one’s body with the intent to destroy.”  You see, this pestilence can be physical or spiritual.  God promised both spiritual and physical deliverance, from the trap of the fowler and from deadly pestilence.  This comprises being delivered from temptation and being delivered from harm.  We thank God for His deliverance from both traps and pestilence.

When you picture a magnificent flying bird, do you think of a chicken?  Of course not.  I believe that you are thinking of an eagle.  The largest eagle in the world is the Philippine eagle, known as monkey-eating eagle.  It dazzles with its wingspan reaching 1.84 m to 2.2 m with the width of a single wing ranging from 57.4 cm to 61.4 cm.  The promise in verse 4 is not about being borne up on the wings of eagles, rather, God promised that we will find refuge, not under his flying wing but under his sheltering wing. 

Is everyone protected under His wings?  “He will cover you with His feathers and under His wings, you will find refuge.”  Again, it is up to us to make that decision!  We can seek refuge under His wings if we choose to.  Have you observed what a mother hen does when danger is approaching like a hawk which plans to take a chick as its prey?  The mother hen would not run to those little chicks and jump on top of them to try to cover them with her wings.  Instead, she would squat down, spread out her wings, and begin to cluck.  And those little chicks from every direction would come running to her to get under those outstretched wings.  Then the mother hen would pull her wings down tight, tucking every little chick safely under her as if saying to the hawk, “you can get my chicks over my dead body.”

It is under God’s wings where we may seek refuge, but remember, we have to run to Him.  It is up to us, really.  It is so sad that many times we do not want to accept His offer of protection.  God is deeply committed to us—yet at the same time, we can reject His outstretched arm if we so choose.  It is available, but not automatic.  God does not run here and there, trying to cover us.  He is saying to you and me, “I have made protection possible.  You run to Me.”  And when we do run to Him in faith, the enemy will have to go through God to get to us. 

SPIRIT OF SPRINGTIME RENEWAL

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9)

The Sabbath school teacher’s lesson for the day was forgiveness. She began with a question: “What do you have to do in order to be forgiven?” One little hand shot up. This boy was certain he had the answer. He said, “In order to be forgiven, you’ve got to sin!”

Sin is a word that dominates the Bible. The Bible’s first eleven chapters try to explain why the world is in such a mess. These chapters of Genesis trace the trouble to sin. Sin is the common condition of humans in every age. We all do wrong and fail to do right, whether we intend it or not, and we must find a way to deal with our sin.

The good news of the gospel is that with God, forgiveness is overflowing. Forgiveness is basic to God’s nature and is a mighty fountain from which all of us are invited to drink.

Jesus’ ministry was strongly centered on forgiveness. Forgiveness is a common theme in Jesus’ teachings.  When He taught His disciples how to pray, He wants us to voice forgiveness in our prayers, “and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” (Matt. 6:12).  The New International Version – And forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.  Unfortunately, in practice, we ignore the last phrase.

The parable of Jesus in Matt. 18:21-35 works by using extravagant contrasts. A slave owes his king ten thousand talents. This is such an astronomical amount of money as to be an inconceivable debt. Amazingly, the king snaps his fingers and forgives the debt completely! That forgiven slave then refuses to forgive a very small debt that a fellow slave owes him. How small? He refuses to forgive a debt that’s five hundred thousand times smaller than the amount he owed the king!  Jesus’ point is clear. God is forever merciful to us. We should be grateful for that mercy, internalize it, and model it in our behavior toward others. To do less is to dishonor God’s forgiveness.

Forgiveness is not natural for human beings. It is very difficult for people to forgive those who wronged or hurt them.

When Elizabeth Barrett Browning, English poet of the Romantic movement, married Robert (six years her junior), her parents disapproved so strongly that they disowned her. For ten years Elizabeth wrote letters to her parents almost weekly. In the letters she expressed her love for them and asked for reconciliation. They never replied. Then one day Elizabeth received a large box in the mail. To her enormous heartbreak, it contained all of her letters. Not one of them had been opened. Today those letters are considered to be among the most beautiful love letters in the English language. Had her parents read only a couple of them, their relationship with their daughter might very well have been mended. They missed out on one of the world’s greatest treasures and never even knew it; but more tragically, they missed out on an even bigger treasure: their daughter!

There was a family that lived in the mountains of the West. The son had married a young Native American woman. His parents were against the marriage and shut out their daughter-in-law. One night during a raging blizzard the young man appeared at his parents’ door to say that his wife is in labor. He needed help to get her to the closest hospital. His father refused to help.

The child died because the mother couldn’t get medical help in time. When the father of the young man heard the news, the enormity of his guilt overwhelmed him. He knew that somehow; he must go to the hospital to beg the forgiveness of his son’s wife. Holding a little bouquet of flowers in one hand and his hat in the other, he unexpectedly appeared in the doorway of the hospital room. He wanted to say the right thing, but words won’t come. Finally, with tears in his eyes, all he can manage to say was, “Spring is coming.”

The good news of the gospel is that spring is coming! Spring is coming for God’s children whenever they face one another to attend to the brokenness in their relationships. The hardest words any of us can speak are the words by which we ask and grant forgiveness. But they are the most necessary words—because without them we all perish. Let us engage in the spirit of springtime renewal, forgive!

Psalm 91: 3, 4a (NIV) – Surely, He will save you from the fowler’s snare and from the deadly pestilence. He will cover you with His feathers, and under His wings you will find refuge.

Psalm 91 is a protection covenant.  God promised that He will save us from the fowler’s snare, the trap of the hunter of birds.  I am not sure if you have tried to trap an animal, perhaps using a mouse trap.  The more common mousetrap is a glue trap. We usually place a bait like a piece of cheese at the center of the wood with very sticky adhesive around.  Once the mouse gets into the adhesive surface, it cannot move, thus, it cannot maintain its body temperature and it suffers from hypothermia and eventually expires.  Or the trapper would come and kill the mouse.

This is what the devil does to God’s child.  He knows what will most likely hook us and he knows exactly which thought to put into our minds to lure us into the trap.  God promised that His child who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will be delivered from the snare laid by the fowler, the trapper, Satan himself. God will deliver us from the deadly pestilence, too. 

A pestilence is any “virulent or fatal disease, an epidemic that hits the masses of people, any deadly disease that attaches itself to one’s body with the intent to destroy.”  You see, this pestilence can be physical or spiritual.  God promised both spiritual and physical deliverance, from the trap of the fowler and from deadly pestilence.  This comprises being delivered from temptation and being delivered from harm.  We thank God for His deliverance from both traps and pestilence.

When you picture a magnificent flying bird, do you think of a chicken?  Of course not.  I believe that you are thinking of an eagle.  The largest eagle in the world is the Philippine eagle, known as monkey-eating eagle.  It dazzles with its wingspan reaching 1.84 m to 2.2 m with the width of a single wing ranging from 57.4 cm to 61.4 cm.  The promise in verse 4 is not about being borne up on the wings of eagles, rather, God promised that we will find refuge, not under his flying wing but under his sheltering wing. 

Is everyone protected under His wings?  “He will cover you with His feathers and under His wings, you will find refuge.”  Again, it is up to us to make that decision!  We can seek refuge under His wings if we choose to.  Have you observed what a mother hen does when danger is approaching like a hawk which plans to take a chick as its prey?  The mother hen would not run to those little chicks and jump on top of them to try to cover them with her wings.  Instead, she would squat down, spread out her wings, and begin to cluck.  And those little chicks from every direction would come running to her to get under those outstretched wings.  Then the mother hen would pull her wings down tight, tucking every little chick safely under her as if saying to the hawk, “you can get my chicks over my dead body.”

It is under God’s wings where we may seek refuge, but remember, we have to run to Him.  It is up to us, really.  It is so sad that many times we do not want to accept His offer of protection.  God is deeply committed to us—yet at the same time, we can reject His outstretched arm if we so choose.  It is available, but not automatic.  God does not run here and there, trying to cover us.  He is saying to you and me, “I have made protection possible.  You run to Me.”  And when we do run to Him in faith, the enemy will have to go through God to get to us.