Often when we negotiate according to the ways of the world, we know that there must be give and take. But that is not the Lord’s way. “Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again.” (Luke 6:38). When we give to the Lord, either directly through sacrifice and offerings, or indirectly through service to Him by way of service to our fellow brothers and sisters, we may be partly motivated to do so out of some sense of obligation or acknowledgement of our indebtedness to Him. This is the wrong way of looking at things. Indebtedness has a finality to it. A debt is incurred, the debt is paid off, the accounts are settled, and there is no more reason for the financial relationship to continue. But the giving and receiving of gifts encourages reciprocity. When God gives us a gift, He does so with the hopes that we will take that gift and give it to others, or even give some of it back to Him. By paying forward the gift of giving, we encourage others to give gifts as well. And by so doing we can all get swept up in the upward spiral of perpetual reciprocal gift-giving. God gives us everything we have, and then we give Him everything we have, and then He gives us everything He has, but with each turn around the cycle the “everything” in which we all collectively share grows bigger and bigger. Generosity is generative. When we choose to give and give and keep on giving, we are leaving behind the zero sum game that the world is constantly fighting over, and we are entering the infinite sum game where everything that everyone has is always running over in the forms of gifts one to each other.
