Give More, You Get More
When you give more, you get more? This paradox is a principle that has been taught in the church, yet a common misconception is that giving more will somehow diminish what you already have. However, it does the very opposite. There is beauty in giving and sacrificing and the greatest example that we have of this can be taken from Jesus. He paid the ultimate price and wiped away our sinful debt. What did He gain? Fellowship and a relationship with us, which He and the Father deemed was more important than His precious life.
Luke 6:38 says:
“Give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you.”
Jesus promises us that when you give, it will be given back to you. We see this promise being fulfilled in scripture even before Jesus spoke these words. In 1 Kings 17:7-16, Elijah approaches the widow of Zarephath during a drought and asks her to provide food for him. She was poor and only had a handful of flour in a jar and a little oil in a jug left to sustain her, until she and son would eventually die of hunger. However, she trusted in God and provided for the prophet. After this sacrifice, neither the jar of flour was nor the jug of oil became empty. This widow gave all that she had but she gained more than she had ever imagined.
When God gives back to His people, He doesn’t hold back, in the text it says that He gives back with “good measure” and it’ll be “running over.” However, it is essential for us to realise that we cannot give a little and expect a lot from God. God loves a cheerful giver (2 Corinthians 9:7) and as He is God, He knows our hearts. In the Bible, we are also told that if we sow sparingly, we will reap sparingly, but if we sow abundantly, we will reap abundantly (2 Corinthians 9:6).
The principle of giving more to get more doesn’t only apply to financial giving. Jesus says that “whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for Me will find it” (Matthew 16:25). When Jesus said this, He was saying to the disciples (and us) that He wanted us to be willing to give up our earthly existence for Him and in return we would gain eternal life and salvation. This is in comparison to us cherishing our earthly lives which, without sounding morbid, do not measure up to eternity. Almost every Christian has asked themselves if it’s really worth it to follow Christ and give up our comfortable, sinful lifestyles? The answer is: it is. Whatever you give up and lose on earth, you will be rewarded for it in heaven and that’s where it really counts because heaven is eternal.
It’s not easy to give, it takes a lot of faith and selflessness, however, God is faithful and He is the maker of the universe, which means that He has an unlimited amount of resources. God doesn’t actually need our money or our time, because He is God and He would be able to source it elsewhere. He asks us to give because He wants to teach us about sacrifice and to be willing to sacrifice those things that we hold so dearly onto, the beauty of this is that He will always give it back to us and will always sustain us.