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.
Do Less to Do More
The idea of doing less to do more sounds like a bit of an oxymoron and that’s because it is. Our fast-paced society believes that the key to productivity is finding ways to get more done. However, if we look to the Bible we can find that there is a key instance where doing less actually resulted in a better outcome than taking on more work.
In Luke 10:38-42, Luke recalls the story of Martha and Mary:
38 Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village. And a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. 39 And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to his teaching. 40 But Martha was distracted with much serving. And she went up to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.” 41 But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, 42 but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.”
There are so many lessons that we can learn from the story of these two sisters. Martha and Mary had two different outlooks on life. Martha was focused on being a good hostess whereas Mary’s attention was purely on Christ. Martha was distracted. However, her distraction wasn’t anything bad or sinful. In the eyes of society and in accordance with the culture of the time, she was doing the right thing. She was serving her guests and of course, the guest of honour, Jesus. The text suggests that Martha was devastated that she wasn’t receiving praise for the blood, sweat and tears that she was putting into being a good hostess. This raises an important question, “Why was she doing it?’
Many have often shunned Martha and boldly proclaimed that if they were in the presence of Jesus at that very moment they wouldn’t be concerned with the earthly obligations, as Martha was. Rather, they claim they would just be sitting at the feet of Jesus taking in His good news. But how many times in our serving and ministries are we distracted from what the purpose of our service is? Or how many times do we sulk and whine when we aren’t given the attention we think we deserve for the hard work that we are putting in?
The truth is that we all have a bit of Martha in us. We take on all these responsibilities and do more but get less done. At the end of the day, our goal in our salvation is to be like Jesus and to get closer to Him. Getting closer to Jesus does not come from taking on more ministries and responsibilities, it comes from spending time in His presence. Mary sat at the feet of Jesus and she gained more in that moment than Martha did in the kitchen. The saddest part in the story is that Jesus was in Martha’s house, yet she had no peace. So often as Christians, because we are doing so much and are anxious about who’s watching us and what praises we get, we’ll be in the house of God, with the presence of God moving so forcefully yet, like Martha, we have no peace. When you’re distracted, you no longer see Jesus, even if He’s right in front of you like He was in Martha’s house.
It is essential to note that when Jesus gently rebuked Martha in verse 41-42, He wasn’t saying that what she was doing wasn’t important, He was just trying to show her that He is more important. Your ministry and the service you provide is very important and we are called to serve (See 1 Peter 4:10-11) but Jesus is actually more important than that service. When you take on so many tasks and they become a distraction, that’s when you miss Jesus.
So how do we do less to do more, you ask? We simply become Marys. Jesus says to Martha, “Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.” Mary did less than Martha, yet she gained more because the time she spent at the foot of Christ was more precious than the glory that Martha wanted to gain from being seen as a good hostess. Ultimately, we need to sit at the feet of Christ, hear His word and enjoy His presence like Mary did. This is how we do less to do more.