The Lordly Grace of Giving
“God loveth a cheerful giver.”° — 2 Con. ix. 7.
God loveth a cheerful giver because cheerful giving is born of love, and therefore it is a Lover loving a lover and rejoicing in the communion. Giving is the language of loving; indeed, it has no other speech. ‘* God so loved that He gave!” Love finds its very life in giving itself away. Its only pride in possession is the joy of surrender. If love has all things it yet possesses nothing.
But we must not confine our thought to material things when we think of the grace of giving. We must get back to the fontal giving of which the gift of money is only a single issue. It is of this primary spring that James Hinton has a suggestive word: “We must make our thinking, too, a giving, an escape from the death of trying to get.” That word has surely a very vital significance. Our real giving is to begin in our thinking, and first of all in our supreme thinking, which is in our prayers. Self is to be lost when we commune with our God, and our empty place is to be filled by others. We must be cheerful givers in our intercessions, fellow-labourers with God in distributing the holy powers of grace over a needy multitude.
When a man begins to be nobly generous in his prayers, when his highest thinking is a giving and not a getting, he need have no care about his minor forms of beneficence. It will “‘ stream from the hills and descend to the plains.”” When our divine communion is cheerfully sacrificial the whole of life will be an unconscious sacrifice. That is a great epitaph on Gordon’s monument in St. Paul’s, and it powerfully illustrates this law of genial and holy sacrifice: ‘‘ He gave his strength to the weak, his sympathy to the suffering, his substance to the poor, and his heart to God.” His great surrender was the offering of love, and it was made in the secret place; and out of that central giving, as streams from a fountain, there flowed all manner of radiant beneficence.
The people who have no money to give are yet not deprived of those joys of cheerful beneficence. ‘“‘ Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I thee!’’? And he imparted a capacity which money could never have bought. The Apostle Paul, “‘ having nothing,’ longed to visit Rome, that ‘IT may impart unto you some spiritual gift.” In those supreme realms we can all be benefactors, ministers of a treasure more to be desired than gold, yea, than much fine gold,