Our Generous God
The following is an adaptation of the house church teaching from January 19, 2023.
We’ve been talking quite a bit in our community recently about God’s generosity. We can experience it in external ways like through physical healing and financial provision. The bible is full of examples of this, from Psalmists praising God for abundant harvests of grain and grapes to the deaf, blind, mute, lame, and demon possessed being liberated from their ailments and telling anyone who will listen about their liberator. But perhaps more profoundly than external provision, we can experience it internally through our core needs being met. Laurie Krieg lists the 10 core needs of the human soul as being affirmed, delighted in, desired, included, loved, noticed, nurtured, protected, purposed, and rested.
Ultimately, the generosity of God takes many forms, but it can be summed up in one simple reality: God’s presence. All the way back in April 2022 during our study of Acts 2, we talked about how God’s presence is characterized by two things: generosity and wholeness. We saw this through the early church who recognized that when the old Temple in Jerusalem was no longer functioning as God intended, they were now able to be the new Temple—God’s presence living in and among them. And the result was spectacular. They gathered together daily for teaching, fellowship, and prayer; shared their food, possessions, and money with each other; were filled with awe at God; saw and performed miraculous healings; were overflowing with worship to God; and were full of joy and generosity (Acts 2:42-47). And in addition to that, all the people watching them respected them and many wanted a part of what they were experiencing. So again, God’s presence is generosity and wholeness.
In the Old Testament, we learn about a prophet named Jeremiah. Much of the following information about Jeremiah comes from the Bible Project, so be sure to check out their video on his story. He was an Israelite priest who lived in Jerusalem during the final decades of the Kingdom of Judah. After kings Saul, David, and Solomon, Israel split into two kingdoms under the failings of King Rehoboam. These kingdoms were the Kingdom of Israel (which you might recognize as Samaria) and the Kingdom of Judah. Samaria was eventually conquered by the Assyrians and Judah by the Babylonians. Jeremiah was sent as a prophet to warn the Israelites not to abandon their covenant with God. This covenant simply stated that God would be their God and they would be His people. But, as we’ll talk about later, the human heart is bent toward independence from God, and the Israelites regularly suffered as a natural result of this.
Jeremiah was the prophet who predicted that Babylon would come and bring judgement upon Israel by destroying Jerusalem and taking the people into exile for their idolatry and injustice—their independence from God. And he saw this come to pass, living through the siege and destruction of Jerusalem we read about in 2 Kings 24-25. Jeremiah was called to be a prophet not only to Israel, but to all nations. Jeremiah 1:10 says, “Today I appoint you to stand up against nations and kingdoms. Some you must uproot and tear down, destroy and overthrow. Others you must build up and plant.” He brought God’s message of judgement, but also of hope for a better future.
The book of Jeremiah is broken down into 3 sections. First, chapters 1-25 are Jeremiah’s indictment of Israel before Babylon comes and destroys Jerusalem. Second, chapters 26-45 focus on God’s judgement & hope for His people. And third, chapters 46-51 focus on God’s judgement & hope for the nations of the world. We’re going to spend some time in chapter 31, which exists within a small break (30-33) between stories of judgement and contains a message of hope for the future of God’s people.
Through meditating on this passage, I think you’ll find that God’s presence is generous. Therefore we can put our hope in Him in our own areas of being blind, deaf, mute, and lame.
The story of Israel is our story. In the very beginning of the Bible, we meet a fallen spiritual being, the serpent, who has decided that rather than serve God, he wants to be God. And his mission thenceforth becomes to convince all other creatures that they, too, can be independent from God and therefore be their own God, ruling the world by their own wisdom rather than submitting to God’s wisdom. But newsflash, it doesn’t work out too well for them. As a result, the world quickly becomes full of division, hatred, lust, greed, injustice, envy, wrath, gluttony. Pick your poison.
Their story is our story, too. But there is a clear and simple solution. Rather than wrongly convince ourselves that we can be our own God, we can choose once again to place our faith in the true God. To have our relationship restored with the one who desperately longs to be with us. Ana shared this excerpt from Leanne Payne’s Restoring the Christian Soul with me, and I thought it clarified this beautifully. Leanne quotes Oswald Chambers who says, “Temptation is the testing by an alien power of the possessions held by a personality. In the temptation (of Christ) the devil antagonized the same thing that he antagonized in the first Adam, oneness with God. Satan does not tempt us to do wrong things; he temps us in order to make us lose what God has put into us by regeneration, the possibility of being of value to God.”
Temptation is not just our sinful desire for wrong things, it is, at its core, an attempt to separate our oneness with God. It is our independence screaming loudly in many different forms. Hebrews 11 gives a powerful remembrance of several very imperfect people who understood this idea even before Jesus came to redeem us. And in the midst of that passage is this little gem. Hebrews 11:6 says, “And it is impossible to please God without faith. Anyone who wants to come to him must believe that God exists and that he rewards those who sincerely seek him.” So what is the reward of God towards those who sincerely seek Him? Hebrews goes on to explain that it is a city, a Kingdom that is unshakable, which is to say the place where God is. The very presence of God.
“In that day,” says the Lord, “I will be the God of all the families of Israel, and they will be my people. This is what the Lord says: “Those who survive the coming destruction will find blessings even in the barren land, for I will give rest to the people of Israel.” Long ago the Lord said to Israel: “I have loved you, my people, with an everlasting love. With unfailing love I have drawn you to myself. I will rebuild you, my virgin Israel. You will again be happy and dance merrily with your tambourines. Again you will plant your vineyards on the mountains of Samaria and eat from your own gardens there. The day will come when watchmen will shout from the hill country of Ephraim, ‘Come, let us go up to Jerusalem to worship the Lord our God.’” Now this is what the Lord says: “Sing with joy for Israel. Shout for the greatest of nations! Shout out with praise and joy: ‘Save your people, O Lord, the remnant of Israel!’ For I will bring them from the north and from the distant corners of the earth. I will not forget the blind and lame, the expectant mothers and women in labor. A great company will return! Tears of joy will stream down their faces, and I will lead them home with great care. They will walk beside quiet streams and on smooth paths where they will not stumble. For I am Israel’s father, and Ephraim is my oldest child. —Jeremiah 31:1-9
Think of stories in the Bible about the blind, deaf, mute, lame, expectant mothers, and women in labor. What do they have in common?
Desperation.
There’s the story of Jesus healing the blind and the mute men in Matthew 9:27-33, the lame man in Mark 2:1-12, the deaf man in Mark 7:31-37. There’s the story of Rachel, who dies in childbirth in Genesis 35:16-19. And of course Mary and Joseph in Matthew 1:18-24. It doesn’t get much more desperate than pregnancy out of wedlock in first century Israel. All of these stories either explicitly or implicitly display desperation. But they also display a second quality that comes as a result of allowing desperation to do its good work: faith.
Why do you think desperation must precede faith?
We have to come to the end of ourselves. We have to recognize our need for something greater than us, someone greater than us. It is through desperation that we are humbled to the point of giving up all of our self protection and self provision, opening ourselves up to the generosity of God.
How and why might we avoid desperation?
Despair is perhaps one of the most powerful low emotions we can experience, and it is deeply uncomfortable to sit in. One of the main ways I try to avoid desperation is by attempting to skip directly to faith. If I start to feel desperate, I will try to intellectually determine how God might possibly be using this horrible situation for His good, thereby soothing my writhing heart.
One example of this was when my grandma was diagnosed with leukemia. I headed home over a weekend in college to go be with her and pray for her. Mustering all of the faith I could, I laid my hands on her, banish the disease from her body, and proclaimed God’s healing power over her. We were both in tears afterward, mine much messier than her calm, gentle ones. It was one of the sweetest moments and fondest memories I have of her. And after that experience, I continued to pray, and pray, and pray, and pray. Every morning. Many evenings. Many times in between. Unfortunately the disease progressed rapidly, and a sense of desperation began to grow within me. So in order to protect myself from becoming angry, disenfranchised, and even slowly building up evidence in my mind how God is untrustworthy, I instead tried to intellectually convince myself that if God allowed her to die, it’s like Paul says, “For to me, living means living for Christ, and dying is even better.” If she died, it was because God would use it for something even better than if she lived. I used this blind faith to try and convince myself that God’s will is perfect, even when my true belief couldn’t have been further from that. Even if I had already internalized a whole slew of lies about God’s untrustworthiness and the smallness of my faith.
Psalms 34:4-7 and 19-22 says, “I prayed to the Lord, and he answered me. He freed me from all my fears. Those who look to him for help will be radiant with joy; no shadow of shame will darken their faces. In my desperation I prayed, and the Lord listened; he saved me from all my troubles. For the angel of the Lord is a guard; he surrounds and defends all who fear him. The righteous person faces many troubles, but the Lord comes to the rescue each time.
What Psalm 34 doesn’t tell us is how long David sat in desperation. And what his prayers looked like while he waited to be rescued by His loving Father.
What do you think we might learn by allowing ourselves to sit in desperation?
When we avoid desperation, we avoid giving ourselves an opportunity to see ourselves and see God rightly. In the experience with my grandma, because I tried to skip despair and go right to blind faith, I buried the feelings that God is untrustworthy, prayer doesn’t really work, I don’t have enough faith to change the situation, and many more. When we allow ourselves to really sit in our desperation, we can start to see our helplessness and open a door for the presence of Jesus to come and meet us, where all things are shown clearly and all wounds are healed slowly and surely. God’s presence is generosity and wholeness. It is abundantly more than anything we could hope or imagine.
Ephesians 3:14-19 says, “When I think of [God’s plan], I fall to my knees and pray to the Father, the Creator of everything in heaven and on earth. I pray that from his glorious, unlimited resources he will empower you with inner strength through his Spirit. Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. [He will make His presence known, available, and accessible to you!] Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong. And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God.
“Listen to this message from the Lord, you nations of the world; proclaim it in distant coastlands: The Lord, who scattered his people, will gather them and watch over them as a shepherd does his flock. For the Lord has redeemed Israel from those too strong for them. They will come home and sing songs of joy on the heights of Jerusalem. They will be radiant because of the Lord’s good gifts—the abundant crops of grain, new wine, and olive oil, and the healthy flocks and herds. Their life will be like a watered garden, and all their sorrows will be gone. The young women will dance for joy, and the men—old and young—will join in the celebration. I will turn their mourning into joy. I will comfort them and exchange their sorrow for rejoicing. The priests will enjoy abundance, and my people will feast on my good gifts. I, the Lord, have spoken!” I have heard Israel saying, ‘You disciplined me severely, like a calf that needs training for the yoke. Turn me again to you and restore me, for you alone are the Lord my God. I turned away from God, but then I was sorry. I kicked myself for my stupidity! I was thoroughly ashamed of all I did in my younger days.’ “Is not Israel still my son, my darling child?” says the Lord. “I often have to punish him, but I still love him. That’s why I long for him and surely will have mercy on him. Set up road signs; put up guideposts. Mark well the path by which you came. Come back again, my virgin Israel; return to your towns here. How long will you wander, my wayward daughter? For the Lord will cause something new to happen—Israel will embrace her God.” —Jeremiah 31:10-14, 18-22
God’s generosity:
Redeems us from those too strong for us
Makes us radiant because of His good gifts
Casts sorrows away
Turns mourning into joy
Exchanges sorrow for rejoicing
Provides abundance
Provides good gifts
Causes something new to happen—a relationship of embrace where distance and independence once existed
When we come to God in our desperation—rejecting quick fixes like blind faith—his presence will bring the wholeness and generosity we long for, and we will experience him in truth.
In God’s presence we see things clearly. Psalm 16:11 says, “You will show me the way of life, granting me the joy of your presence and the pleasures of living with you forever.”
In God’s presence we are kept safe. Psalm 31:20 says, “You hide them in the shelter of your presence, safe from those who conspire against them.”
In God’s presence we receive clarity and truth. Psalm 89:15 says, “Happy are those who hear the joyful call to worship, for they will walk in the light of your presence, Lord.
In God’s presence our deepest, eternal needs are met. Psalm 21:6 says, “You have endowed him with eternal blessings and given him the joy of your presence.”
In God’s presence we will be filled with joy. Psalm 68:3 says, “But let the godly rejoice. Let them be glad in God’s presence. Let them be filled with joy.”
So where do we go from here? I invite you to spend some time considering the following questions.
Where are you blind, deaf, mute, or lame?
Where are you tempted to give up hope or skip directly to blind faith as you wait?
How might God meet you with generosity and wholeness in His presence?
Now rest in the promises of the Lord.
Jeremiah 31:35-36 — It is the Lord who provides sun to light the day and the moon and stars to light the night, and who stirs the sea into roaring waves. His name is the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, and this is what he says: “I am as likely to reject my people Israel as I am to abolish the laws of nature!”
Psalm 65:4—“What joy for those you choose to bring near, those who live in your holy courts. What festivities await us inside your holy Temple.”