DIG DEEP
Excavating the Depths of God and His Glorious Riches
August 19th, 2022
a PORTION
Matthew 6:21, ‘”For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”’ (NIV)
We are learning that there is vast spiritual wealth available to each one of us who call ourselves Christians, who consider ourselves children of God. It is buried just under the surface of the Christian life, waiting to be discovered and drawn out. This month we are headed on a dig, so we can explore, excavate and extract the glorious riches God has for His children.
We are a greedy people. Do you agree? I mean, as a whole. Maybe you are not or maybe your spouse or children are not or perhaps it is very important to your entire family to be generous to others who may not be blessed with as much as your family is. In fact, I choose to be generous and kind. I adore spoiling other people with gifts and mementos and paying super close attention to things important to them. I love the act of generosity. But I still think there is a stigmatism: mankind is very greedy.
I have learned about myself this past year that I am quite greedy, especially with my time. I used to believe I was also generous with my time, willing to help anyone in need, available to be needed. But that was before when I had unlimited amounts of time to myself, at my disposal, to use as I pleased. Try when you have plenty on your plate to get accomplished and then you are met with someone who needs something. When someone needs financial assistance, and you are found with no income and trying to stretch a ten-dollar bill for the next two weeks. Where does your generosity meter land on that day? See, it is very simple—at least for some of us—to give away what we have plenty of. But what happens when time and resources, maybe even love and grace, are in scarcity.
Within us, we harbor great spiritual riches. Because God is our portion, we can hope in Him (Lamentations 3:24). He is and has everything we need, to live, to prosper, to cope, to survive, to be victorious, to produce, to rebuild, to move forward, to be generous even. He is our portion and our peace. With Him, we lack no thing. Without Him, we lack everything. And when we lack, we squabble; we become cantankerous and wonky. We find we are greedy, and we hold onto idiotic things that make us worse human beings, not better. But it is what we know because it is what we cling to.
When we yield and surrender this life and our footsteps to Him, the path becomes so much simpler and easier to navigate and we hold things more loosely, with more appreciation and confidence. We find it is good to be generous, and painful to be greedy, because in those times we cannot pry from our hands what they are wrapped tightly around. You might find it surprising, but there is spiritual wealth in having less instead of more.
Genesis 35:11, ‘”I AM God and I AM more than enough.”’ (TPT)
2 Corinthians 2:10b: ‘The Spirit, not content to flit around on the surface, dives into the depths of God, and brings out what God had planned all along.’ (MSG)
