What do you give a God who has everything?
by Thomas Cramer
The Bible says, “Everything comes from you, and we have given you only what comes from your hand.”[1] Our abilities, our senses, our jobs, our money, our health, even our faith comes from God. “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.”[2]
However, every gift we have now is from the past. Every memory, thought, accomplishment, and thing we value is from the past. Our life itself is sustained in the present by the last breath and heartbeat God gave us. “And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.”[3]
“But God’s love, far from being caused by goodness in the object, causes all the goodness which the object has, loving it first into existence and then into real, though derivative, loveability.”[4]
In other words, without the continual loving intention of God we would revert to the properties of what we were made of – nothing. “Our life is, at every moment, supplied by Him: our tiny, miraculous power of free will only operates on bodies which His continual energy keeps in existence — our very power to think is His power communicated to us.”[5]
The only gift left that we control is our Free Will. When we choose and exercise our free will, we declare and commit ourselves. When we choose to follow God in the direction He has shown us [even if we’re not completely sure we understand], we are giving not only all He has given us but our future as well as a gift to God … and God loves it. “But if anyone obeys His word, love for God is truly made complete in them. This is how we know we are in him: Whoever claims to live in him must live as Jesus did.”[6]
To willfully obey God is to decide to act as He wants us to. To willfully commit to God that we will love Him, as He asks us, is the only thing He wants from us.
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[1] 1 Chronicles 29:14 NIV
[2] Ephesians 2:8 NIV
[3] Acts 17:25 NIV
[4] The Problem of Pain, CS Lewis. Samizdat, 2016. pg. 35
[5] The Problem of Pain, CS Lewis, Samizdat, 2016. pg. 29
[6] 1 John 2:5 NIV
