Give Everything… and Live

You know how sometimes you don’t really hear the lyrics of a song until the fifty-third time you’ve listened to the song? You like the tune, you sing along with the chorus (or at least the first line of the chorus, because that’s all you really know) and then you mumble-hum along using your inside voice while your brain focuses on traffic and what awaits at the office or at home or how how you really should stop eating potato chips. And then, bam, the words coming out of the speaker collide on just the right neural freeway in your head and you think, “hey – that’s good, that’s right, that’s exactly what I’ve been thinking but haven’t quite put into words!”

A neural freeway collision of that sort, along with some added musings, occurred to me recently while driving, as I listened to Casting Crowns’ “What if I Gave Everything?”

And along with thinking, “yeah, what if?”, right about there is when Ananias and Sapphira popped into my mind.  Wait – what?  You mean the story in Acts, about the couple who lied about how much of their proceeds they had given to the young church, and were struck dead?  The story that makes many of us look a little bit over our shoulders, because it sounds like one heck of a harsh response to folks who were, after all, supporters of the church who gave a whopping big donation if you think of it in offering-plate terms?  The story that pastors and church officials are, for the most part, quick to clarify: it’s about their dishonesty, not about amount of giving.  Don’t say – don’t pretend – that you’re giving all the proceeds, if that’s not true. Don’t try to lie to God.  It might get you killed.

And it occurred to me, what if there’s more to the story than that?  What if there’s a lesson here that goes beyond admonishing us not to test God or lie to him in our hearts? What if it’s a parable about where “holding back” leads? What if it also hearkens back to the falling of Adam and Eve, in their act of taking something that wasn’t permitted – that wasn’t for them?  What if … if our refusal to give it all (back) is another way of saying “I recognize you as God over most things, God, but I’M still claiming to be god over this.”  

What if the additional message we received from this parable was simple, blunt, and more than a little bit uncomfortable:  holding back from me, God, leads to death. Maybe not in this life.  Maybe not by being struck down in front of fellow “disciples” in dramatic fashion.  Maybe only when we’re called to account in the ultimate performance review – when God asks us to explain how we’ve loved him and loved others.  Even if we’re honest (unlike our predecessors in Acts) and admit we only gave it 80%, or only loved God by going to church and doing daily devotions and periodic small group, and loved our neighbors by … well, some of our neighbors, because some of them didn’t want our love, or deserve it, or … but anyway sometimes we gave good chunks of money, and stopped to change a tire, and made some meals for those in mourning. Not perfect, but better than most people, I’d guess.  Maybe that’s when God says, “But I told you to love me with all of your heart, and all of your mind, and all of your soul.” And I told you to love your neighbor as you love yourself – did you hold back your love for you when you were petty, mean, distracted? And if your heart still holds back from me and what I ask of you, why should you join me in Heaven – in LIFE?  How could you be trusted not to again steal the fruit in an act of ‘me first”, because you don’t really trust me, God’?

Or maybe, although we are saved by grace and promised eternity in Heaven by our faith in Christ, real life here and now comes only if and when we stop holding back little pieces of ourselves from God. We can be generous – even extravagant – with our resources, but if we hold back from God little fiefdoms that we claim as ours by right of some entitlement, aren’t we perpetuating our claim to be like God? And isn’t that exactly what got us relocated from Eden to this life that has more than a few nasty thistles in it?

What if “giving everything” was recognized as simply giving everything back, and relinquishing this claim to any entitlement to be like God? What if giving everything we have to God was the way to avoid both death and living a life that is dead?

Lord … YOU alone are God.  Everything is from you.  Everything is yours.  I am yours and EVERYTHING of mine is not mine but yours.

What if … I stop holding back from you? Is this more than just a way to live a better life?  Is this what I need to do, to have life?