Sunday, January 25, 2015

He's More Than Enough



How can one define enough? In some instances, enough might be a whole lot of something.  At other times, enough might be just a little.

Most of the time more than enough sounds like an impossibility; we can't even get enough, let alone more than enough.

Jesus provided a perfect picture of more than enough when he fed the multitudes (Luke 9). One small boy in the crowd had five loaves and two fish. Jesus took that small meal (which was enough for the boy) and blessing it, He made it more than enough for five thousand. In fact, there were twelve baskets of left overs once everyone had eaten.

The story of the loaves and fishes is such a perfect example of the way God so often works. I have found, over and over, that He wants us to give Him the little we have; in exchange, we get all that He has. 

When I was a young woman, my siblings and I had a Christian rock group. Our goal was to lift up Christ and draw people to Him. We were pretty devoted and gave up all other ambitions in pursuit of ministry. 

One of our biggest hurdles was that we did not have our own sound system.This placed some serious restrictions on our ministry. We prayed and prayed that God would give us a sound system.  One day, after chores, I was walking across the yard, asking God (once again) for a sound system. God reminded me of David and his five, smooth stones - the same stones David took to meet Goliath. 

"What do you have in your hand," God said to me that morning. All of a sudden, I realized that I could sell my horse and the money could be used to buy a sound system. My sister and my father also sold their horses and we had enough money to purchase the sound system.

I won't lie to you; it was a sacrifice. I loved my horse. 

Did I ever regret giving up my horse for the Lord?  Absolutely not. God took the little that I had and poured out blessing on me, a thousand times more than what I had given Him. He took enough and gave back more than enough.

Let's take this even deeper.

Sometimes we hold ourselves, or pieces of ourselves, back from God. We love the self we have come to be and do not want to give all of ourselves over to God. We hold a little something back.

What we fail to see is that God has something so much greater, so much better, even so much more us, than the thing we are hanging on to. 

It's a little bit like a trapeze artist. Unless he lets go of the bar he is swinging on, he can't grasp the next bar that takes him even higher.

When we  stop hanging on so tightly to what we have, we can embrace the abundance - the more than enough - that God has for us.

2 comments:

  1. C.S. Lewis is one of my very favorite authors. He probably makes the strongest case for letting go of self: " Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred,
    loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with
    Him everything else thrown in." (Mere Christianity, page 190-191)

    ReplyDelete
  2. C.S. Lewis is one of my very favorite authors. He probably makes the strongest case for letting go of self: " Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred,
    loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with
    Him everything else thrown in." (Mere Christianity, page 190-191)

    ReplyDelete

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