Date: 20 Jun 2018 Comments: 0

Last night, my wife and I started attending a Tuesday night bible study at our new home church. It talked about community and how each of us is part of the body and have skills to use. This is certainly something that I have always felt compelled to do, use my skills to glorify God. However, one of the points they brought up was a very popular topic about how we must learn to give up some things in order to get better things back. In essence, we must find the thing we are most protective of and be willing to give that up to God but He will return it and make it even better. When I did my reading today, it seemed to speak of a similar topic. It is easy for us to think that we can hold just a little piece of something back from God and it will be fine, but that is not what the bible tells us. In fact, Proverbs warns against this: “False weights and unequal measures – the Lord detests double standards of any kind!” (Proverbs 20:10, NLT). So what? Will God actually care if we hold it back? Yes, the king of Heaven and Earth does not take well to those who intentionally choose to disobey Him,, Proverbs addresses that too: “The king’s fury is like a lion’s roar; to rouse his anger is to risk your life.” (Proverbs 20:2, NLT). If you want a more biblical example of this, we must only read the story of Ananias and Sapphira who chose to sell some things as the church members often did but rather than donating all the proceeds to the church, they decided to keep just a little of it and the results were deadly. “The property was yours to sell or not sell as you wished. And after selling it, the money was also yours to give away. How could you do a thing like this? You weren’t lying to us but to God!” As soon as Ananias heard this, he fell to the floor and died. Everyone who heard about it was terrified.” (Acts 5:4-5, NLT). Now, I’m not insinuating that God is prone to dropping you dead for holding out on him, he is the father of grace after all, but the truth is that anything you don’t give away to God could be your undoing. If we hold on to money, health, children, cars, houses, anything, that we are not willing to offer to God, we’re only poisoning ourselves. God will do great things with the things you give him.