Kingdom Values – Part III
Key Verse: Luke 6:38
“Give, and you will receive, your gift will return to you in full-pressed down, shaken together to make room for more, running over, and poured into your lap. The amount you give will determine the amount your get back.”
Additional Reading: Luke 6:37-42
Starting at Luke 6:37, Jesus lays out more of His Kingdom values that should be built into the lifestyle of every believer.
If you catch yourself judging or condemning others and determine to stop… you will not be judged or condemned by God. If you don’t discipline yourself in this area, Jesus says your judging and condemning others will soon come back toward you!
The same principle works on forgiveness, according to this verse. If you quickly forgive those that hurt you, you will be forgiven quickly by your Father in heaven.
How would you compare your present lifestyle to these areas? Do you need to work on them? If so, why not take a moment right now and ask the Holy Spirit to remind you when you start down the path of judging, condemning, or holding grudges.
Our Key Verse turns to our generosity toward others in material giving. Remember, Jesus is doing the teaching and His words should really matter most to all believers! When we give a gift, Jesus makes us a promise: our gift will return to us. That means, we will be blessed, in some way, like the person who you blessed with a gift.
But wait, there is more to His promise. Jesus says God doesn’t just give us with a blessing equal to our gift but will bring His blessing to you “pressed down, shaken together to make room for more, running over…” (Luke 6:38). The old saying is, “you can’t out give God” and that saying is based on these very words of Jesus. When we give one amount, God will give blessings that are far more and beyond what we originally gave! (Blessings from God mean way more than just money but can include money. God defines “blessings” as anything that give to us feelings of being loved and joy filled by Him).
To drive home this point of what our giving produces in our lives, Jesus reminds us that the amount of our giving determines the amount of our blessings that return to us. The last phrase of Luke 6:38 is very clear: we determine how blessed we are, how much we feel loved and happy in God. That is not to say that our giving determines how much we are loved and accepted. However, God opens the “windows of Heaven” when we give and lets us feel that love and acceptance in a greater way.
(I realize that a lot of people want to take this verse to mean that God gives us money back in the same or greater portions as our giving. However, I don’t think that characterizes God’s nature. Money can be a curse in some people’s lives, so why would our good, good Father give them a curse in return to their giving. God’s knowledge of each of us determines what a blessing is to us individually, and what would be a curse to us).
The last Kingdom Value Jesus teaches in our Additional Reading section is about how His followers should deal with others’ sins. Jesus reminds us not to offer to “take a speck” out of someone else’s eye, when we have a “log” in our own eye!
In other words, no one is so perfect in the way that they live life that they are qualified to be the voice of the Holy Spirit in another believer’s life! We must let God deal with other believer’s issues and focus on our own issues! In my lifetime, I have not meant any believers that have so removed the “logs” in their eyes to qualify them to judge others.
Father, you are the perfect “Gardener” of my soul, help me to trust all that you teach me through your Son. In Jesus’s Name I pray, amen.