God Gave All

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small.
All things wise and wonderful.
The Lord God made them all.

And when He did, He made them perfectly. And when He did, He gave all of His creation to the crown of His creation, mankind, who bore His image perfectly. He said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. These will be yours for food” (Genesis 1:29).

What love! The Creator gives the remainder of His creation to serve His principal creatures. He held nothing back. Because of His love God poured forth the products of His creating voice. All for us.

We Lost All

However, as quickly as the sweetness of the forbidden fruit soured the lips and souls of our first parents, sin’s cataclysmic tsunami spread over all things once bright and beautiful and all things great and small. The image of God—lost! The perfection of creation—gone! Self preservation and survival of the fittest became the motive and the way of life for man and animal. “Mine” became a favorite word. Sin’s delusion wrought havoc on all of creation and brought spiritual and physical disease and disorder—even death! “Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned” (Romans 5:12).

God Gave Jesus

To this sin-trashed world of fallen man came Jesus—God’s perfect Son and mankind’s perfect Brother. God the Father gave His dearest treasure, His Son, to all and for all!

And Jesus gave Himself. All was His, but He gave it all up for us. The earth was His, but foxes and birds had substantially more in real estate holdings than He. The Temple in Jerusalem was His, but He still paid His temple tax. All rule and rulers were established by Him and subject to Him, yet He still rendered to Caesar what was Caesar’s. All sin was ours, but He made it His own. All holiness was His, but He made it our own. All hell was ours, but He made it His own. All heaven was His, but he made it our own. “For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God,” (1 Peter 3:18). Now His heavenly Father is our forgiving Father. Through God’s Gift we “…are all the sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus,” (Galatians 3:26). And if that were not enough, along with the unspeakable gift God also graciously gives us all other good things!

We Give All

Someone once wrote: “The measure of God’s love is that He loves without measure.” All this measureless love God pours out on us for body and life, for soul and eternal life.

We, however, are naturally prone to allocate and measure out in a miserly fashion what is “mine” and “yours” and even “God’s.” When we do that, we are so like children who demand that the other children (including God and the church) stay on their side, and who scrutinize which half might be bigger or better for self. That’s because of the selfish sinner inside us, whom we are to drown by daily contrition and repentance.

But by the Holy Spirit we are “…created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:24), saints of God, who in good stewardship “…set aside a sum…” (1 Corinthians 16:2) of all of ours in order to give them back to God. As redeemed souls in Christ, we realize that all of our time, all of our personal talents and all of our financial assets are gifts on loan from God to be used to serve Him by serving others. We also realize that what is true in our personal lives and families is also true in our congregational life and family, and, furthermore, is true in our synodical life and family. God gives us sufficient resources to help many people. Remember, it’s all for God’s glory, all so we may glow as Jesus’ lights in this dark world, all to send the Gospel to all!

All of that comes about by God’s doing as He convinces us that all is His and all of ours is His. Then our hearts and hands together respond by gladly confessing:

We give Thee but Thine own,
Whate’er the gift may be;
All that we have is Thine alone,
A trust, O Lord, from Thee.

David Russow is co-pastor of King of Grace Lutheran Church in Golden Valley, Minnesota and Chairman of the ELS Board for Stewardship