Acts 20:35, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
Short Thoughts:
This principle is true only because the Triune God Himself—the most blessed of all—is the supreme Giver, as He declares definitively in the Son at the cross.
Long Thoughts:
What does it mean for something to be “more blessed”?
Does it mean it is more beautiful? More enjoyable? More healthy? Certainly it would ultimately entail all those things, but—considered in the broadest way—for something to be “more blessed” must mean that it is “more like God.” It is closer to His character. Since the Triune God is the source and wellspring and essence of all truth, goodness, and beauty, the “more blessed” a thing is, the more it is going to be like Him. And so, in a universe created for the sole purpose of communicating the character of the One true God, those things that are more aligned to His character will inherently be “more blessed.”
Now, in relation to His creation, God is only, ever and always a Giver. It is true that, in some sense, He “receives” from us….receives praise, receives obedience, receives service, but ONLY in the way the sun “receives” light from a mirror reflecting back the sunlight. The minute we conceive of our “service” or our “offering” to God as giving Him something that He did not have, or as adding anything at all to Him, or as making Him “happier” than He was before—we are in dangerous and soul-sick territory. There are ways in which we “give” to God, but ONLY and EVER because He Himself is the GIVER of all things.
So….it is more blessed for us to give (one to another) than to receive because the heart at the root of reality is a heart that GIVES (Now, one might argue that, within the Trinity, God is both Giver and Receiver….He gives Himself to Himself in love, and receives Himself from Himself in love, such that generous giving and joyful receiving are equally God-like…and that would be true. But in today’s post I’m stopping short of that deepest level, rather I’m staying at the level of God’s relationship to creation). We know this heart at the root of reality—we know the Weight and Wonder of this Giver— with greatest clarity and concentration at the cross of Christ where, in the infinite act of self-giving, the one true God says to all the universe, “This is Who I Am.”
So, if our God—the most blessed of all realities—if our God crowns His self-revelation with the act of supreme self-giving, then we know beyond all doubt that it is more blessed to give than to receive. May we, then—having received Him as our all—give of ourselves to those the Lord would place in our spheres of influence.
