Growth & Giving

DAILY BYTE

There is another lesson regarding Kingdom growth that I want to bring out of this story and is as follows:

Growth is about abundance, not hoarding; and about receiving, NOT taking!

We learn from this story that in the Kingdom of God, growth does not come as a result of hoarding or saving – by holding desperately onto every good thing we have until we have more than the rest. Yet, of course, that is how the rest of the world defines growth because acquisition lays the foundations of all of our world’s empires.

However, that understanding of growth makes no sense to God!

The parable of the sower was first told in an age when most people were really poor and lived hand to mouth. Seed was precious and carefully saved and yet this farmer flung them about with crazy abandon. This would have shocked many of Jesus’ listeners because of its senseless waste. Economically speaking it made no sense to farm that way.

Is Jesus trying to tell us that the way God’s Kingdom works is similar to a crazy, wasteful farmer?

Indeed, this is one image of God’s Kingdom that you will do well to take away with you! Divine generosity is imprudent, uncalculating and concerned with something more than just outcome. Always and everywhere the sower goes out to sow, casting the seeds of new opportunities and new possibilities in every direction.

God flings Kingdom encounters and opportunities for growth around haphazardly, generously and even a little crazily. It’s as if God is willing to let this Kingdom seed fall wherever it may in the hope that wherever we are, we might still be able to encounter possibilities of new life.

Funnily enough, when it comes to the things that God gives us in such crazy abundance – love and grace and more – if we try to hoard them and save them for ourselves, then very much like manna in the Old Testament, they begin to rot and stink.

But the more we share of these things, the more we will find we have!

PRAY AS YOU GO

Loving God, thank you for the way you so generously share the seeds of your Kingdom – your love and grace. Help me to realise that hoarding and taking is not the way these Kingdom seeds will grow in my life, but only when I learn to share them as generously as you do. Amen.

FOCUS READING

Mark 4:8 NRSV

Other grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.