The Giver or the Gift

So if you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him” (Luke 11:13, NLT).

I want to pose a question today, and ask that you answer with complete honesty: Are you more thankful for the gifts you enjoy or for the Giver of those gifts?

One of the greatest fallacies of our day is that the gifts we receive from God are the most absolute evidence of His love. Then the “spiritual lie” is propagated that God must love some more than others because of the diversity of gifts He bestows. What a tragic and unscriptural premise that is! God loves us, period. Sure we should be thankful for the gifts He bestows upon us, but those gifts MUST never become our focus. If they do, we are nothing more than selfish children who will likely “take our ball and go home” as soon as things don’t go our way. The focus should never be on the gift, but on the giver. When we honor the Giver, and love Him supremely, we recognize that His gifts are not for our benefit but for the benefit of others. That is true giving, and God wrote the book on the subject! This is precisely what Christ was conveying in our passage from Luke. If we, who are sinful, give gifts to our children because we love them, how much more capable is God, who knows no sin, to give us gifts? There is no proper standard of measure to compute this difference. What’s the point? We should be more thankful for the Giver than the gift.

Allow me to illustrate this point. A boy’s sixth birthday was approaching, so his father began to ask about what the boy wanted to do. He had mentioned he wouldn’t mind a party, and his son usually was very specific about the kind of presents he liked. The dad asked him what he could get him. The father expected a well-planned reply, such as “I’d like a baseball glove; you can find it at Hibbet Sports, aisle 6, below the batting helmets, or a new X-Box game; the games are in alphabetical order in the case in the electronics section of Wal-Mart.”

But, his son’s request was a bit different. He said, “Dad, I’d like a ball to play with for my birthday.”

Dad said, “Great, what kind of ball?”

“Oh, I don’t know for sure, either a football or a soccer ball,” replied the son.

Pressing the issue, the father questioned, “Well, which would you want more?”

The boy replied, “Well,” and thought about it. Then he said. “If you have some time to play ball with me this year, I’d really like a football so we could throw it back and forth in the back yard. But, if you’re gonna be real busy this year, maybe you should just get me a soccer ball, because I can kick it up against the house and use it by myself.”

The dad thought about this and said, “Let me surprise you. How does that sound?”

The little boy smiled and said, “Oh that would be great, Dad. I really love you.”

The father went to his room and pondered with sorrow this little encounter with his son. The father realized that his son was not so much interested in the gift. He was interested in spending time with him, the giver.

In which are you more interested? I wish to encourage you today to be like this little boy and be less concerned with the gifts of God, and focus more on being able to embrace the gifts in order to spend time with Giver and His purpose. Embrace the giver more than the gift and you will soon find you have more gifts than you imagined!

Pray with Me:

Father, thank you for every gift and blessing you have placed in my life. I confess that I have focused on those gifts and the use thereof, sometimes without ever being thankful to you who gave them. Today, I just want to thank you for all you’ve given and I commit to spending time with you so I may use those gifts the way you intend. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I really love you Father. Amen.