Open
Hands

The Man Who Had a Good Year

Jesus tells a story about a farmer whose land produces an unusually good harvest. He has more than his barns can hold, so he decides to tear them down and build bigger ones. Then he tells himself he has plenty stored up for many years and can now take life easy. That night he dies.

Read the parable carefully and notice what is not in it. He did not steal anything. He did not exploit anyone. He worked hard, had a good year, and planned ahead, which is roughly what everyone is taught to do. Jesus does not call him wicked. He calls him a fool.

The problem was ownership. He thought it was his. It was not. He was a steward, someone entrusted with managing resources that belonged to someone else. The shift from owner to steward is one of the most significant shifts in a person’s whole orientation toward life.

Time and Talent Belong to God Too

Stewardship in most church conversations gets reduced to money. But Psalm 24:1 says “the earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it.” Everything. Including your time, your skills, your creativity, your relationships, your platform if you have one, your access to people and places that others do not have.

Think about what you are genuinely good at. Not what you are professionally trained to do necessarily, but what you are built for. The thing that when you do it, you feel most like yourself. Last session we called that a gift and said the Spirit hands them out. Stewardship is the other half of that sentence. It was given to you on purpose, for the common good, and the question of what you are doing with it applies just as much as it does to your bank account.

How you spend your time is one of the clearest revelations of what you actually value. Most people, if they tracked their time for a week, would find that it does not quite match what they say matters most to them. Stewardship of time means making deliberate choices about where your hours go, because your hours are finite and they belong to God.

The First Portion

There is a specific practice attached to all this, and it deserves plain explanation rather than an awkward silence.

Long before there was a law about it, Abraham gave a tenth of what he had to a priest named Melchizedek. Jacob promised the same thing at Bethel. The practice is called tithe, which simply means a tenth, and it runs through the whole Bible as the way people acknowledged that what they had came from somewhere.

The number is not the interesting part. The order is. Tithe comes off the top, first, before anything else has a claim on it. That sequence is doing something specific to the person who practices it. Anyone can give out of what is left over, and leftover giving costs nothing and changes nothing. Giving first, before the bills and the wants and the fear have made their case, is a monthly rehearsal of a sentence you cannot afford to stop believing: this is not mine, and I am not the one holding my life together.

It is also worth knowing where it goes, because vagueness about money is how trust gets broken. Tithe in this movement does not stay in this room. It goes to the wider church, where it supports pastors and mission work across the region and around the world, including places that could never fund their own. It is deliberately not controlled locally. The reason is that a church in a wealthy neighborhood should not have more ministry than a church in a poor one, and pooling it is the only way that works. So a portion of what you give ends up funding a pastor you will never meet, in a place you will never visit, which is either strange or beautiful depending on how large you think this family is.

Offerings are different and they are separate. Those are given on top of tithe and they stay closer to home. They fund what this specific community does: the meals, the space, the service projects, helping a family here who is in trouble, the things you can see with your own eyes. Where tithe says I am part of something much bigger than this room, offerings say I am responsible for this room.

And if you are new here, or currently underwater financially, hear this clearly. Nobody is checking. This is not a membership fee and there is no ledger with your name on it. Start where you can start. Some people begin at one percent because ten feels impossible, and the practice does its work in them anyway.

The Cheerful Giver

2 Corinthians 9:6–8 describes what generosity is supposed to feel like: “Whoever sows generously will also reap generously. Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” The Greek word translated cheerful is hilaron, which is where we get the English word hilarious. Freely, joyfully, with abandon.

The picture is not of someone making a reluctant sacrifice. It is of someone who has understood that they are participating in something larger than themselves and genuinely enjoys the participation. That kind of giving is not produced by guilt or obligation. It is produced by a person who has actually made the shift from owner to steward and discovered that open hands are lighter than clenched ones.

Generosity is, among other things, a spiritual practice that breaks the grip that money and security have on us. People who give generously tend to find that the anxiety that comes with holding everything tightly begins to ease. You cannot be fully alive and also white-knuckling your resources.

One warning that belongs here because it has done real damage. Nowhere does the Bible promise that giving generously makes you wealthy. Anyone who tells you God will pay you back with interest is selling something, and usually to people who cannot afford it. What Scripture promises is that God provides what you need and that generous people are freer than anxious ones. That is a better promise anyway, and it has the advantage of being true.

Open Hands, and the Table Again

We have come full circle. The BLESS practice we have been building throughout this series, beginning with prayer, listening, eating, serving, sharing your story, is ultimately a description of open-handed living. Every element of it involves giving something: your attention, your time, your food, your effort, your story.

The early church in Acts shared freely not because they were told to but because their community was more valuable to them than their possessions. That is the natural outcome when people genuinely believe that what they have belongs to God and that the family of God includes the person in front of them.

So here is where twenty sessions have been going. You came to a table you did not set, for a meal you did not cook, at an invitation that went out before you were ready and that you had done nothing to earn. Somebody watched the road for you. Somebody kept the seat.

And now you know how the story ends, which means you know what the meal was always a rehearsal for. There is a feast coming, on a mountain, for all peoples, where death is swallowed up and every face is dry. Every ordinary dinner you have eaten in this community has been a small, imperfect preview of that.

Which leaves one thing to do with what you have been given, and it is the same thing that was done for you. Set the table for somebody else. That is the whole shape of the Christian life. It is also the shape of the feast that never ends.