Get By Giving

Honor the LORD with your wealth and with the best part of everything you produce. Then he will fill your barns with grain, and your vats will overflow with good wine.

Proverbs 3:9-10

God’s wisdom and my understanding are often diametrically opposed. Get by giving? That doesn’t sound reasonable. Get by hoarding? Now that sounds right. Give God your leftovers sounds right.

But God doesn’t do leftovers. Giving God the first of the harvest, dedicating the firstborn son, and offering the firstborn of the herd were all requirements God placed on his people. The gift of the firstfruits was an acknowledgment that everything belonged to God. He calls believers a kind of firstfruits, his “prized possession” (James 1:18). He means that we have been set aside for him from among his creation. The firstfruits also represented a portion of what was to come. When Jesus rose from the dead, he was “the first of a great harvest of all who have died” (1 Corinthians 15:20); in other words, he was the first, and he stood as an assurance that many more would follow.

Giving God our firstfruits is an act of trust and obedience and an acknowledgment of his ownership. Unfortunately, it is our nature to cling to the firstfruits and then see what we might spare for God from what remains. That is the way our own wisdom would call it. We tend to reason something like this: “Let me make sure I’ve got all I need first.”

But God’s promise is that when we honor him with our firstfruits, he will honor our obedience with his provision. The firstfruits of our day belong to him. The firstfruits of our energy belong to him. The firstfruits of our financial resources belong to him. When we offer him our firstfruits, we are really saying, “Everything is yours.”

If you want to honor God, to give worship that is more than mouthing words, and to see God’s provision in your real-life experience, it’s all about giving him the firstfruits.

Father, I offer you the firstfruits of my life. Everything I have is yours. It comes from you and is for your use. Surrendering my firstfruits is surrendering all that I am and all that I have to you.

Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self.

C. S. Lewis(1898–1963), Irish novelist, literary critic, and essayist