In addition to Work from Worth Wednesday posts, I’m beginning a new series called “Sunday Love Notes.” In these posts I’ll share things I’m thinking about to you in the form of a short love note from one friend to another a few Sundays a month.
I was asked to offer a short giving message at my local church last weekend. My first Sunday Love Note to you are my notes from what I shared with a few expounded thoughts on the topic I couldn’t share with my church for the sake of time.
I pray these words land on you with gentle challenge to provoke holy desire for the abundance God is offering you.
Generosity keeps us open to receive from God.
The most important work of grace in our lives is becoming a person who can freely receive. Our calling can be simplified to this aim: to freely receive love from God and offer it back to the world around us.
At the beginning of 2023, everything in our life changed. My husband came off the road from full-time touring, and I was pivoting away from a seven-year-long career. God had revealed a clear direction, but the provision for that direction was hazy. The income on my husband’s side had completely ended, and we lived that year off the selling of assets.
On paper, it didn’t make sense for us to be giving to our church monthly, let alone practice generosity. And yet, it really wasn’t even a thought that we wouldn’t.
When you’ve walked with God for long enough, and He’s proved Himself faithful to you time and time again, there’s a knowing. A deep trust. We didn’t know how He would provide, but we knew that He would. Even in our need, we chose to live in alignment with God’s character and our calling.
This wasn’t a hands off trust. It was prayerful and faithful. Giving isn’t the golden ticket to abundance and answered prayer - it's a generous and active partnership.
At the end of 2024, we sat in awe of God, realizing that He had miraculously breathed on seeds we had sown in years prior to our year of lack. He provided in ways we never could have orchestrated—paying off debts, alleviating financial burdens, and leading us into our most profitable financial year to date in 2024. Thank you God.
I don’t think that’s just because we gave, but giving was an essential piece of the puzzle. Generosity is a basic principle of living life as an apprentice to Christ.
Generosity keeps us open to receive from God.
Three Stages of Spiritual Formation
In his book Sacred Fire, Ronald Rolheiser describes three stages of spiritual formation.
First Stage: Taming the Flesh.
This first stage is when we come to faith in Jesus. Like uprooting weeds in the garden of our life, it’s a season to contain the destructive habits we formed in our life apart from God and let go of the things that once held us captive.
When 2 Corinthians 5:17 says, “if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” it’s not saying that we suddenly become perfectly free from our sinful desires overnight.
Rather, it means we now live with a new orientation—we have access to the presence of God face to face through Christ and it makes a whole new way of living available to us. God can bring supernatural sudden deliverance, yes. But it’s always followed by a life-long journey of maturity that requires us to die daily to our flesh so our spirit can cultivate new life.
Like a newborn learning how to walk, in this first stage we’re still figuring out how to live in this new reality. Like…
I’m going to stop lying, lusting, and hating my neighbor.
I will stop running to false places of safety that keep me far from God.
As it related to generosity, I’m going to stop wasting my life and resources chasing after things that leave me empty.
The revelation of God’s generosity toward us awakens a new hunger to begin abiding in this new love and freedom we now have access to that will not just tame our flesh, but satisfy us in such a way that we don’t desire what has kept us bound anymore. This refining love tills the soul of our life for fruitfulness. Which leads us to the second stage.
Second Stage: Giving your life away.
This is where we are no longer just avoiding sin but actively producing something good through our lives
We start asking deeper questions:
Not just robotic religious basics like… “Is this right or wrong? Is this sin?” but “Will this make me more like Christ?”
Will doing this or not doing thing cause me to become someone who can receive from God more freely. Will it protect the intimacy of my relationship with Him.
This is the stage where generosity becomes more than something we do but an identity we embrace. The thing about giving your life away is that you receive it tenfold in return. God’s kingdom operates on this beautiful cycle of releasing and receiving.
Tithing, in many ways, is the training wheels of generosity. It’s the starting point, not the finish line. By giving our first 10% to God, we are:
1. Declaring that we trust Him as our provider.
2. Protecting ourselves from traps like greed, fear, pride, envy, and self-sufficiency.
3. Keeping our hearts open to hear His voice and receive His direction.
Because we know…
Generosity keeps us open to receive from God.
Final Stage: Giving Our Death Away
In this final stage of our lives, we are no longer at our peak of fruitfulness in a productive sense. There are plenty of bitter souls in this final stage who have grown hard with hatred, fear, and doubt. But for those who live for eternity in the first two stages, there is a harvest of wisdom reaped in this season in preparation for heaven’s doorway.
Before you spend your resources frivolously, think about how living in this current stage of your life will affect your final stage.
Like asking a question, “will investing this thing — this habit, this hobby matter to me when I’m 80? Does doing this and spending money on this reflect who I desire to be at the end of my life?”
It may or may not change your perspective and redirect your investments. Generosity protects you from making worthless investments.
I know that my investment in the kingdom of God and the work of my local church will be something I will look back on and say, “I only wish I could have given more.”
How do I know I’ll feel this way? It’s because my church and community is the place where my soul is stewarded and my soul is the only thing I bring from this life to the next.
As believers, our whole life should centers on the desire to live in such a way that our last breath is our final song of worship to God.
Like a seed buried into the ground to produce new life, giving our death away will be our final act of generosity and we will be welcomed into our final and eternal moment of receiving - meeting our God face to face in the fullness of His glory.
I want to live in such a way that my death is a valuable and honorable gift that blesses those that live beyond me and leaves a legacy of love for others to feast off of.
My choice to be generous today is an investment in the richness of blessing my death will bring as I enter into eternity.
So no, the reason why our church talks weekly about giving is not because God needs our money, but because we need to be freed from money’s tempting power to life more fully in the abundance God is offering you.
When we give, we’re positioning ourselves to receive—not just financially, but spiritually. We become people who have ears that hear, souls who freely receive wisdom, strategy, provision, intimacy, love, comfort, and supernatural peace from the hand of God.
A Challenge for Us Today…
Don’t let generosity be something you do occasionally—let it be who you are.
Because we know…
Generosity keeps us open to receive from God.
For Eternity and Until,
Tori
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