A Purpose to Our Series on 
'The Giver, the Gifts and the Giving'

Man, living in selfishness—often denying his gifts are from God, or demeaning those gifts and thus demeaning himself, misusing and abusing them, denying the love that would give him the use of gifts where he needs such use, and so making him without true purpose and so without true hope in life—needs to see what we have so briefly stated, that ‘Every good giving and every perfect gift is . . . from the Father of lights’. If we add to this that God ‘gives to all men generously and without reproaching’, and ‘everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected’, for God ‘richly furnishes us with everything to enjoy’,[1] then to oppose what is the ontological reality of God’s giving nature is to have a burden on one’s conscience.

The refusal to respond to Divine giving, and the Divine expectation of our giving to others, as well as thanksgiving to him—God—means that we have a key into some of the existential misery of Man, to say nothing of our own when we act in like manner. The purpose, then, of our series on the matter of giving is for us to see afresh, and even in a fuller way than ever, the amazing nature of the God who withholds not his only Son but offers him up freely for us all. With Paul, we exclaim, ‘will he not also give us all things with him?’ Learning of life and having the spirit of receiving and giving makes us better able to have pastoral ministry to others.

[1]  James 1:5, 17; I Tim. 4:4; 6:17.

These tape references below are previous lectures but hold similar content and are now available as mp3 on CD upon request