Honour the Lord with your substance
and with the first fruits of all your produce;
It is easy to give what we do not want. Do we really deserve the pleasant feeling of righteousness as we drop off a bag of clothes at a donation center when we were planning on getting rid of the clothes anyway? Are we really being generous when we re-gift a bag of candy corns that we find revolting? It’s great to give away what we don’t want, but true generosity calls for sacrifice. Often what people really need is exactly what we don’t want to give. We throw money at charities because we don’t want to give our time. We volunteer for glamorous, visible ministries because we don’t want to labor without recognition. God asks us for the best we have to offer: our first fruits. True generosity means sacrifice.
