Relocating To Elfland

An exhortation before our corporate confession of sin this morning:

Brethren, I’d like us to think for a few minutes, especially this morning, about the great sin of asking for more. It is not asking for more in itself that is sinful, actually (we will learn that today at the Supper); it is a heart that asks for more because it refuses to see what it has already been given. Most of us have been on either the giving or the receiving end of a Christmas scenario in which a recipient of a pile of gifts, having torn through them all in short order, immediately asks, “Is this all?” Perhaps some of us blush to remember asking such a question! We blush because, in its own way, this question is as grinchy as a refusal to give any gifts at all. The one who will not give has a heart (so the saying goes) that is two sizes too small; the one who will not thankfully savor what he or she has been given has an identical problem. The fabled spirit of Christmas is, biblically speaking, the spirit of God’s kingdom, the spirit of God Himself. Our God is fundamentally characterized by abundance, by an extravagant excess of goodness and glory and joy; there is a kind of playful prodigality (we might say, a wasteful generosity) in the way He dispenses His inexhaustible resources. The appropriate human response to this is to swim about cheerfully in the goodness, seeing it everywhere, delighting in gifts great and small, sharing generously with no thought of the cost, no fear of going hungry – for even were hunger to come, it would be freighted with the good grace of God (“it is good for me,” says the Psalmist, “that I have been afflicted”). The one who knows God as He really is can never ask, “Is this all?” because he can never quite get over the goodness of the Lord right in front of him, and all the promises of goodness still to come! One grinch clutches, because he needs what he has to fill the hole in his heart; another grinch demands because he needs what he doesn’t have to fill the hole in his heart. The child of God neither clutches nor demands, for the ice of unsmiling fear has been melted in his heart by the faithful love of the Father in heaven. If God spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how will He not with Him also freely give us all things? Repent therefore, brethren, of an unthankful heart, one that demands, “Is this all?” And let us turn ourselves to see with joy all that the Father has given to us.