My 40 Day Journey to Generosity is Complete…but are we there yet?
If you remember, I actually made a New Year’s Resolution this year . The main focus of the resolution was to internalize the quality of being more generous as a person. Ever since my wife and I got married, we have given a set percentage of our income to our local church, various missionaries, and other ministries. But even with doing that, I am not a naturally generous person. I find myself having to remind myself that it is a good thing to be generous with my time and money. So, now I am on a quest to try to smooth off my rough edges in this area.
A few weeks ago I wrote about my first tangible effort to start smoothing….a 40 day devotional I was going to try . I signed up and I started receiving the emails and now I have already completed the entire 40 days of learning. S0, it is time to debrief the program and my experience.
GiveWithJoy.org’s 40 Day e-devotional focused on generosity
So it turned out that this program was basically a review of finances from a Biblical perspective. Well, it wasn’t just about finances. To give you a flavor for the myriad topics touched upon, here are some examples:
- God is the owner of everything
- Don’t trust in your riches, trust in God
- Don’t live for this life, but for your heavenly home
- Beware of greed, hoarding, or selfishness in your life
- God blesses you financially so that you can be a blessing to others
- God will reward you for your faithful generosity and diligent labors
- Realize that God can use anyone and any resources to provide for His work
- When you help the poor and needy, don’t do it for public recognition
Obviously, these are but a few of the topics covered (there are 40 days after all)
There was a lot of good stuff in there
I’m not sure which I found most useful each day – the numerous verses related to the topic of the day or the inspiring stories from people who saw awesome things happen in their lives as a result of adopting God’s view on generosity and giving. The site also included a daily cartoon…but frankly I didn’t think those were all that funny most of the time!
For me personally, however, it was a little off the mark from what I was expecting. This devotional was geared more towards generosity in relation to giving to your church and other ministries. I was hoping it would be more focused on increasing my interpersonal generosity (is that a phrase?).
That being said, it was still very useful and I enjoyed reading through it. Now, some of it was review after reading Your Money Counts but there were many new verses that were great ones to read and reflect upon. And the daily anecdotes were quite inspiring as well to see how God works in people’s lives when they trust Him fully.
If you are looking to investigate how God views money and giving and trusting Him and numerous other topics, then I would recommend that you sign up at GiveWithJoy.org . You’ll get an email each morning for the next 40 days that links to a page on the website. I’m sure that you will learn quite a bit from the Bible and hopefully you will be inspired to get serious about your giving and your generosity in general.
To answer the question posed in the title – I’m definitely not finished with this journey yet. As I mentioned, this didn’t really scratch my personal generosity itch. I am better off for doing the 40 days of study, but me as a naturally generous person: that is still a work in progress unfortunately (I’ll keep trying, I promise!)
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