Covenant Weekly

This fall, we're combining the blog/email and podcast formats. The form will be shorter than it was with the previous podcasts and will be sent as an email with a link to a podcast - a recorded version of the email. You can choose which format you prefer to receive it in!
If you subscribe to the podcast through Google podcasts, it should show up in your feed so you won't need to go find it. Our social media sites will link to our podcast page, which also offers a PDF of the text. Hopefully, this will help reach as many people as possible!

Click here if you would prefer to listen to the podcast audio of this message!

We just changed our clocks back to Eastern Standard Time. With that change, mornings are brighter. Have early risers gained an hour of daylight? It certainly feels that way at 7 am. At 5:30 pm, however, the truth becomes clearer…or darker if we want to think about it literally. When we get to early evening we realize we haven’t gained anything. Daylight is a limited resource and we have simply shifted our access to it. There are a lot of things in this life that are limited resources and we’re going to talk about that today.

Several things in our world come with limited resources. Money is a limited resource. In our home finances we know that if we increase our spending in one area, that is money that won’t be available for something else. When a government spends in one area, that is money that won’t be available somewhere else. Energy is another limited resource. Some of us feel this more strongly than others. I am often amazed when I hear how active young people are because I don’t have the energy they do. Whether it is making a meal, going for a walk, putting up Christmas lights, grocery shopping, or meeting with people - I use up energy resources and I will subsequently not have energy for other things. And energy is a deeply individual thing. Some of us seem to have a far more limited energy store than others. And, depending on how we are wired, we reenergize in very different ways. This can sometimes make it hard for us to understand each other. When working with limited resources - things like time, money, and energy - we need to think carefully about where and how we use those resources.

Sometimes, though, a recognition that resources are limited can lead us beyond careful thinking into acting with fear. A scarcity mindset thinks that because resources are limited, we need to hoard things in case we won’t have enough of them later. This happens with money and energy. People can do this with their time by refusing to share it with others. It can even happen with food. And when we feel we need to get as much of something as we can, it doesn’t take very long at all to see those who would like some of the same things - money, our energy, our time, food - as enemies trying to take from us. Fear easily begets things like suspicion or anger or even hatred towards others because they threaten our access to limited resources. I’ve even seen this happen with churches that begin to operate as being in competition with each other over the limited resource of people who will attend church.

While we recognize that resources are limited, how can we live in a relationship with them without sliding into the scarcity mindset that fosters fear and many subsequent difficult and divisive postures?

Here are a few quick thoughts:

• Recognize that God has a hand in resource distribution and that they often aren’t as limited as we think they are. Scripture describes God as the one who ultimately has everything. And God can surprise us by providing in ways that we couldn’t previously imagine. Two quick examples of ways God has provided despite resources being limited.

Some time ago, I realized I was spending too much time working and was missing out on much-needed rest. There wasn’t a day I wasn’t available for work. I was convicted by some teaching about Sabbath. I realized that my inability to unplug and rest stemmed, in part, from a need to control and a lack of trust in God. I committed to taking Fridays as a full Sabbath of rest from work, as an act of trusting that God would be at work in the world when I wasn’t. Not two weeks after making this commitment, I had many extra things come up in my church role and I found myself on Thursday evening without a sermon prepared and with a very busy Saturday that would only leave me a couple of hours to prepare something that would normally take me 10 hours of work to prepare. I was left with a choice. Do I honour my commitment and trust God with my time or do I take the time on Friday to work? My resources were clearly limited. For me, that week, I felt like I needed to trust God to help me do something in less time than I thought was possible. I needed to honour my Sabbath commitment. I did so and when the time came to work on Saturday, I was able to complete something in a fraction of the time it normally takes me. My thinking was clearer than it normally is. When I needed a resource, I found it far more quickly than normal. I felt deeply affirmed in my trust in God to work at that moment and that even the use of an obviously limited resource of time wasn’t beyond God’s participation.

Several years later, the limited resource was money. Covenant had been struggling financially and we were heading into a board meeting when we were going to have to talk about significant budget cuts because we were so behind in giving. I decided to head to the church an hour before the meeting just to try to centre myself and breathe deeply so that I could enter the upcoming difficult conversation from a Jesus-centred place. Went into my office and began to just read scripture and pray. Then I noticed an envelope sitting on the desk. It had my name and the church address handwritten on it. I almost set it aside to focus on what was at hand, but curiosity got the better of me so I opened it. Inside was a letter from someone I didn’t know, but they somehow knew about me and the church. They’d been prompted by God to send something to the church to be used however was most helpful. Along with the letter, which insisted on confidentiality, was a cheque for $20,000. That amount made up the deficit we were facing as we headed into the meeting. Through some people I didn’t even know, God had provided in an area where resources are limited. Needless to say, that dramatically changed the tone of our meeting that night!

As we recognize that God has some say in the distribution of resources and they may not be as limited as we think, we can avoid a scarcity mindset.

• With that trust and awareness established, we are invited to live out of a posture of love, not fear. Over and over again in scripture, we are called to love. And here’s the thing about love. It is not a limited resource. Several emotions work this way. The more we give it away, the more it grows in us. The more we act out of fear, the more afraid we can become. The more we see the world with suspicion, the more suspicious we become. The more we engage with anger, the angrier we become. On the flip side, though, the more we choose to love, the more love we have to give.

I’m not sure I really understood this well until my kids came along. Many parents will recognize this. If you loved your spouse before the child, that love doesn’t shift from your spouse to the child. Your capacity for love grows to embrace the child and this continues with subsequent children. Love is not a limited resource.

The invitation of Jesus is to live with our limited resources in a way that is guided by the unlimited resource of love. And that leads us to a third thought.

• The reason living this way feels like a threat to our limited resources is because we don’t live this way. The Jesus ethic, as Paul outlines it in Philippians 2, is that we would each “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.” If we all lived this way, each one would have enough because we would all be watching out for each other.

The early church ran into some widows not having enough, not because there wasn’t enough but because people were showing favourtism. Paul called for people to examine themselves before coming to the communion meal because some were getting drunk and full while others were left hungry. The issue wasn’t resources it was selfishness. It didn’t feel like selfishness to those who had resources because it was the normal cultural way of acting. But it was a failure to love in the way of Jesus - a way that ensures everyone participates. If we all love in the way of Jesus we will have what we need. This is a challenge because we look around and see others not living this way. But it needs to start somewhere and the invitation of the earliest church leaders was that it should start with us. It should start among us.

May we…may you and I…have the courage to hold our limited resources with open hands seeking to love well so that all may receive of the goodness of God.