Last week in worship we began our stewardship series, Money Matters. And I attempted (attempt being the operative word) to describe how money is a spiritual matter. I suggested in the message that money is one of God’s primary competitors for our admiration. Most everything in our life has been commodified. And the result is that hardly anything we touch isn’t purchased, traded, transacted or bartered through money. From the clothes we wear to the food we eat, from the cars we drive to the shoes on our feet… money touches almost every aspect of our life.

My question for you to consider this week: Is God bigger than that?

Every moment is a moment in which we have a choice. We can numb out or tune in to the spiritual movement of God around us. And it’s in the moment of tuning in, I believe, that we come to see just how sufficient God is. By sufficient, I don’t mean quantity of anything. Sufficiency, from a spiritual perspective, isn’t about “amount.” It’s about experience. Hence why we have to be in tune with it. It’s a moment. An energy. A context we can generate but also given by God, a declaration, a knowing (in the heart) that there’s enough and that we are enough…

When we embrace and experience the context of sufficiency is when we find freedom in the spiritual sense. We can begin to engage in life form a sense of our own wholeness rather than a desperate longing to be complete. We feel naturally called to share the resources that flow through our lives – our time, our wisdom, our energy, and yes even our money. But because we’re grounded in the sufficiency of God, all this flowing through us is done in service of our highest commitments.

That is, sufficiency as a way of being in the world offers us enormous personal freedom and abundant possibilities. Insufficiency tells us there’s only one way to perceive the world: there’s not enough, more is better, and that’s just the way it is. But the truth of God’s bigness is that there’s enough for everyone. And trusting that truth inspires us to share, collaborate, and contribute to whatever it is God is doing among us!

So there’s a lot of ways to engage in giving beyond just giving financially. In the United Methodist Church, our membership vows are to support (read: give) the church our prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness. When you’re grounded in the truth of sufficiency – God’s bigness – then giving anything feels natural and right and good, even if it’s money. So the flow of income and outcome, seasons of savings and seasons of spending, aren’t anything to fear. From a mode of sufficiency, we can appreciate money’s power (or anything for that matter) to do good – which is simultaneously our power to do good with it!

No matter how much or how little you have flowing through your life, when you direct that flow with soulful purpose, I believe you feel wealthy… full… vibrant… alive… My prayer for you this week is that in all you say, do, or give it is done from a place of being firmly grounded in the bigness, the grandness, the extravagance of our gracious God!

Peace and Blessings,

Rev. Taylor G Smith