Offering (9)

They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything--all she had to live on."(12:44)

In yesterdays’ meditation, I mentioned that the offering of a widow was a peculiar offering made at the risk of her own survival. At the same time this offering unconsciously invokes the grace. Our present survival itself is a grace from God. The entire foundation of our life on the earth are not ours but the gift of God. It is so easy for us to neglect this point and treat it as a sort of some assumptions. This is the most precise insight for this world and human life.

In this connection, the way to solve the problem of offering in the church is not to impose force on its members but to let them and help them enter into God’s grace. If church members can conceive the secret of grace they can find out the right answer to the question of offering. Of course everybody can easily say like this but problem is that such awareness does not practically come or even though it comes, it is easily forgotten.

The doctrine of grace is applicable not only to an individual Christian but also to church community. If church community practically realizes that everything is God’s gift, then the church may not use their finance to enlarge the size of the church. If they have this spiritual awareness as far as possible, they would spend minimum amount for the church within and spend maximum for things of outside the church.

The most important thing for outside of the church is the survival of the church which does not stand by itself. In my opinion, the entire problems of dependent churches can be solved if the Korean church intends to do it. People say the entire church is one in Jesus Christ but in practice there is no such unity. It may be difficult to have such status of oneness until the coming of Jesus. Despite this fact, we have to follow the word of God. It is because we know that our survival is founded by God’s grace. Lord, help us.