3 Reasons Every Church Should Wrestle with Abundance (#2)

Posted by Timothy

August 4, 2009

Reason #2: Because Living Abundantly in a Scarce World Stretches Our Faith

The parable of the loaves and fishes is in all four gospels, and it illustrates what a profound difference there is between our scarcity-mentality and God’s abundance mentality.

Jesus illustrates what it is to think and live abundantly, to take what is at hand and, in partnership with God meets our needs.

But it tests our faith.

The disciples were reasonable men who saw that the feeding of 5000 was a huge undertaking. Huge!

What they had at hand was so little. Some fish and some loaves.

But Jesus wants us to turn to Him, to give to Him what we see as little, as tiny, as miniscule, and let Him to translate that into abundance. God meets our needs, but so many people operate with so little faith.

To question God’s abundance even though He is literally overflowing, maybe even wasteful in just how abundant He created the world, is to show a weakness in our faith. Human nature says that there isn’t enough and that God cannot provide.

Growing in our faith in God’s abundance will grow our faith in all aspects. Don’t we often succumb to doing things our own way when there’s a scarcity mentality towards whatever area in our life? Finance, love, respect, freedom? Scarcity in all those areas leads us into sin unless we turn to God for our source of abundance.

So when a church avoids tackling the issues of abundance, they do their congregation a disservice of challenging them in their walk and in their faith.

Conversely, imagine what a church can do when they live totally abundantly and totally free?

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