Seeking Jesus First Oct. 27, 2025
The Scripture speaks of giving and receiving as planting and harvesting.
“But this I say: He who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. So let each one give as he purposes in his heart, not grudgingly or of necessity; for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace abound toward you, that you, always having all sufficiency in all things, may have an abundance for every good work.” (2 Corinthians 9:6–8, NKJV)
Everything we have on this earth was given to us by The Creator God. Everything we have, including our body, soul and breath, comes from God. The Heavenly Father is the first and best giver. Remember John 3:16? With this as our base understanding of giving, we repent and start thinking like heaven thinks. “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” “By love, serve one another.” “Freely you have received, freely give.”
These things being understood and spoken, let us move on to the meat of how our giving affects our receiving. Our giving is like planting. When we plant, we prepare the ground. We plow, we fertilize, we dig holes, we ensure a water source and plenty of sunlight. After planting seeds, we don’t plant weeds, we don’t destroy what we planted; we nurture what we plant. We are talking about money today, but this is true about attitudes, actions and even our children.
If we decide to give money to our church, whether we call it “tithes” or “offerings” or “donations”, as long as it is seed, we should not speak evil of our church or other people in the church. Why would we plant weeds in our garden? We should be faithful to our church and attend as often as possible. Why would we ignore the garden where we are planting our seeds? We should pour our faith into blessing our church. Why would we used poisoned water to water our plants?
Our seed can be forgotten, eaten by birds, stolen by predators and destroyed if we do not pay the proper attention to it. In fact, our faithfulness to tend to relationships at church and stay in unity, peace and forgiveness with everyone helps to keep our church a good ground for producing a great harvest. It is not only the leadership of a church that makes it good ground. It is the faithfulness and the attention of all who are family in the church that makes a church good ground that will produce 30, 60 or 100 times what we plant.
We use our faith to plant seed, we use our faith to nurture what is growing and we use our faith to harvest what has grown. Yes. Second Corinthians 9:6-8 is talking about giving money as sewing seeds and reaping a harvest of money. In the earth, all seeds produce after their own kind.