Risks in Faith: God Multiplies

Now he who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will also supply and increase your store of seed and will enlarge the harvest of your righteousness.

2 Corinthians 9:10 (NIV)

If you give God your time, he multiplies it. If you give him your money or energy, he multiplies those too. It’s like planting seeds. Farmers know that seeds must be given away – sacrificed by being buried in the ground – to do any good. If you keep a seed in a sack, it does no good, but if you plant it, it multiplies. For example, when you plant just one watermelon seed, you get a bunch of watermelons with hundreds of seeds in them. In the same way, God multiplies whatever you give him.

What’s the key ingredient in this seed planting? Faith. But we have to understand the difference between faith and bargaining. Bargaining is when you say, “God, help me close this deal and I’ll give you part of it.” But God doesn’t work that way. God asks for faith – he wants us to sacrifice in advance, not knowing that we’ll get anything in return –then he wants us to let him figure out how to repay us.

One of the great lessons that Kay and I have learned is that you cannot out-give God. Whatever you give him, he multiplies. Three different times in our marriage, God told us to give away our entire savings. Each time we obeyed, and each time God restored our finances in greater ways than ever before.

I’ll never forget one of our church building campaigns. Kay and I prayed about how much to give, and God told us to give an amount equal to one year’s salary. I didn’t know how we would live for an entire year without a salary, but we obeyed God.

About a month later, we saw God’s plan when a publisher asked me to write a book and offered an advance of $100,000. That book became The Purpose Driven Church.

Jesus makes us this promise in Luke 18:29-30: “I tell you the truth, no one who has left home or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God will fail to receive many times as much in this age and, in the age to come, eternal life” (NIV).

And 1 Corinthians 15:58 says: “Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain” (NIV).

Remember, when you give a seed in faith to God, he will multiply it.....Rick Warren