God gives--gives only--glees, always--and He in giving has joy, blessedness. He would not be the ever-blessed God' unless He were the giving God.' Creation we are perhaps scarcely warranted in affirming to be a necessity to the divine nature, and we run on perilous heights of speculation when we speak of it as contributing to His blessedness; but this at least we may say, that He, in the deep words of the Psalmist, delights in mercy.' Before creation was realised in time, the divine Idea of it was eternal, inseparable from His being, and therefore from everlasting He' rejoiced in the habitable parts of the earth, and His delights were with the sons of men.'
The light and glory thus thrown on His relation to us. He gives. He does not exact until He has given. He gives what He requires. The requirement is made in love and is itself a grace given,' for it permits to God's creatures, in their relation to Him, some feeble portion and shadow of the blessedness which He possesses, by permitting them to bring offerings to His throne, and so to have the joy of giving to Him what He has given to them. All things come of Thee, and of Thine own have we given Thee.' Then how this thought puts an end to all manner of slavish notions about God's commands and demands, and about worship, and about merits, or winning heaven by our own works.
Notice that the same emotions which we have found to make the blessedness of giving are those which come into play in the act of receiving spiritual blessings. We receive the Gospel by faith, which assuredly has in it love and self-sacrifice.
Having thus the great Example of all giving in heaven, and the shadow and reflex of that example in our relations to Him on earth, we are thereby fitted for the exemplification of it in our relation to men. To give, not to get, is to be our work, to love, to sacrifice ourselves.
This axiom should regulate Christians' relation to the world, and to each other, in every way. It should shape the Christian use of money. It should shape our use of all which we have.
