Overflowing Generosity (Exodus 36:3–7)

And they received from Moses all the contribution that the people of Israel had brought for doing the work on the sanctuary. They still kept bringing him freewill offerings every morning, so that all the craftsmen who were doing every sort of task on the sanctuary came, each from the task that he was doing, and said to Moses, “The people bring much more than enough for doing the work that the Lord has commanded us to do.” So Moses gave command, and word was proclaimed throughout the camp, “Let no man or woman do anything more for the contribution for the sanctuary.” So the people were restrained from bringing, for the material they had was sufficient to do all the work, and more.
—Exodus 36:3–7

Is that not amazing?

God’s people were giving so freely. These were freewill offerings. They did not have to do this. They were giving, as Exodus 35 describes, out of the overflow of the Spirit’s leadership in their hearts, to the point where Moses had to say, “Stop giving. We have more than enough of what we need.” I want to lead us to pray for that kind of generosity in our hearts—in your heart and in my heart—when we think about giving to and through our local churches, stewarding our resources and our lives for the spread of the gospel around the world, for the building up of the Church, and for the relief of urgent spiritual and physical needs. May we give to the point where we almost have to be restrained in our giving.

Exodus 36:3–7 points us toward joyful stewardship of all we have.

Only the Spirit of God can produce this kind of generosity. So can we pray for this in our lives?

God, we praise you for what your Spirit was doing in Exodus 36, for this spirit of generosity that led to restraint in giving. We praise you for your generosity, which is at the heart of what we are reading here. We pray that your generosity would be at the heart of our lives, our families, and our churches.

Regardless of how much we have—many of us live in some of the wealthiest places ever to exist in the history of the world, so most of us listening to this have much—yet regardless of where we live, or what stage of life we are in, whether we have accumulated wealth over decades or are students or children without much money, regardless of how much we have, especially in light of the New Testament pictures we see in 2 Corinthians 8–9, where churches that were extremely poor gave generously out of the overflow of your Spirit’s work in their hearts, we pray that this would be the story of our lives today, tomorrow, and the next day—as long as you give us breath.

We pray for generosity in our lives. We pray for a spirit of generosity in our churches and in your church as a whole when it comes to the spread of the gospel in the world—to people who have never heard it.

A Prayer for the Banjar People

Today, we pray for the Banjar people of Indonesia, for more than four and a half million Muslim Banjar, that they would be reached with the good news of your grace. We pray that you would raise up a spirit of generosity across your Church to give for the spread of the gospel in Indonesia, to the Banjar, and to thousands of other people groups like them.

O God, we pray that your generosity in our hearts would overflow in abundant generosity in our lives and in our giving, especially in light of this Old Testament, old covenant picture of giving. How much more reason do we have to give under the new covenant, in light of the abundant grace you have poured out on us in Jesus?

Help us to give like this—more than this. Help us to give to the point where others restrain us in our giving. We pray all of this in the name of Jesus, who gave his life for us that we might be saved. O God, help us to live in the power and generosity of the Spirit within us.

In Jesus’s name we pray. Amen.