Prayer on Giving and Receiving

 

               Read II Corinthians 9:10-15.
¹⁰ He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness. ¹¹ You will be enriched in every way for your great generosity, which will produce thanksgiving to God through us; ¹² for the rendering of this ministry not only supplies the needs of the saints but also overflows with many thanksgivings to God. ¹³ Through the testing of this ministry you glorify God by your obedience to the confession of the gospel of Christ and by the generosity of your sharing with them and with all others, ¹⁴ while they long for you and pray for you because of the surpassing grace of God that he has given you. ¹⁵ Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!

There are times, Lord, when my prayer is that you will teach me to be less withdrawn and withholding. You will teach me to give my time, my money and my self more generously and sensitively than I sometimes seem able to do.

                Nevertheless, the prayer I need to pray at least as often is the prayer I pray today: Lord, teach me to receive.  Break through my pretense of self-sufficiency.  Address, rebuke and change my compulsion always to be the helper and never the helped, always the rescuer and never the rescued.

                Keep your pressure in me until I know that I have not seen the truth until I see that I am as much the one in need as the one whom someone else needs. Keep your pressure on me until I understand it is as important to be a cheerful receiver as it is to be a cheerful giver. 

¨   To that end, help me today to be a cheerful, aware and grateful receiver of the kindness of those I love and those who love me.  Because I love them, I want to make life easier and happier for them.  Because they love me, they want to do the same for me.  Let neither of us be so eager to give and so reluctant to receive that we deprive each other of the need for love to express itself.

¨   To that end, help me today to be a cheerful, aware and grateful receiver of all the services that make my life more comfortable, more secure and more interesting.  An anonymous network of persons provide services without whom there would be no food on the table, no mail in the mailbox, no heat, light and transportation, no music to hear, no books to read.

¨   To that end, help me, above all, to be a cheerful, aware and grateful receiver of your sustaining, moment-by-moment ministries.  Freely you give, and the deepest wish of your parental heart is that we freely receive.  Hope, joy, forgiveness, purpose--you hold them out to me. 

I hold out to you now my cupped hands.  Amen.