Scripture: 2 Corinthians 9:8
Date: July 14, 2024
Speaker: Philip Kulishov
There aren’t many things better in this life than warm bread, soft butter, and sweet honey. Bread, butter, and honey are one of my fondest childhood memories when going to my grandparents house for dinner every Sunday. My mom’s parents had 11 kids, and so with all the spouses and grandkids, the table was always full. It was all normal, expected, and most definitely taken for granted. There was never a shortage of people, talking, singing, and of bread, butter, and honey. There was other food, and table was always spread with treats. But bread, butter, and honey was never absent. It was a staple at that table.
When it comes to bread, butter, and honey, one can do it the wrong way, or one can do it the right way. Sure, you can cut yourself a thin, scratchy morsel of bread, spread a sliver of butter that disappears into the bread as soon as you lay it on, and then drizzle a few droplets of honey. If this is how you approach bread, butter, and honey, what are you even doing?
When it comes to partaking in such a delicacy, the bread is to be thick and soft. A thin, dry slice of stale bread finds it’s purpose only in croutons. Put those into a salad. The bread should be able to handle the considerable weight of what it’s carrying.
That’s because the butter is to be soft, needing only the lightest touch of the knife before agreeing to share it’s richness with you. And when deciding how much butter to use, the rule of thumb ought to be enough so that when biting into the slice, you’d feel the layer of butter on the top of your teeth before reaching the bread. The butter should be spread on thick. Thick bread. Thick butter.
When it comes to the honey, the word drizzle is not appropriate. On your thick bread and thick butter, you do not drizzle honey. You pour it. Honey is naturally a thicker liquid. Thick enough to avoid drizzling, and let it pour on. Let it overflow, running off the sides of the bread, where you can wipe off the left-over honey on your plate either with your finger, or, better yet, with another piece of bread.
Thick bread. Thick butter. Thick honey.
Now, in one sense, I’m having some light-hearted fun with this. But in another sense, I do think it’s a matter worth considering how thick we lay things on. Holding out on God’s blessings - in our acceptance and our distribution of them - points to a deeper matter of the heart.
God does not lay it on thin. This earth is finite, and everything on it is as well. And even so, our finite minds are incapable to grasp the abundance of even the finite, temporal blessings that God bestows on His creation. God’s blessings are both infinitely vast, and vast in finitude. Even God’s finite blessings are overflowing.
But before I go on, I need to clarify one other thing. You might think that I’m using bread, butter, and honey as an allegory to set up the sermon. The bread, butter, and honey are all relevant as bread, butter, and honey to the point I’ll be making. They’re no allegory. My simple, single-layered point today is the opposite of symbolizing our blessings. It may be single-layered, but it isn’t thin.
Bread, butter, and honey are thick blessings that our Maker gifts to us in abundance, for us to partake in with overflowing enjoyment, and share with others in overflowing generosity. God’s blessings on our life, are in fact, tangible and tasty and thick and teeming. He gives us real things, that we can smell, hear, see, touch, and taste. He gives us life, and gives it abundantly.
This presentation of God as a generous giver is abundant in Scripture. A passage that has been formative for me is 2 Corinthians chapter 9, verses 6-11. Verse 8 specifically is one of those life-purpose verses that has molded the way I approach my work.
Paul here is encouraging the Corinthians towards good works, specifically in the matter of financial generosity. He brings up examples of the churches of Macedonia, whose “abundance of joy” and “extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part. For,” Paul says, “they gave according to their means…and beyond their means, of their own accord.”
This idea of abundant generosity overflows throughout this passage. Paul encourages, exhorts, and exemplifies this abundant lifestyle. And then brings it to a point in verse 6.
The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. (2 Corinthians 9:6-7)
In verse 6, the word that the ESV translates as “bountifully” is “eulogia.” Which can be translated, even in this context, as “blessing.” The idea here is that what we’re sowing, and will be reaping as a result, is blessing. We will be bestowed with blessing in accordance with how much blessing we’ve bestowed. If we bless abundantly, we will receive an abundance of blessing.
We reap what we sow, and with the amount that we sow. That’s because blessing other people is not consumption. Yes, we are spending our strength, time, and money. But when blessing others, we are not doing so as consumers. We are doing so as producers.
Jesus brings up this point in his parable of the talents. In Matthew chapter 25, in his dialogue on the kingdom of heaven, Jesus says that it will be like a man who entrusted his property to his servants to steward. The ones that were productive with their talents were rewarded, but the one that hid it, was punished.
The master said,
So take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. (Matthew 25:28-29)
The one who has blessings to bestow, and bestows them abundantly, will receive an abundance of blessing. But the one who sees the blessing he has as a consumption to hoard, will lose even the little he’s trying to protect.
This brings us to the “how” of the matter in 2 Corinthians 9:8.
Why bless abundantly? Because you will be blessed abundantly. Bless with the amount you want to be blessed with. If you want abundant blessing, you will bless abundantly.
But how do we do that? How do we sow bountifully? How do we bless abundantly?
And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work. (2 Corinthians 9:8)
3 main points coming out of verse 8.
Redpill merch is going around that says, “No one is coming to save you.”
I understand the idea behind this message. If you rely on the system, you will be let down. A certain kind of independence from Big Brother, or any other institution, is of a sound mind. You want to learn a certain kind of sufficiency that sets you up to be antifragile.
Antifragile is a term coined by Nassim Taleb. The opposite of breaking under tension is not remaining unbroken. It’s getting stronger with tension. Taleb presents the opposite of fragility is not robustness, but rather, antifragility. Both ancient and modern stoics argue for a sense of self-sufficiency that is robust, or even anti-fragile. “No one is coming to save you.” The word that the ESV translates as “sufficiency” in verse 8, autarkeia (ow-tar’-ki-ah), means self-sufficient, or independent. It’s used in some of the Stoic writings in that exact sense.
But at the start of this verse, before mentioning “autarkeia,” Paul makes sure to present us with the Source of our Abundance: All Grace.
God is able to make all grace abound to you.
We know, and confess every Lord’s Day, that “our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth.” We know that God is able, and does, make all grace abound to us.
Our Source of Abundance is not our own self-sufficiency. All of God’s Grace is the Source of Abundance.
There are 2 ideas that are introduced in this part of verse 8, that are then repeated in this 1 verse. The first is “pas,” which means “all, every, each part, of totality, complete.” “God is able to make ALL grace abound to you.
This is the same word - pas - that Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 3:21 and 22 when he says “All are yours,” a phrase we’ve all heard many times. Of the 21 words in verse 8 in the Greek, 5 of them is a variation of this word “pas.”
All grace, All sufficiency, All things, All Times, Every good work.
Nothing is left out. Grace encompasses both spiritual and material blessings. God bestows the completeness of His grace onto us, so that we lack nothing. All God. All Grace.
The second idea that is repeated in this verse is perisseuo (per-is-syoo-o), which means “to be over and above, to overflow, to abound.”
The image here is one of overflowing the sides of the barrel. You turn on the water to fill up the 50 gallon tank, and don’t stop until the tank is standing on the bottom of a lake. God is not stingy in distributing his grace. His gives an abundance, an overflow, of all of it. God does not hold back.
Psalm 65:9-13.
Everywhere we look, it’s God’s grace in abundance. I said earlier that God’s blessings are both infinitely vast, and vast in finitude. That even God’s finite blessings are overflowing.
When we think about doing something good that is short-lived - a short-lived blessing - we are tempted to match it with a short amount of blessing. “Our kids aren’t going to remember this desert. They’re going to gobble down the pie, and forget all about it. Why bother putting in the effort? They won’t tell the difference.”
But that is not the way of our God. When we approach the glory of marionberry pie we must approach it with the weight of eternal proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. The slice of marionberry pie that we serve to our 5-year-old - a temporal dessert that will be consumed and turned into excrement in less than a day, never to be seen again - carries with it evidence of God’s steadfast love to humanity - evidence of his abounding grace. Its temporal nature does not detract from God’s love, but only adds to it all the more.
The amount of care and intention that God places into our temporal pleasure should bring us to our knees. It’s a detailed and delicate oversight that our Maker has in order to enable our temporal pleasure.
The Substance of the abundance of God’s grace is All Sufficiency. Everything we need, to the brim, all the time. God is able to provide us all the way with everything all the time.
How am I going to take care of all my responsibilities? I want to sow and reap bountifully, but it’s too much. The work is too hard. Look to God’s abundant grace. All sufficiency in all things at all times.
The Substance of Abundance is All Sufficiency.
I’m referring to setup like that of a ball-game, when a player sets up his teammate to score. The scoring player takes the glory. But he would not have been able to do it without a proper setup, giving him the opportunity to score.
God performs the setup with his abundance of grace. And what he sets up is each and every one of our good works.
The Setup of Abundance is All Good Works.
That’s the objective we’re after. In order for us to reap an abundance of blessing in glory, we are to sow an abundance of blessing in our good works.
All grace abounds to you, so that you may abound in every good work. All grace in abundance leads to All good works in abundance.
Which good works are we enabled for? All of them. God gives us all grace for us to have an opportunity to score in every good work.
And how much of all the good works are we to expect to perform? A 50 gallon drum at the bottom of the lake. An overflowing amount. Abounding in every good work.
Yes, the point that Paul makes in verse 6 is that we reap what we sow. Thin work brings thin blessings. Thick work brings thick blessings. But here in verse 8, he lays a foundation underneath our work. And that foundation is also God’s blessings. Both the source and the end of our work is blessing.
An abundance of work to do is not in spite of God’s blessings in my life, it’s because of them. First, we’re blessed, and then we work, and then we’re blessed some more. And since the abundance of work follows the abundance of blessings, thick blessings don’t ever come with thin work. The thicker the blessing, the thicker the work.
We roll up our sleeves for the abundance of every good work out of the abundance of all of God’s gracious blessings. If we think our blessings are thin, we will expect our work to be as well, and get frustrated when it’s not. It’s when we open our mouths and eyes to taste and see the goodness of the Lord in our thick blessings, that we will open our hands to fulfill our thick work with joy.
Thin blessings, thin work. Thick blessings, thick work.
This is why it only makes sense to have thick bread, thick butter, and thick honey. The blessings are thick. So lay them on. Just as God does not hold back in his outpouring, his overflowing, his abundance of all the grace, so we too ought not hold back in our outpouring, our overflowing, our abundance of every good work.
As Paul follows up in verse 9,
As it is written, “He has distributed freely, he has given to the poor; his righteousness endures forever.” (2 Corinthians 9:9)
We distribute our blessings freely, with an open hand. We don’t measure and tally up the sides of the tablet. God abounds. And we abound.
So,
Take note of the beginning of verse 8. Paul does not say that God’s abundance of grace in this context is assured. What he says is something a little different.
”And God is able to make all grace abound to you”
It’s not an affirmative. The abundance of all of God’s grace in this verse depends, is conditioned on, how much blessing we want to reap. Do you want to reap an abundance of blessing? Then sow an abundance of blessing. God loves a cheerful giver, and is able to make all grace abound to you. Do you want that abundance? Reach for it. Like Jacob, wrestle with God for his abundance of blessing.
Think of the grace of God, the Maker of all things, in heaven and on earth. The Reconciler of all things, on earth and in heaven. This God whom we worship every Lord’s day, of whom we confess our help is in, is able to make ALL grace abound to you, depending on how much of it we want.
Jesus says,
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! (Matthew 7:7-11)
What will God withhold from his children? He wants to give you All grace. You want to reap an abundance of God’s blessing, and to be able to sow accordingly? You want to have the strength, energy, and zeal to be the kind of cheerful giver whom God loves? Ask him. He is able to make ALL grace abound to you, Scripture says, enabling you to sow bountifully, so that you may reap bountifully.
Charles Spurgeon once preached about petitioning God with prayers of faith. He said,
Mark you, my friends, this is the true mode of prayer. Rest not content with past answers, but double your request and go again. Look upon your past petitions as the small end of the wedge opening the way for larger ones. The best way to repay God, and the way he loves best, is to take and ask him ten times as much each time. Nothing pleases God so much as when a sinner comes again very soon with twice as large a petition - “Lord thou didst hear me last time, and now I am come again.” Faith is a mighty grace, and always grows upon that which it feeds. When God has heard prayer for one thing, faith comes and asks for two things, and when God has given those two things, faith asks for six. Faith can scale the walls of heaven. She is a giant grace… We are most of us too slow to go to God.
How much do we want to reap? How much are we willing to sow?