More Blessed to Give
We often hear people say, “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). But is that really the truth? Let us take a look at a few things which indicate that it is more blessed to give than to receive.

Suppose you have a friend over and you are going to serve him or her some cake. You try to cut the pieces evenly, but one is reasonably bigger.

You say to yourself, “I’ll take the bigger piece. He’ll never notice it’s bigger!” In your heart you know you should give the bigger piece to your friend, but you go ahead and take it yourself. Somehow it doesn’t taste quite right (you might even get indigestion! ). If you had gone ahead and given the bigger piece to your friend, your cake would have tasted a lot better and God would have been pleased!

I have done this before, and afterward have wished I had done what God wanted me to do. I have also given the bigger piece of cake to my friend, and the resulting feel is indescribable.

Have you ever noticed how someone’s face lights up when you give them a gift or card? That look is worth all the money or time you spent on the gift.

It doesn’t come easily, but with God’s help we can learn that it is more blessed to give than to receive. God bless you all as you live for Him!

Ministering as opportunity surrounds us. This does not mean selecting our surroundings: it means being very selectly God’s in any haphazard surrounds which He engineers for us. The characteristics we manifest in our immediate surroundings are indications of what we will be like in other surroundings.

The things that Jesus did were of the most menial and commonplace order, and this is an indication that it takes all God’s power in me to do the most commonplace things in His way. Can I use a towel as He did? Towels and dishes and sandals, all the ordinary sordid things of our lives, reveal more quickly than anything what we are made of.

“Oh,” you say, “I will do that when I get out into the foreign field.” To talk this way is like trying to produce the munitions of war in the trenches—you will be killed while you are doing it. ...If we do not do the running steadily in the little ways we shall do nothing in the crisis.

Each soul has its own faculty; it can help in some way to make the world more cheerful and more beautiful. This it is which makes life worth living. If we are living only for ourselves, our own amusement, luxury, advancement, life is not worth living. But if we are living as coworkers with Christ, as fellow-helpers with God, as part of the noble army of martyrs who bear witness to the truth in all time, then our lives are full of interest. This gives sweetness and strength to all our days.           —J.F. Clarke

Lord, help me to think of Thee and for Thee; Thou hast put me in this world for something, Lord, show me what this is, and help me to work out my life-purpose: I cannot do much, but as the widow put in her two mites, which were all her living, so, Lord, I cast my time and eternity too into Thy treasure; I am all Thine; take me, and enable me to glorify Thee now, in all that I say, in all that I do, and with all that I have. —C.H. Spurgeon

Give me, O Lord, a heart of grace,
A voice of joy, a shining face,
That I may show where’er I turn
Thy love within my soul doth burn!

A tenderness for all that stray,
With strength to help them on the way;
A cheerfulness, a heavenly mirth,
Brightening my steps along the earth!
—R. Gilbert