The Abundant Grace of an Almighty God

While accompanied in the garden last spring by my middle son, Elijah, I presented him with a picture of God’s abundance. This stuff does not come by me naturally, so I know the Spirit was leading me as I held the seed-laden sprigs of a spinach plant that had bolted into several leaning towers of tiny goldish-brown seeds. “This is a picture of God’s character,” I told him. “As you grow up, people are going to ask you how you can believe God is just and good when there’s so many people out there starving and dying from disease and utter lack.” Elijah did not really have an answer, so he just listened. “This is a picture of his plan for us. He never intended anyone to go hungry. He designed His creation so that we could live in abundance – always having more than enough to eat and even share. You remember how many seeds it took to grow just one spinach plant?”

“One,” Elijah replied.

“That’s right. One. One seed gave us a whole spinach plant to eat from and gave us enough seed for a whole crop of spinach for the next season. Not just one more spinach plant – not just two – a whole crop of ’em.” He smiled at that thought as it settled in.

I know this was God that morning, because when I took the Designed for Life workshop with Gene and Gretchen Tate that summer, Gene got up (he had a cabbage shoot, which is amazingly prolific) and gave us almost exactly the same words. This is what God is saying to His people right now. We’ve misperceived Him because we live amidst the consequences of our own greed & ignorance, and its been like this for so long we forget how we got here. We assume God did it to us. But, God is saying, ‘no more.’ No more will the children pay for the sins of the fathers. “The child will not share the guilt of the parent…(Ezekiel 18:20) For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign Lord. Repent and live! (Ezekiel 18:32)”

I say it again in the great hope that my children can know, “I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign Lord. Repent and live!”

Designed for Life Workshop