Abundant sufficiency
One of the things that my family and I have been learning these past few years is that you really need very little to live. Our culture tells us we need more, and we need it now. We’ve seen how our cultural drive for more actually undermines our ability to receive from God and rely on him. Culture tells us to depend upon ourselves. Scripture reminds us that it is God who provides for, upholds, and sustains all of creation.
Our choice to follow God over these years of ministry has been an invitation for us to release our expectations. One of those expectations was that God would provide for us with abundance. Spoiler alert: when we don’t let God define abundance, we often end up frustrated by how He shows up.
Increasingly over the years, we began to have to rework our understanding of God’s abundant provision. We slowly began to understand that when walking with God, his provision is always, “just enough.” To be sure, the Kingdom of God is absolutely a Kingdom built on the reality of God’s abundant generosity and provision. But the culture from which we come however, repeatedly tells us that “just enough” is actually “nowhere near enough.”
And so, very quickly in the Christian life, we’re faced with a very important question: Is God’s enough, enough for me? Scripture is full of example after example of God’s abundant provision and sustaining power for his people. Rarely though, do we see a story in Scripture that shows that God gives more than what is necessary in the moment it’s needed.
Provision For God’s People
When the Israelites needed food in the wilderness, manna was given only for the day it was needed. No more, no less.
When Elijah was being fed from the ravens, the ravens provided meat for the day – he didn’t even get to choose how much food he could receive.
When Jesus sent out the seventy-two he told them to take nothing with them and to receive only what was given to them.
That God provides is not in question. God certainly delights in giving, we know this is true. But how should we frame our understanding and expectation of his provision?
Is God Enough?
Our experience in the missions world has forced us to grapple with the question of whether God’s provision is enough. It’s a funny thing in the mission world, there’s a continuous drive towards making sure you raise 100% of your budget for ministry. The truth is, rarely do missionaries raise 100% or maintain 100% of their ministry budget throughout the entirety of their ministry. In fact, in well over a decade of ministry in the missions world, I knew no one who had 100% ministry budget raised. And yet, the constant drum of missions boards was to get to 100%. This magical number surely represented God’s faithful provision for his ministers.
We recognized that largely this was coming from of a good place. Naturally, missions organizations desire to see their missionaries thrive and not have to worry about funding. But the push towards this number seemed to align itself more to the culture from which we come than from Kingdom dynamics. Does God want his workers to be at 100% of some arbitrary budget? Maybe. But who decides this budget?
Just-In-Time Provision
More often than not we saw missionaries being forced to grapple with God’s promise to provide for his people. More often than not that provision looked nothing like what was expected. All the missionaries we’ve known have crazy stories of “just-in-time-provision.” It wasn’t that all of the sudden they had more than they needed. It was almost always a need met, just in time.
“Just what I need” is anathema to a world that gluttonously provokes people to endlessly reach for more and more. Throughout the pages of Scripture we see God provide just-in-time with just what’s needed. We see David proclaim that God is a shepherd who provides all the needs of his people. He provides in a way that leaves them lacking nothing. Paul proclaims that he learned how to thrive whether he had much or little. Paul knew that no matter the circumstances, God strengthens and upholds his people.
The Choice is Yours
What we have had to learn is that choosing to follow God requires you to release everything to him. And it requires that you trust that you will receive what is needed, when you need it. The promise being that God will provide and will do so for our good and for our salvation. It’s an ongoing invitation to live by God’s standard of provision, not the world’s.
It forces us to reorient how we look for and receive God’s provision each day. When we allow God to reframe our understanding of provision, it allows us to see his faithful hand show up each day.
This reorientation allows us to pray as Jesus invited us to: “give us today, what we need for today.” Choosing to trust God’s provision allows us to pray this and actually be content in whatever way he chooses to provide.