Day 3 of 6 — Glow in the Dark. About 3 minutes.
How that in a great trial of affliction the abundance of their joy and their deep poverty abounded unto the riches of their liberality.
2 Corinthians 8:2
The Statue of Liberty reached New York in 1885 with nowhere to stand. France had paid for the figure and America was to pay for the pedestal, and the committee had come up about a hundred thousand dollars short. The wealthy had been asked and had not answered. So that March a newspaperman named Joseph Pulitzer put the appeal to his readers and promised to print the name of every single person who gave, whatever the amount. The money came in a dollar at a time and often less. A kindergarten class in Iowa sent one dollar and thirty five cents. By the eleventh of August the fund had passed a hundred thousand dollars, given by something like a hundred and twenty five thousand people, most of whom could not have afforded to do it twice.
Paul’s description of the Macedonian churches reads like a contradiction until you slow down over it. In a great trial of affliction the abundance of their joy and their deep poverty abounded unto the riches of their liberality. The word behind deep poverty belongs to the family used for a beggar. This is not a church that was a little tight that month. This is nothing left.
And out of that came riches. Paul does not call it generosity, or commitment, or sacrifice, though it was plainly all three. He opens the whole passage by calling it the grace of God bestowed on the churches of Macedonia. Something had been given to them before anything was given by them, and that is the only way the arithmetic ever works.
So the smallest thing you can do is not nothing, and it never has been. A kindergarten in Iowa helped hold up a statue, and a church with nothing left funded relief in Jerusalem, and neither of them lived to see what their part was carrying. If you have stayed quiet about missions because the number you could honestly write looks embarrassing, you have been measuring it against the wrong thing. God is not weighing your gift against somebody else’s. He is asking whether you came at all.
Growth principle: God has never needed a large offering to do a large work. He needs willing people.
Take it with you: Give something this week even if it is small, instead of giving nothing because it is not large.
Pause and pray: Lord, I have used the size of my gift as a reason to give nothing. Forgive that. Let me have a part in this, whatever the part turns out to be worth. Amen.
From Sunday’s message: A Faith That Promises (2 Corinthians 8) · Sunday, October 18, 2026
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