“‘Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this’, says the Lord Almighty, ‘and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it’.” (Malachi 3:10)
Before I share an experience with you, let me first say that I don’t expect anything else from God in return for what I do for Him. I’m just grateful for salvation and the opportunities He brings my way to serve Him.
I also don’t believe blessings from God are handed out in relation to how much we do for Him; that all comes on the other side of eternity. Having said that, I do believe that many of the blessings that I enjoy today are a result of my obedience to call of Christ and my heart to serve Him in every way I can. In other words, while my faith has taught me that you can’t out give God, my experience has also pointed out to me that life since I became a Christian is less troublesome, more peaceful, and the blessings far more frequent (or maybe just more noticeable with my “new eyes”) .
Like anyone else, I’d love to win the Reader’s Digest Sweepstakes, or have some unknown relative leave me a million dollars, and if that ever happens, I’d believe with all my heart that God had a hand in it. But I’ve come to understand that God doesn’t measure His blessings the way we do. In other words, blessings that we see as small and insignificant are big-time blessings in God’s eyes.
Let me give you a great example of one we recently experienced. Our ice maker has been on the blink for several months. It just stopped working one day. We had the same problem a few years back and later learned that the water in the line on the back of the refrigerator occasionally froze where it entered the ice maker. This time, however, when I checked the line, everything was fine. I told my wife it looked as if we would have to replace the ice maker. In the interim, she bought ice at the convenience store until I could make arrangements to have someone come out and complete the repairs.
Within a few weeks, the ice maker started working again. “We had a miraculous healing,” my wife exclaimed. Little did we know how right she was!
We both thought about it and realized that the day before we had given a computer that we had to a friend of mine. The circumstances are not important, except to say that Robbie and I talked about it and it seemed like the right thing to do.
Actually, Robbie was the first to wonder if there was a connection between what we did for a friend and the ice maker. “I think it’s God’s way of saying we did the right thing.”
“Yeah right,” I thought.
My doubts grew even stronger when it stopped making ice again. But this time, I thought about something when it started working again. It was the day after we had made a small cash gift to a friend in need.
Like Robbie, I’m also convinced that God really is at work in our refrigerator. In fact, I told my Sunday School class that the Holy Spirit can be found anywhere, even in your freezer.
Have I learned something from this experience? You bet I have. I’ve learned not to overlook the small things God does for us everyday. The Bible says it this way: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.” (James 1:17)
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