Daily Manna · Day 294 · October 21
All Grace Abounding
“And God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work.”
What would you have to be sitting on before you would call yourself sufficient?
The people Paul had in mind when he wrote this sentence were not sitting on anything. He describes them a chapter earlier, and it is worth reading slowly: the churches of Macedonia, in a great trial of affliction, whose deep poverty abounded unto the riches of their liberality. Macedonia had been stripped by Rome, worked over by civil wars, its mines and its money taken. These were people with a documented history of being poor. Paul says they gave beyond their power, and then says the detail that gives away what kind of people they were: they were praying him to take it. He had to be persuaded to accept the collection.
That is who is standing behind this verse. God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work. The word for sufficiency was a philosopher's word for self-containment, the state of needing nothing from anybody, and Paul takes it and points it outward. Enough, so that you can overflow.
And here is the warning, because this verse gets quoted almost exclusively by people who stop at the comma. Paul's sentence has a purpose clause on the end of it and the purpose is not you. A sufficiency that terminates at your address is not the thing described here. Read it as a promise of personal surplus and you have taken a verse written about poor Macedonians emptying their pockets and made it a reason to keep yours full.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 294 is Me and My House (Joshua 24:15).