Daily Manna · Day 97 · April 7
The Logic of Generosity
“He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?”
We pray around the edges. After a year like the one we have had, asking for something specific feels greedy, so we keep the requests general and safe and ask for nothing that could come back as a no.
George Müller kept about two thousand orphans in Bristol for sixty years and refused on principle ever to ask a human being for money. He asked God, in writing, with dates, and recorded the answers in the same book. His journals are not devotional literature; they are closer to accounts. The famous morning when the children sat down to breakfast with no food in the house and a baker knocked because he could not sleep is famous partly because Müller wrote down the ordinary mornings too, including the ones where the answer was late. What he said he was proving was not that prayer works. It was that God can be trusted by people who have nothing, and he wanted it on paper so that others could check.
That is the logic Paul is using here, and it is an argument rather than an encouragement. He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things? It runs from the greater to the lesser. The costliest thing has already been released; nothing cheaper is now going to be held back out of reluctance.
But be exact about what all things means in this chapter, because Paul has just defined it: conformed to the image of his Son, kept through tribulation and famine and sword, glorified at the end. It is not underwriting the life you had planned. It is a guarantee that the Father who handed over Jesus will not economise on anything required to get you home.
Ask for something specific before you put this down. The number, the name, the date, in writing if you keep anything. Then write the sentence you will hold if the answer is no, and write it now while you are calm: He did not spare his own Son for me, so this is not neglect.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 97 is How Frail I Am (Psalm 39:4).