Open Hands

Here's the context. Israel is in judgment. They have been radically, consistently, intentionally disobedient. They've brought upon themselves the covenant discipline and judgment of God, and now they're feeling the hurt of it. They're experiencing the consequences, and they want God to free them from the consequences of their sin. That's what they want. They want the hurt to go away.

And so they do, in principle, what God has asked them to do. They begin to fast, and yet nothing happens. They fast and there's no breakthrough. They fast and there's no loosening of the bonds. And so they become confused, because they're checking all the external boxes. Not eating — check. Wearing sackcloth and ashes — check. Prostrating themselves before the Lord — check, check, check. And yet nothing.

This is a beautiful and terrible illustration of something that I say to you all a lot: if we do the right thing in the wrong way, it becomes the wrong thing. The right thing done in the wrong way becomes the wrong thing. And so God explains to them in verse six why the fasting that they're doing isn't doing what fasting is supposed to do. He explains to them that they're not doing the fasting that He desires — it's not the fasting that actually loosens the grip.

So that's exactly what He says to them: "Is this not the fast that I choose?" And then He's going to give seven positives that fasting is supposed to produce within us. Is this not the fast that I choose — that you would loose the bonds of wickedness, undo the straps of the yoke, let the oppressed go free, break every yoke, share your bread with the hungry, bring the homeless poor into your house, and when you see the naked, cover him? God says the fasting He desires is to produce a life of the open hand — a life of serving and generosity, a life that doesn't hoard for itself, a life that gives and blesses.

And then He gives this one negative to them. He says, "And not to hide yourself from your own flesh." The verb here for "hide" in the Hebrew is עָלַם - ʿalam, and it means to conceal or keep concealed. In the grammatical stem that it's in, it means to hide yourself or to look the other way deliberately. So this is not accidental blindness — it's willful blindness, chosen blindness.

Here's what God is saying. You're coming to Me crying out for Me to do for you what you can't do for yourself. You're asking for mercy. You're seeking grace. You're wanting My generosity. And yet, while you're doing it, you see the needs of others all around you, and you willfully turn a blind eye. God's people were seeking God, seeking freedom, seeking forgiveness — all while selfishly and willingly ignoring the brokenness and chaos of sin around them. And God says, "This is why your fasting is not producing anything within you."

God is communicating to us this morning that there's a right way to fast and a wrong way to fast, and it's tied to the purpose of fasting. It's not about fasting technique. It's not about how many days you fast. It's not about the details. It's about the heart — the intent, the desire, what we hope fasting produces within us. Are we just trying to have our best life now? I'm going to fast so that my life can be more comfortable. I'm going to fast so that my life can be more convenient. I'm going to fast so that God can do for me what I want Him to do for me. When we lay it out that straightforwardly, it feels…icky, doesn't it?

Are we seeking to become more and more like Jesus, or are we like the Israelites — just trying to avoid the consequences of our sin? God shows us a different way, a better way. So we're coming into this whole series out of our Lenten series on idolatry, and I hope one of the things that we all learn together is that we are really, really good at idolatry. We're number one. We can make anything an idol. The evil things of this world, the sinful things of the world — that's the low-hanging fruit of idolatry. We all see those things and go, "Oh yeah, that's clearly killing me. That's really a bad thing"

But we have the incredible capacity to take even the good things of God and turn them into idols. I really want you to understand this morning, as we learn and begin to practice the disciplines, we're not performing for God. It's not, "Hey God, look at me. Look how good I'm fasting." This is not what fasting is about. We're not trying to earn something from Him. This is not a barter. It's not an exchange. "Hey God, I'll fast this many days if you give me this sort of thing. God, I'll confess if you give me that." The disciplines are God's gift to us to get Him and to get ourselves. As we behold Him, we become what we behold. We're transformed from glory to glory. We receive and reflect. We image God, which is what we were created for.

The discipline of generosity, the life of an open hand, isn't a life of heroic sacrifice or religious ritual. It's the human being, the image-bearer, functioning as designed. This is what we were made to do. We were made to be generous. We're designed to serve, to give, to participate in the work of God. That's why you're here. That's why God gives you breath in your lungs. It's why God keeps your heart beating. We're not created to simply serve ourselves, but to serve God, to serve with God, and with God to serve others.

I've rooted all the other disciplines in this series; community, confession, fasting — in the creation account of Genesis. For this one, for the discipline of generosity, I've got to go pre-creation. It's actually before. See, before there was a creation, there was a Creator, a glorious, generous God. Before there was anything or anyone for God to be generous towards, He was already self-giving. The Father gave to the Son. The Son, eternally begotten, gave back in love what the Father poured out. The Spirit proceeding as the very overflow of that giving. Our God is one and yet three. Our God is relational. Our God is love. Before the Creator created, He was generous.

The Trinity is not some boring, abstract, static fact about God. The Trinity is love in motion, which changes everything about creation. God doesn't create out of need. I've heard this for most of my life in ministry — people think that God created us because He was lonely or because He needed us to do something. This is not the God and Creator of the Scriptures. That's every other god and every other scripture and every other religion. Gods that are not self-sufficient. Gods that are not complete in and of themselves. Gods that are not generous and loving. So the gods in all the other faiths, all the other religions, create mankind to get something from them. That's not our God. That's not our Scripture. Our God creates to give Himself.

This is so key and core. We exist because of who God is, because God is generous. We've been made by an open-handed God, which means that in creation we're made by an open-handed God for an open-handed God, and we're made to image the open-handed God. So do a little math here with me. If God is an open-handed God and you were made to image Him…do the math: we are made to live lives of generosity. Lives that are not self-oriented and self-serving, but other-directed lives that are giving. Lives that are joyously giving. We're made by an open-handed God, for an open-handed God, to live an open-handed life. This is how we image Him.

We're made to receive God's self-giving love, to take the gifts that He extends and then to do what images do — reflect it out. We reflect it back to Him in worship first. Then we reflect it to neighbor. We reflect it to creation. This is what we are made for. It's why the pattern of sin is so wrong. We looked at that pattern the last few weeks starting in Genesis; Eve sees the fruit, desires the fruit, takes the fruit. It's grasping. It's a closed hand. This is the opposite of what we're designed for. It's the 180-degree reversal of how we're supposed to function as God's image-bearers — to have an open hand. Instead, the pattern of sin is a closed fist. The pattern of idolatry is the exact opposite of the open hand of faith.

And so the effect of sin as it has corrupted our nature — selfishness, narcissism, the willful blindness to others — these are not simply bad moral choices or personality defects. They're so much worse than that. They are a false representation of who God is, the God who gives, the God of the open hand.

Do you see this morning why generosity matters so much? Why a life that serves others is so significant? Let me say it this way: there is no version of being human rightly that is closed-handed. They're mutually exclusive. To be closed-handed is to be less than human — not less moral, less human — because the closed fist not only misrepresents the God Whom we're supposed to image, but it diminishes and destroys us.

Unsurprisingly, Jesus had a thing or two to say about generosity. I want to start in Luke 12, verses 15 to 21:

Here's the setup. A brother comes to Jesus demanding that Jesus settle a family dispute about, wait for it, money. Shocking, I know. An inheritance. Solve this inheritance dispute between me and my brother. Jesus passes. But He uses it as a moment to teach. He says to them,

Be careful and be on your guard. Stay alert. Pay attention against a devastating enemy of the heart: covetousness. This word in the Greek is πλεονεξία = pleonexia. It means greediness, and it means insatiableness — the structural craving for more that's never enough, regardless of what one already has. Jesus isn't just warning against an individual sin, but against a structural disordering of our appetites. An approach to life that says, if I get more, then I'll be happy. If I have more, then I'll be secure. If I possess more, then I'll be safe. If I have more, then I'll be satisfied. I know that doesn't sound like anybody that you know, but maybe you'll meet somebody like that one day…in the mirror.

This is the reality of our culture. Paul in (Colossians 3:5) will use this exact word pleonexia and say that it is flat-out idolatry. It's an exchange, a gripping of something less than God. So when we look for our possessions to satisfy us the way that only God can satisfy, when we look for our possessions to secure us in a way that only God can truly offer security, we are grabbing something. We're holding on to an idol. We're making the good gifts of God's creation something more than they were meant to be. And it's a destructive pattern — a formula for frustration, because it doesn't work.

So look at what Jesus does then with this warning. He tells a story, as Jesus was wont to do. He says He told them a parable saying:

This might be the first instance of first world problems, right? Here he is — he's wealthy, his land is producing beautifully. Did he make that land produce beautifully? So here he finds himself in this terrible quandary: I've got so much stuff, I don't have anywhere to put it. What shall I do? I have nowhere to store my crops. And he said, "This is what I'll do. I'll tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods." And then — this is where we get to the heart of it — "Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years. Chill out. Eat, drink, and be merry."

Now, I want you to think carefully about what Jesus is saying here, and what He doesn't say. Jesus doesn't say this is a bad man. Doesn't say he's an evil man, a corrupt man. Doesn't say that the man got his wealth through illicit means. No — he worked the land and the land produced bountifully. It's not a story about a bad man. It's a story about a normal man, a man who by our cultural definition is killing it. He's just being wise. He's been a good steward of the stuff that he has, thinking to himself about how he can better store and better use his wealth. This is the most American parable Jesus ever told.

And what does Jesus say? What does God say?

You remember the old bumper sticker: he who dies with the most toys wins. And then the follow-up bumper sticker: he who dies with the most toys dies. That's the reality. What Jesus is doing here — He's not critiquing wealth. He's not critiquing success. He's not critiquing the produce that the land created. The man's mistake wasn't growing the grain. It wasn't storing the grain. Jesus doesn't condemn him for his wealth. Jesus condemns him because he doesn't understand what his wealth is for. He doesn't know who God is. And so he doesn't know who he is. And so he does what far too many of us do — he makes the mistake of thinking that his possessions are for him alone. And Jesus says he is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God. This is Jesus's point. The things that we have are not solely, or exclusively, or maybe even primarily for us. The man didn't make that crop grow. God did. But he didn't understand.

Of course, the tragedy of this — the crazy thing — is that we all know this to be true. If we go around the room, every one of us knows an incredibly wealthy person who's miserable. This is not difficult. We all understand the studies that have been done on lottery winners, right? You've seen it. You've seen a 60 Minutes on it. You've read an article. Lottery winners end up worse off. And yet, every day in every gas station and grocery store, people line up and put their money in saying, "Please give me a chance to destroy my life." What Jesus is saying is that your barn can be full — your 401k is healthy, your Bitcoin is going to revolutionize everything — and by every external metric, you can be winning at life. You can have a full barn and have an empty heart. One's life does not consist in the abundance or lack thereof of possessions. The rich fool is not a monster. He's just a bent and broken mirror — one we too often resemble.

So let's look at one of Jesus's clearest teachings about generosity, about what we do with what God gives us, about how we give. We were actually in this text last week. It's found in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 6. Last week, we looked at what Jesus said about fasting, which was actually the third in a list of three practices that Jesus talks about — giving, prayer, and fasting. So look at it with me.

Matthew chapter 6 starting at verse 1, Jesus says this and gives us the principle for the disciplines:

Jesus starts with this principle, and it applies to giving, it applies to prayer, it applies to fasting. It's going to apply to any of the disciplines, any of the things that allow us to be transformed from glory to glory, any of the things that bring God's rightness and God's righteousness to bear fruit in our lives. Here is the principle: it's not a performance for yourself and it's not a performance for the people around you. And if you engage in it in that way, you're missing the point and you're missing the blessing that those disciplines are designed to give.

So Jesus says,

First, notice the expectation Jesus has. He doesn't say "if you give" — He says "when you give." Jesus doesn't argue that you should. He assumes it. This is how deeply wired into what it means to be God's people generosity and giving is. Jesus doesn't even try to convince you that you should. He assumes it and says, "Now when you give, let's be careful about how we do it."

He says, "Sound no trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues." That word "hypocrites" — in the Greek it's ὑποκριτής = hypokritēs — it’s a theater word. That's what it means. It's an actor who wore a mask on stage. That's what it was. So Jesus is saying giving is not to be done as a performance. It's not to be a role you play. It needs to come out of the core of who you are.

Now, the "sound no trumpet before you" is interesting. He's basically saying, don't draw attention to yourself. We don't have any evidence that in Jesus's day this was an actual practice — like people were walking around with trumpets and announcing their giving. But we do have an interesting detail out of the temple of Jesus's day. Within the temple, there were several different trumpet boxes, shofar boxes — the giving chests that people would put their offerings into, and they were shaped like a shofar, a trumpet. And so when you would cast your coins into that trumpet box, maybe there was a clanging going on, and maybe people were making a practice of, "Hey, look how much I'm putting in." Regardless, what Jesus is making really clear is that the point of giving is never to draw attention to yourself.

Giving is a challenge. In Luke, we saw the man who doesn't give at all — he's just trying to hoard it for himself. Now Jesus is addressing the reality that we can give wrongly, with wrong motives, and that's not what God is asking of us.

God has been so good to me and blessed me to travel to so many places across the world to preach and teach, and I'm so grateful for that. The first time I went to India, something happened in my heart. I just loved the country and the people of India. It's such a beautiful place, beautiful people, and the food is amazing — I've not done a lot of fasting in India. But like all places and people, it has its share of brokenness.

On my second trip to India, I was there with a pastor and evangelist, and one of the things that was a little bit overwhelming about many of the places I was in India was the amount of begging. Traveling to India, one of the most striking things was the sheer number of beggars everywhere. It was overwhelming because it was just everywhere, and one of the things that was particularly hard to process was seeing so many children begging. I remembered asking the pastor I was with — a pastor from India — and he unpacked for me how the whole begging and giving system worked within that cultural reality. You could see people giving to the beggars, but here's the thing: they didn't care for the beggars at all. In their mind, the beggars were in that position, in that lower caste, because they had done something bad in a past life. And so people would give to the beggar not because they wanted to help them, but because they wanted to accrue good karma so that when they came back in their next life, they would come back better.

Hearing that, it's hard not to think, "Oh, well that's just the American prosperity gospel." Like, I'm going to give so that God can give me more. It's selfish giving, which should be an oxymoron. It's a brokenness of what giving is meant to be and what it's supposed to do. So what does that produce? When you give to someone not because you care about them but because you want to either improve your own situation or have other people think well of you, what does that produce? It just produces more selfishness, more narcissism, more brokenness. You're just bending the mirror to reflect God even more poorly. It doesn't do what it's supposed to do within us.

And this is the tragedy of it. Giving is the right thing to do. It's what we're made to do. But done in the wrong way, it becomes the wrong thing. So if you never give, like the rich fool, or if you give for selfish reasons — you're blowing your trumpet — you're missing the point, and you'll get something out of it. If you're giving for human approval, you can probably pull that off, but that's all you're going to get. So look at the end of verse two. Jesus says, "Truly I say to you, they have received their reward." They have received their reward. This is a term in the Greek — it's a business term, a term that was quite often stamped on ancient business receipts to say the transaction was complete, that it had been paid in full. It's a beautiful thing. So Jesus is forcing us to think not just about whether we should give — He assumes that we will — but about how we give.

If we want to virtue signal and give so that others will think well of us, Jesus says; “Fine, go for it. But that's all you'll get from it. There's no further benefit or reward.” However, there is another way to give. Jesus says:

"When you give to the needy, don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing." That's such a memorable little expression and phrase. And then we go, what does that mean exactly? Don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. It's a little like that ancient philosophical question: what is the sound of one hand clapping? And actually, that's kind of what He's saying. Do it in such a way that there's no applause — no high-fiving yourself, no high-fiving others, no having somebody applaud what you're doing. No. You do this in a way that is private, secretive even. You do it in a way so that you're doing it because it's the right thing to do, and you're directing it toward God — not so that God will then give you more, not so that you give twenty dollars hoping God gives you a hundred back, which is what you hear from the television guys all the time.

No, what Jesus is saying is this: when you give rightly, God will reward you. And what is that reward? Well, it's the unbending of the mirror. It's the restructuring of our appetites. It's the reordering of our hearts and desires. It's being transformed from glory to glory to glory to glory, becoming more and more and more like Jesus, becoming more and more the images of God that we were made to be. Giving is meant to transform us. Giving shapes us.

So let's be real about that, because most of us give when we feel like it. And that's how most giving pitches are made — go for the heart, right? The sad Sarah McLachlan song and puppies, and checkbooks just start opening. Most of us wait to give until we feel like giving. And that's okay — it's okay to be moved and motivated by a need and respond to it. But we're in a series on disciplines, and I want you to see generosity, giving both of money and anything else that God has given you, not just money but our time, a shoulder to cry on, an ear to listen, a hand to do some work — all of us, all of it — not as a feeling but as a discipline.

It's not what some might call it — it's the discipline of generosity, because it applies to so much more. Jesus says "when you give," not "when you feel like giving," because giving is generosity and generosity is formational. When we give, we're teaching our hearts something. We're teaching our hearts that our meaning, our value, our purpose, our satisfaction, our joy is not found in those things. It's found in the God who has given us those things. We're teaching our hearts.

The open hand is not only the fruit of a transformed heart. The more that you confess, the more that you fast, the more that you're in the presence of God, your hand is going to open — it is the fruit of a transformed heart. But giving is also one of the pathways by which your heart is transformed, which is why it's a discipline. It's chosen. It's intentional. And that is why it matters.

Some of us in this room can relate to the rich fool, or at least the rich part. A lot of us are very comfortable, we're doing well, and we can relate to that sense of feeling. But that's not all of us. There are some in this room who are wondering, "How am I going to pay my mortgage this month? What are we going to do when gas prices hit seven or eight dollars?" The reality is that when it comes to giving, the issue is not how much you have and how much you give — the issue is in the heart. If you have a lot and you're not satisfied and you want to keep it and get more, that's a problem. If you don't have a lot and you're scared about where your future is going and who's going to take care of you, that's also a problem. Whether you're on the abundance side or the scarcity side, the issue is still the same: What are you looking to? What are you hoping in? Who truly has your heart?

So it's a discipline — a discipline that we need to examine and transform our hearts. If we only give when we feel like it, when the mood strikes, when the need is great, when the cause is moving, that giving won't really change us. It'll feel good, sure, and it might do good things, but that in itself will be the reward. When we choose to give as an act of faith, when we intentionally engage as an act of obedience, as an act of an image-bearer — saying, "God, this thing that I have is not mine, You gave it to me, I'm a steward, I'm going to choose to give it to bless" — then the reward that God gives us is that transformation, because we're acting as an image-bearer. A chosen, practiced life of generosity over time shapes our hearts, and the grip on our hands is loosened slowly. Oh, so slowly. And how I wish it wasn't so slowly — but slowly we become the kind of person whose hand is open naturally, without thought.

For me, the biggest challenge in this kind of giving is me — my own heart, my own disordered desires. I love me too much. I love my comfort too much. And practically, what that means is that I will give, but I'm much quicker to give to someone who can give something back to me. Don't we kind of live in that quid pro quo reality of our culture? Isn't it easier to give to somebody who can do something for you in return than it is to give to somebody who has nothing to offer you? I think that's why Jesus says, "Don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing," because that takes away the possibility of reciprocation. Secrecy actually protects us from ourselves.

About twenty years ago, I was planting a church in Portland, Oregon, and the first sermon series I preached was through the Sermon on the Mount. I had just preached about this very passage, and we were meeting in a bar — which was awesome, except for all the setup and teardown. After the service, we tore down, loaded everything into my truck, and I was walking down the sidewalk when I saw a woman with a van equipped with wheelchair accessibility equipment, and she was struggling to get a man in a wheelchair out of the vehicle. So I just ran over and helped her, and got him safely down, and then they were going into a building nearby. I opened the door and held it for them as they went in.

As I looked inside, I realized I had walked past this place a hundred times and never really paid attention to what it was. As I looked in, I discovered that it was a group home for people with severe mental handicaps — as severe as you can imagine. I started having a conversation with this woman and asked what they were doing, and she told me more about it. I said, "Hey, is there anything — we're just a small church, maybe twenty-five people at the time — is there anything that we could do to help you?" She said, "Well, let me think about it." We talked, and for several weeks we were able to go in — until they decided we were too Christian. But for several weeks we were able to go in and help clean and serve people who could do absolutely nothing in return.

There was something so freeing about that intentional act of going to serve somebody who couldn't give anything back. It was so good for the early days of that church plant to work its way into their DNA — the sense that we're not here for ourselves, we're not here to just get God's blessing, we're here to be a blessing, and we're here to give because God has so generously and graciously given to us. There's something about that intentional act of serving somebody that can't give anything back to you that is just so good for the soul. It was loving for the right reasons, serving like Jesus served.

So I want to challenge you this morning to give intentionally and generously. I'm not just talking about your money, and I'm not just talking about giving to the church. You guys are killing that, by the way — our mortgage offering went up to over $81,000, and our yearly budget is going so well. I have pastor friends say to me, "Don't say how well it's going, people will stop giving," but I don’t believe that. I'm talking about a lifestyle of generosity. A lifestyle that doesn't clench and grasp stuff to make you happy. A lifestyle that finds your happiness and joy in the Lord and is therefore free to give what God gives, trusting that He'll always keep supplying because that's who He is.

It means giving, yes, of our money and resources, but it means giving of our time and our bodies, our physical presence and action. Sometimes that is so much better than money. Please don't equate generosity with giving money. And please don't equate generosity with how much money you can give — that's beside the point. We're to be generous because God is generous. We're to be generous with everything that God has generously given us. I'm so desperate for you to see this not as a duty or an obligation. I know how deep the "I'm going to give so I can get" mechanism is in our culture, in our brains, and even in the church. That's not what this is. That's not what God designed it to be.

It's an invitation to participate in the process of God reforming and remaking us into who He has always intended us to be — imagers, open-handed images of the open-handed God. One last passage. Paul in 2 Corinthians is writing to a church that actually had a lot, and Paul was taking up an offering to help the church in Jerusalem, which was going through a terrible time. He had gone around asking various churches to contribute to this offering, and he had asked the Corinthians to give to this as well, and they had been hesitant. So this is what he writes them in 2 Corinthians 9:7–8:

Notice the choice, the seat of decision-making — you make a decision, you give as you decide in your heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion. The word translated "cheerful" in the Greek is ἱλαρός = hilaros, from which we get our English word "hilarious," which is what I keep telling my wife I am. But I love this word. We associate "hilarity" with spontaneous, unfiltered laughter. When somebody tells a joke and you go to a comedy show, you don't sit there and listen to the joke and think, "Oh, now it's time to laugh." Laughter just comes. If it's funny, laughter comes. If it's not funny, well, you know. This is the word that Paul uses to describe how our giving should function. Yes, we decide in our heart, but it also has to come as a natural, spontaneous reaction of our heart.

"God loves a cheerful giver, and God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work." That is Paul's way of saying, “Listen, Corinth, everything you have comes from God anyway. If you hold on to it, it's not going to do any good for you. But if you give it joyously and intentionally, because God has given it to you joyously and generously, then listen — the God who gave it to you in the first place is more than able to keep taking care of you.”

So we should give because it's who God has made us to be — the kind of open heart and open hand that naturally and instinctively wants to help. That's what God loves. That's what we're made for. That's the goal, the destination. But it starts with a decision in your heart. It's not just something that happens overnight. It's not a single decision. It's the practiced posture of the open hand.

Listen, church. We live in a world that has a deep structural confusion about generosity. The world thinks generosity is a sacrifice that the generous person makes for the benefit of someone else — as if the giver is a little bit smaller and the receiver is a little bit bigger after the gift. But Jesus and Paul both know, and the entire scriptural witness knows, that's exactly backwards. The generous person who gives becomes more themselves. Giving doesn't subtract — it adds. It grows. The generous person becomes more themselves. The receiver receives the gift, and yes, the giver receives something the receiver can't even see. The giver is being formed. The giver is being made more.

The giver is being made into the kind of person who can hold treasure but whom treasure can never hold. The flow of grace in giving runs in both directions at once, and the giver gets so much out of it. That's what the discipline produces. It's what the open-handed life feels like from the inside — not heroic, not sacrificial. True giving makes you feel lighter, freer, more genuinely joyful than the close-handed life ever could, because the discipline of giving is liberative. It sets us free.

So here's the diagnostic question I want to leave you with, and it's not "Are you giving enough?" That's the wrong question. That's a question that keeps the giver in charge. The question is this: “Am I practicing generosity in such a way, over time, that it is producing the kind of person who is genuinely glad to give?” If yes, keep going. Keep doing that. If no, hey, get going. It's a great day to start. Pick a number. Pick a person. Pick a frequency. Pick something. Start living like you were made to live. Start giving freely, because God in Christ has so freely given to you. Open your hand. Become the imager you were made to be. That's what the disciplines are for.

I can't help but think of Jesus. Everything about Jesus is an open hand. We looked at the open hand in Philippians chapter 2 — He refused to seize, refused to grasp. He comes into the world as a human, as a servant, and dies a death on a cross. The open hand of Jesus touching the lepers that no one would touch. The open hand of Jesus giving sight to the blind, stopping the woman from bleeding, feeding the hungry, grasping Peter as he sinks beneath the waves. But the open hand of Jesus as He is nailed to the cross, freely giving Himself for you and me.

The open hand of Jesus is extended to each and every one of us, that we might unclench the fist, that we might become the imagers we were made to be, that we might live the life of the open hand. Confession is the act of opening our hands. Fasting is the power that loosens giving. Generosity is the point and the purpose of the open hand. May God shape us. May the freedom that Christ has offered be ours. Amen.