Here Are The Two Things You Must Let Go to Experience Abundance in Your Life

Does anyone remember a comic book character named Richie Rich?  When I was growing up, I loved that guy.  Heck, I wanted to be that guy.  Just in case, the name didn’t give it away, Richie Rich was well rich, or as the comic book described him, The Poor Little Rich Boy.   Frankly, I never got the poor part of that title.  Richie Rich’s life looked pretty good to me.

But now I get the poor part a bit more.  In spite of all our nation’s challenges, here’s the amazing reality.  Americans live in the midst of incredible abundance.  Today you have phones that give you access to literally the knowledge of the world.  You have hundreds of ways you can entertain yourself.  Heck, if you buy a Triscuit cracker, you can choose between Original or
Cracked Pepper & Olive Oil or Reduced Fat or Hint of Salt or Rosemary & Olive Oil or Dill, Sea Salt, & Olive Oil or Roasted Garlic or Fire Roasted Tomato & Olive Oil or Garden Herb or finally Rye with Caraway Seeds.   And I haven’t even got to the Thin Crisps, Brown Rice or Family Size Triscuits! 

Yet, in the middle of such abundance, Americans seem more miserable and angry than ever.    And yes, you can point to the injustices, to the rich getting richer, to the stagnant incomes, but does that explain it completely?   After all, in the past, you had awful injustices too, arguably worse ones in many ways.   Yet, at no time, in my lifetime have I seen a nation more divided against itself, more resentful, miserable and simply mad about well, everything.           

And often, even with the very wealthy, you see these same things.  For all you can read every day of the abundant wealth of the rich and famous, for most of them, their lives don’t seem all that abundant at all.   Whatever the abundance in people’s bank accounts or grocery stores or in the infinite offerings of the internet, where is the abundance of happiness or simply peace?  Where is the abundance in people’s relationships?  How many folks have lives abundant in meaning or purpose?   Yet, isn’t that what every human being wants.  Don’t you want a life flowing over with joy and fulfillment.   Sure, you want an abundant bank account but not just that.  You want an abundant life.    But, you can’t get an IRA for that.  So, how does it happen?   In the words you’re about to hear, Jesus shows you the way.   Let’s listen to what Jesus has to say..

Luke 6:37-38

Do you want an abundant life?  Jesus tells you how here.  Jesus says, stop clinging; start letting go.  Stop clinging to grievances.  Stop clinging on to status or position or power.   Instead let go.  Give up your resentments.   Let go of your time, your talents, your money.  That’s when abundance will come.

When you read these words, you can at first think that Jesus is offering us a trade.   If you give a little condemnation, if you do some judging, then God will throw that right back at you.   On the other hand, if you start passing out some forgiveness, make a few gifts, then God will pass that right back to you too.

 

But, as we talked about two Sundays ago, God doesn’t work that way.  God isn’t a trader.  God is a giver.  And God gives without any conditions at all.   So God doesn’t do the whole trading thing, then what is Jesus saying?

Jesus is telling you this.  God is giving people abundance but lots of folk can’t get it.  Why?   They’re clinging to all sorts of other junk instead.   And if their hands get filled with that, there’s no room for the abundance God yearns to bring.  Look, God doesn’t force people to receive what God has.  God won’t pry the junk out of your hands.  The only way that stuff goes is when you let it go.   And what is this junk that people cling to?   Jesus tells you.  People cling to their grievances and their gifts. 

When Jesus talks about judging and condemning, Jesus is warning you how deadly clinging to grievances can be.    You end up judging and condemning yourselves.   That’s because when you live lives fill with judgment and condemnation of other, you’re not imprisoning the people you’re judge and condemning.  You’re imprisoning yourself.

Think about it.   Judging and condemning take a lot of energy. You’ve got to keep reminding yourself of the tally of wrongdoers and the wrongs they’ve done to you.  You’ve got to keep working to keep them locked up in that place of condemnation.  It’s like you’ve put that person in a prison, and in order that they don’t escape, you’ve got to be the prison guard.  You’ve got to be there too.  But no, it’s worse than that.  Because guess what, those folks you condemn, they’re not actually imprisoned at all.  You are the only prisoner.  That’s why the writer Malachy McCourt said that holding resentments is like drinking poison, and expecting the other people to get sick.  It’s crazy. 

So, in the end, the only folks judged and condemned are the very people doing the judging and condemning.  So, if this whole practice only imprisons you, then why is it so easy for people to get caught up in it?

Well, when you’re judging and condemning others, you don’t have to look at yourself.  You don’t have to face up to your own failings and faults.   After all, you’ve been victimized.  And as long you play that victim, you don’t have to deal with your own junk, with how you might have hurt others or even contributed to the pain and hurt others caused you.   That’s not your responsibility.  No, it’s all their fault.  And that sort of avoiding your stuff can seem easier.

And if that’s not tempting enough, when you judge and condemn, you get to play God.   You get to place yourselves above others, to get on your high horse.   And that can feel good in a twisted sort of way.  It can feel so good, that people get addicted to judging and condemning.  The more you do it, the more you want more of it.  You can’t get enough.  And then the prisons your judging and condemning create get so big, that even if you wanted to, you can’t find your way out. 

So, Jesus tells you.  Don’t go there.   Don’t judge.  Don’t condemn.  Don’t trap yourself in a prison of your own making.  Let go of the junk.   Forgive.  That’s what forgiveness is.  It’s letting go.    

Forgiveness doesn’t mean reconciliation.  You can stop being in relationship with someone and forgive them.   You can even forgive people with whom a relationship can’t happen, people who have died for example. 

And forgiving doesn’t mean minimizing or burying the hurt either.   After all, if you just do that, you’re not really forgiving.  You just denying.  So, if you’re not reconciling or minimizing the hurt when you forgive, what are you doing.  You are letting it go.    

Let’s say I get caught up in just an unbelievable load of debt, debt that I can’t repay. Even after the bank has done all it can to get its money back, it’s not enough.   But I got nothing else to give them.  I’m flat broke. What does the bank do?   They write my debt off.  They take it as a loss on their books.   They don’t minimize my debt.  They don’t necessarily reconcile with me; that’s for sure.  They simply realize that, in order to move on, they have to face that this debt is one they’re not going to collect.  So, they write it off.

That’s what forgiveness means.  You write off that debt so that you can move on.  This writing off can take a while.  Forgiving, at least with human-beings, rarely happens all at once.  You’ll probably let it go a lot before you finally become free.    Forgiveness doesn’t come easy.  But it does free you.  It frees you not simply from the prison of your own judging and condemning.  It frees you to receive, the ultimate gift, God’s forgiveness of you.   When your hands are full of self-righteous grievance and resentment, God can’t do that.  Heck, those very grievances block you from even seeing the need for that forgiveness.   

But when you get that grace from God, you start realizing that everything, everything you have God has given you.  And as you realize that, you start letting it go too.   Your generosity grows everywhere.

But sadly, just the way people cling to their grievance, they cling to their gifts as if somehow God can’t give more.  So, they think they own their things.  But the things actually own them.  And then they wonder how they can have so much, and yet it feels like so little.  But that’s what happen when you start putting your trust in the gifts rather than the Giver. Your clinging shuts off the abundance God wants to give.   And how abundant is this abundance?  Jesus tells you. 

Have you ever bought a big box of cereal, and seen that little sign on the side that says, “Ingredients may settle during transit.”   Then you open it up and discover what that means.  You didn’t buy a big box of cereal.  You bought half a big box of cereal.  In Jesus’ day, something similar happened.  You’d buy some meal from a merchant, and put it in a little bag attached to your robe, but once you shook it and pressed it down, well it wasn’t so much.  But Jesus says, not with God.  No matter how much shaking and pressing you do, what God gives will always run over your laps.  God’s gifts, no matter how much the ingredients settle, will always be too big for the box.

For the last week, the internet has been abuzz with just such a story, one that some folks here gave me an update on only a few days ago.   A young woman named Kate McClure ran out of gas on the side of the freeway outside of Philly late one night.  She had no money with her.  And she was terrified.   But a homeless vet named “Johnny” noticed her distress.   And with his last 20.00 he walked to a gas station and brought back gas for her car.   From that point on, Kate became friends with Johnny.   And 16 days ago, she and her boyfriend, Mark, started a GoFundMe page for him.   They had an ambitious goal to raise $10,000, that would help get Johnny an apartment, a decent vehicle, and a few months of expenses until he could get a job.  Well, they hit a bit over that goal.  As of the time of this blog post, 13, 245 people had raised over 370,000.00.  And Johnny and Kate are now trying to figure out how to give that money away to other folks in need, including some of the places that helped Johnny out in the past.

When Johnny let that last twenty dollars go, he set off a chain of abundance that is still going even now.   God won’t always work that dramatically.  Nor will the abundance God bring always be money or anything material.  But God will always bring abundance.        

But if you don’t let go, then you will never receive what God yearns to give. Your hands will simply be too full, of all the junk you’re still clinging to.  The abundant life God created for you won’t happen.

You’ll be like that monkey with the banana.   Do you know that story?  In Africa, when people want to catch a monkey, they put a banana in a gourd with one hole.  The hole is big enough for the monkey to stick his hand in to get the banana.   But it’s not big enough for him to get the hand out with the banana.   But that monkey won’t let go of that banana.  He’ll hold on to that banana until the hunters return.

Human beings imprison themselves like those monkeys simply by not letting go.   They won’t let go of grievance and resentment.  They won’t let go of the very gifts God has given them so that God might give them more.  They hold on to those bananas even when they trap them again and again. 

So how do you let go?  How do you stop clinging to the junk?  You look to the One who let go everything for you, who let go of heaven in order to give you a place there forever, who become poor so that you might become rich with abundant life without end.   As you experience what God gave up out of love for you, God’s love will free you to let go of the junk to which you cling.   And your hands, your heart, your life will open up so that God can give you a deeper, richer abundance than you could ever have dreamed.