Giving Away What Has Been Given

In Memory of David Powlison, 1949 – 2019

It is our hope that we are giving away what has been given to us.

David Powlison says:

You are giving away what is being given to you. Trust, thankfulness, and worship to the God who gives. Care, wisdom, and mercies to people in need. Many psalms open on a personal note, pleading with God for one’s own sins and sorrows. They close by pleading for others. Mercy received becomes mercy to give. The words “image of Christ” can tumble from our lips without us understanding how Jesus is the man for God and for others. He identifies himself with the needs, sins, sorrows, and weaknesses of others. His life purpose is to bring redemption into the dark, hard places where redemption is needed. Being found by him, we know how others need finding.

B. B. Warfield put these things so well:

Christ was led by His love for others into the world, to forget Himself in the needs of others, to sacrifice self once for all upon the altar of sympathy. Self-sacrifice brought Christ into the world. And self-sacrifice will lead us, His followers, not away from but into the midst of men. Wherever men suffer, there will we be to comfort. Wherever men strive, there will we be to help. Wherever men fail, there will we be to uplift. Wherever men succeed, there will we be to rejoice. Self-sacrifice means not indifference to our times and our fellows: it means absorption in them. It means forgetfulness of self in others. It means entering into every man’s hopes and fears, longings and despairs: it means manysidedness of spirit, multiform activity, multiplicity of sympathies. It means richness of development.

It means not that we should live one life, but a thousand lives—binding ourselves to a thousand souls by the filaments of so loving a sympathy that their lives become ours. It means that all the experiences of men shall smite our souls and shall beat and batter these stubborn hearts of ours into fitness for their heavenly home. It is, after all, then, the path to the highest possible development, by which alone we can be made truly men.

May a loving sympathy beat and batter these stubborn hearts of ours into fitness for our heavenly home. Faith and love are the fruit of the Spirit’s sanctifying grace. You are no longer an isolated individual, divided off from others, an island of self-reliance. You are becoming a person, bound together for life with your brothers and sisters.

Perhaps the most dramatic evidence of headway in sanctification is that you no longer think so much about yourself. You are starting to do better when you are not preoccupied with “How well am I doing?” You are finding yourself when you lose yourself and worry less about who you are. A sinner forgiven, a sufferer sheltered, a saint in process—your welfare is inextricable from our welfare together. We are one in Christ. We are heading home. We will see his face. And all will be made well.

Source: Powlison, D. (2017). How does sanctification work? Wheaton, IL: Crossway.