Change the World by Giving as God Gives

So many of us want to “change the world.” But the answer to doing that is right in front us, quiet as a contented child. Change in the world starts inside of us, with a simple act of giving. Seeing God as a giver can help us start making the changes we want to see around us and inside us.

God the Giver

The candlelight flickers on the wall. It’s not yet dawn. September is the time of the crickets, when they make their leg-songs in the humble dark. In a few months, it will be the time of silence, when the cold of winter hushes the world to a whisper. In the cricket calls and the silence, God is there. He is here, with you as you read. And he is giving.

He is giving the crickets. He is giving the dark and the light as the earth turns its hunched shoulders towards and then away from the sun. He is giving the silence. And he is giving me these words. God is an incessant and prodigal Giver. But this goes beyond what God does. It’s who he is.

God Before Time

There’s a traditional teaching on the Trinity from Saint Augustine that depicts the Father as giver, the Spirit as gift, and the Son as recipient.1 The Holy Spirit is a person and a gift, given to the Son by the Father. And yet this “gift” imagery can also extend to the Father and Son. There’s a sense in which the Father gives himself to the Son, showing him all that he does (John 5:20), and a sense in which the Son gives himself to the Spirit and to the Father. The Son did, after all, wander into the desert in the power of the Spirit (Matt. 4), according to the will of his Father. Does that strike you as strange, that a person can give himself to another person? If it does, it’s probably because we overlook the profound truth that giving oneself in love is the greatest gift — the handing over of all, in fullness, to another. Keeping nothing protected. Leaving nothing behind. Offering all in sweet, almost levitating abandon. This is so rare in the world that it sounds like holy fiction, an ideal no one can really practice.

But not so with God. God is a Giver. He gives himself to himself, which would be strange if there weren’t three persons in the Godhead. Thank goodness there are: Father, Son, and Spirit. Each gives to each and each to all.

Abraham Kuyper wrote beautifully of this love and mutual self-giving. He called it God’s “love-life.”2

The Love-life whereby these three mutually love each other is the eternal being Himself. This alone is the true and real life of love. The entire Scripture teaches that nothing is more precious and glorious than the Love of the Father for the Son, and of the Son for the Father, and of the Holy Spirit for both.3

He says that this truth is a deep and ancient song. “We listen to its music and adore it.”4

Love as the Greatest Act of Giving

Love is the greatest act of giving. It holds nothing back. All other gifts seem to let the giver retain something. Love requires open-armed abandon, complete vulnerability. For us, that’s terrifying at times, but not so with God. Within that timeless triune community of love, there is unbroken and unhindered acceptance. This is only possible because God has one will. The Father, Son, and Spirit all want the same thing. They want each other, with love fiercer than fire, greater than any lover’s gaze. I have not even the words to reach that place. But I know it’s there, because God has told us it’s there. It’s who he is (1 John 4:8).

God’s self-love burns bright and glorious, like a great star set in a navy night sky. Jesus tells us this. “Father, glorify me with the glory I had with you before the world began” (John 17:5). Before the world began, in the stillness and the silence, there was the burning and beautiful glory of love, the illuminating hearth of self-giving. Jesus seems to allude to this when he says, “For he whom God has sent utters the words of God, for he [the Father] gives the Spirit without measure. The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand” (John 3:34–35). God gives the Spirit to the Son without measure, and because of the Father’s great love, he even gives “all things” to him. He puts them into his hand. What a portrait of reception: the Father giving all to the Son in the Spirit.

And because elsewhere in Scripture we see that the love among the persons of the Trinity is reciprocal (John 14:31; Rom. 5:5; 1 John 4:8), we can say that the persons of the Trinity are always giving themselves to each other in love.5 In fact, Jesus says that it is because of his self-giving that the Father loves him: “For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again” (John 10:17). In the giving, the Father loves the Son, for giving is simply who God is. This is God’s giving circle. I wrote a short poem about it once so I wouldn’t forget it.

Radiant, the glory of giving,

Father, Son, and Spirit each to each.

A love unuttered by the living,

A giving that God would bend and teach.

This feels so far from us, doesn’t it? In order to even glimpse it, we have to hear a perfect high note on a violin or a holy pause between piano keys — and then we can follow that beauty like a tightrope. If we balance long enough, then maybe we see a glow on the dark horizon. Maybe. But it’s there. It must be. As the Romanian theologian Dumitru Stăniloae once wrote, “The Holy Trinity is the supreme mystery of existence. It explains everything, and nothing can be explained without it.”6 Only the holy and eternal giving of God could explain the great power of giving — the way something inside us releases when we give to others, the way clouds clear in the sky of the soul when we see that it’s not about us. It’s never been. Givers at heart are never concerned for themselves. They trust the great power of God to care for them, to receive them, and to carry them home.

Why? Because they know that giving is circular, that givers are also receivers and gifts, and that God has invited us into his circle of self-giving. In that circle, no one is ultimately left uncared for; everyone is given, gives, and receives.

Change through Giving

But where does this leave you and me? It leaves us with open palms. Changing the world isn’t always a matter of breaking norms and climbing charts and gaining followers. It’s often about a small, simple act of giving from one person to another. We give our time, our attention, our resources, our encouragement. The gift goes from the giver and to the recipient, who then turns to give again. The change is in that turning. And each change is a spark that gets carried onward.

Far more changes would occur in the world if we saw giving as a circle and not as an arrow. Giving goes on. It’s never meant to stop. You and I can jump into a giving circle anytime we want, even at this very moment. Who knows what changes may come as a result?

NOTES

1. Saint Augustine, De Trinitate 15.33–36.
2. John Frame also talks of the mutual love in the Godhead in his Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2013), 480–81. I have also written about this in The Speaking Trinity & His Worded World: Why Language Is at the Center of Everything (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2018), 24–29.
3. Abraham Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit, trans. Henri De Vries (Chattanooga, TN: AMG, 1995), 542.
4. Ibid., 542.
5. Vern S. Poythress, The Mystery of the Trinity: A Trinitarian Approach to the Attributes of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2020), 564–65.
6. Dumitru Stăniloae, The Holy Trinity: In the Beginning There Was Love, trans. Roland Clark (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2012), xi.

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