Quotes about Gifts

Give all your gifts away in service to the world.  If you want to paint, don't wait for a grant, paint a wall in your town that looks drab and uninviting.  You never know who is going to see that wall. Whatever it is you want to do, give it away in service to your community.

My biggest concern about the effects of the prosperity movement is that it diminishes Christ by making him less central and less satisfying than his gifts.

If we only trust Christ to give us gifts and not himself as the all-satisfying gift, then we do not trust him in a way that honors him as our treasure. We simply honor the gifts. They are what we really want, not him.

The great danger of riches is that our affections will be carried away from God to His gifts.

The most precious gifts you can think of are not ends in themselves. They all lead to God. Ultimately, that is what all His gifts are for.

The way we honor Christ in death is to treasure Jesus above the gift of life, and the way we honor Christ in life is to treasure Jesus above life's gifts.

By nature, we get more pleasure from God's gifts then from Himself.

God is not glorified if the foundation of our gratitude for the gospel is the worth of its gifts and not the value of the Giver. If gratitude for the gospel is not rooted in the glory of God beneath the gift of God, it is disguised idolatry. May God grant us a heart to see in the gospel the light of the glory of God in the face of Christ. May he grant us to delight in him for who he is, so that all our gratitude for his gifts will be the echo of our joy in the excellency of the Giver!

all the gifts of God are given for the sake of revealing more of God's glory, so that the proper use of them is to rest our affections not on them but through them on God alone. What I mean by resting our affections is that the desires of our hearts find their end point-their goal, their resting place-only in God, even though, as it were, they ride up to God on a thousand gifts.

But when we commend Christ as the one who satisfies our soul forever—even when there is no health, wealth, and prosperity—then Christ is magnified as more precious than all those gifts.

Would you want to go to heaven if God were not there, only His gifts?

If the beams are beautiful, the sun is even more beautiful. God's aim is not that we merely admire His gifts, but even more, His glory.