God's Inheritance

Passage: Psalm 50; Ephesians 1

What do you get the person who has everything?  If you have a wealthy friend or family member, this is a dilemma you face every Christmas and birthday.  If that wealthy friend or family member is insecure and capricious, the dilemma becomes a game.  The gift becomes an emblem of your love and loyalty, and every special event becomes a pass/fail proposition. 

Throughout history people have thought of the gods as insecure and capricious.  Relating to the divine has been a pass/fail proposition, as human beings have tried to figure out what offering or sacrifice might win the favor of those who have everything.  The one true God constantly encounters people who are enslaved to this way of thinking.  People who believe that God is insecure and capricious, and demands sacrifice and offering as a way of appeasing his wrath; boosting his ego; earning his love.  What the one true God communicates again and again is that he doesn’t need anything from us.  In Psalm 50 God tells his people,

I bring no charges against you concerning your sacrifices or concerning your burnt offerings, which are ever before me. I have no need of a bull from your stall or of goats from your pens, for every animal of the forest is mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird in the mountains, and the insects in the fields are mine. If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is mine, and all that is in it.

We can’t offer God anything that isn’t already his. 

So what does God want?

In Ephesians 1, Paul refers repeatedly to “God’s inheritance.”  Paul is clearly talking about the gifts and blessings God offers us.  Through Jesus Christ, Paul says, God has claimed us as children and full heirs of the riches of heaven.  The inheritance comes in installments.  We get to enjoy some of it now, via the Holy Spirit, who assures us of God’s love and begins to make us new.  We’ll experience it fully when Jesus comes back.  God’s inheritance is God’s gift to us.

And yet God’s inheritance is also something God receives.  Paradoxically it’s an inheritance that flows two ways.  But what could God possibly be waiting to receive?  What do you give the one who has everything?  The one thing no one else can give.  Yourself.  Mother’s Day is coming up. This week countless kids will go shopping with their parents’ cash or credit cards.  They’ll give their moms gifts their moms have essentially paid for themselves.  And yet countless moms will be deeply moved and gratified by these gifts.  Why?  Because the gifts are symbolic of what the parent wants most: the love of their child.  Symbolic of the reality that this child, who has occupied the deepest part of your heart since their birth, has a place in their heart for you, too. 

God owns everything.  He owns you.  He owns the money you donate and the time you volunteer.  God doesn’t need that stuff.  But God can’t take your love.  He can’t own it unless you give it to him.  God has given himself in love to all humanity.  What God awaits is the moment we reciprocate.  Do not doubt that God loves you.  He knew you before you were born and reached out to you in love even then.  He poured out his life for you; and continues to pour his life into you.  The question is whether you will love God back.  The love God has shown you until now is a deposit on an incomparable inheritance.  Your love is the inheritance God is waiting for.