A line in a reflection published this week has been following me around all day. A writer at America magazine put it plainly: the Holy Spirit isn't stingy with grace — so why are we? His point was that we carry around an imposed logic of stinginess, a kind of mental accounting that limits what God has never limited.
I know that accounting. I suspect you do too. It rarely announces itself. It shows up as a slight tightening when a certain name comes up in conversation. As the internal note we keep on someone — not a grudge exactly, just a file. As the quiet conviction that some people have used up their allotment of second chances and the window is now closed.
Without measure
Scripture closes that argument before it starts. Speaking of Christ, John writes: "For the one whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for God gives the Spirit without limit" (John 3:34).
Without limit. Not in careful portions. Not drawn down against a balance that might run low by Thursday. The Greek there carries the sense of "not by measure" — no cup, no scale, no rationing. God does not pour the Spirit the way you pour an expensive thing, watching the line. He pours the way a river pours.
And that matters enormously for how we treat each other, because almost every stingy thing I have ever done with people traces back to a scarcity I believed about God. If grace is a limited commodity, then every bit someone else receives is a bit I don't get. If mercy is a fixed pie, then forgiving the person who wronged me feels like losing. Scarcity makes us small. It makes us the older brother on the porch, doing arithmetic while the music plays inside.
Where the narrowness hides
Here is what I notice as I walk alongside people: our stinginess is almost never with strangers. We are generous with strangers. It costs us nothing. The narrowness shows up close in — with the family member who keeps making the same decision, the friend who apologized but not the way we wanted, the person in the next pew whose story we think we already know.
It also shows up toward ourselves. Some of you extend grace to everyone but the face in the mirror. You believe God forgives, genuinely — you'd tell a hurting friend so without hesitating — and then you hold yourself to a standard God has never applied to you. That is the same scarcity in a different coat.
Paul had a word for the alternative: "Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom" (2 Corinthians 3:17). Freedom is not just freedom from guilt. It is freedom from the ledger. Freedom to stop keeping score on people.
You cannot squeeze it out of yourself
Now — and I want to be careful here — an article like this can easily become one more thing to fail at. Be more generous. Try harder to be gracious. Most of us have attempted that, and it lasts about four days.
Generosity of spirit isn't manufactured by effort; it's received. It is a fruit, not a product — "the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness" (Galatians 5:22). Fruit grows on a branch connected to something. Which is why the honest prayer isn't "God, make me nicer." It's "God, pour out more of You on me, because I have gone narrow and I can't widen myself."
I believe He answers that. Not as a theory from church history — now, in ordinary people, in Ravenna, this week. I see hearts soften that had every right to stay hard. I see somebody who swore they were finished with a relationship pick up the phone. That is not willpower. That is the Spirit doing what the Spirit does, without measure.
If there is a name that surfaced in you while you read this — and there usually is — bring it. We gather to pray Tuesday, October 27 at 11am, and that is exactly the kind of thing worth carrying in: not a complaint about the person, but a request that God would widen you toward them.
And if you came to this already feeling like the one who has drawn down too much grace to ask for more — hear it again. Without limit. The cup He is pouring into your life has no line on it. It never did.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.