When the Lord first called me to quit my office job and come home to invest more time in ministry to the Kingdom, He wasted no time in eradicating all that didn’t fit that new life–obligations, desires, volunteerism, time-wasters, nearly everything on which I spent any amount of time.  He cut and He cut and He cut.  

So when He started having me say yes to things again, I was a little thrown off.  I was loving my days spent almost entirely with Him alone, the relaxed nature of my schedule and obligations.  Then, all the sudden, I kept hearing Him say yes over and over and my calendar began to get rather full once again.  

Over the course of those next months, I came to learn that God didn’t intend for this to be a long season with an empty schedule, just a long season of a schedule empty of fruitless things.  I learned a ton in those months.  Prior to that season, I had this thought somewhere in me that God was pleased with what I had offered and when I was done, we could both sit and bask in the glow of that sacrificial offering and have Him tell me what a great thing I’d done.  I wasn’t wrong, I was just shortsighted.  

If all I have to give Him today is a few minutes or a meager offering, He does indeed delight in my gift.  He does indeed see me as the apple of His eye, and He is indeed pleased with my sacrifice.  But.  But what I hadn’t realized before is that He doesn’t have a cap on how many offerings He will accept and be pleased with.  While He was pleased with my all-day-Sunday offering and my daily moment, while He did love the two-hours-a-month and the whatever whatever I laid at His feet, I had not tapped out His love and delight at what I might offer Him.  

Is God pleased when we offer Him our time and our resources?  Yes, He loves to know that we love Him more than those things.  He also blesses those offerings, returning to us all we’ve first offered to Him (no, not necessarily in the financial sense, but usually in something of greater value than that.)  Here’s what became so clear to me: if I give Him my Sunday, He’ll take and bless it.  If I give Him my Monday, He’ll take and bless it.  If I give Him my weeks, my hours, my calendar, my every day, He will take and bless it. The more we offer Him, the more He will take.  The more we allow Him to take, the more He will fill to the max with life-giving, satisfying, and productive things.  

This is a picture of my church…one of them.  I meet with other ladies weekly in this room and pray.  Last week, one of the ladies got there early to set up our table and chairs.  There was a bigger table already set out.  Her first thought was that this table was too big for us, she should change it for one of the smaller ones.  She didn’t.  God filled the bigger one instead.

Sometimes in life we have to realize that if we will just set a bigger table, God may have plans to fill it.

If we’ll just offer Him a bit more than we think He wants, can use, or would like, He will take that sacrifice, burn it on the altar, and light up the whole world in it’s glow.  

Set the bigger table.