[Excerpt from Craig
Hill, Living on the Third River]
 Have
you ever thought about funding Kingdom work from God’s perspective? God has an
infinite supply of resources. However we usually see that churches and
ministries doing Kingdom work have a very limited and scarce supply of
resources. Why? Does God not want to supply our needs? No, this is not the
problem. In Matthew 6 Jesus describes how God provides the basic needs of
sparrows and lilies without their sowing or reaping or toiling or spinning. In
other words, their provision is not dependent upon their works. Thus Jesus
teaches that
basic
provision for life is made by your Heavenly Father just because He loves you.
This is what I have come to
call “Sparrow Faith”.
How do resources get from God’s supply into the hands of the end-user
ministries? This happens primarily though people. Each
Christian is like a pipeline though which God desires to flow financial
resources into the Kingdom. However,
many of the pipelines are extremely clogged and leaky. Most of what God puts
down the pipe never makes it out the other end.
Now suppose you were the person who decides how much resource to release into
each pipe? How much are
you going to release into a clogged pipe? If
Sparrow Faith is not established, fear will cause most of God’s resources to
be collected in the pipeline. There’s no use for those resources just becoming
stagnant, like the Dead Sea. So, probably you’d put just enough down there for
each family to use but no more.
 How much
resource would you put down a leaky pipe?
There
is no point in sending huge quantities down this pipe, as it will be improperly
used. If there is too much debt then much of the resources is siphoned out of
the pipeline in the form of interest. If there is not a fixed budget for
personal consumption, then most of the resources is consumed on making a bigger,
better and more comfortable pipe. This must be very frustrating for the Lord.
Instead the majority of resources will of course be sent down the most
efficient pipe, so that it will be utilized to bring the most benefit to the
greatest number of people.
Craig Hill, Living on the Third River, pp 27-28, 44-45
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Sparrow Faith & Water-tight Pipes
