Merry Twelfth Day of Christmas—Delivering God’s Gifts, Part 1

So far this Christmas season we’ve we’ve looked at the nature of God’s gifts and how we should respond to them, but let’s shift our focus to how He gives His gifts. More specifically, let’s see what we can learn about that from two Old Testament saints, Joseph and Daniel.

Many of God’s gifts are temporal; they are practical helps for us and others as we go through the earthly phase of our lives.  Some examples of these are marriage, family life, church community, corporal acts of mercy, and civil government. God uses these things to deliver His goodness in tangible ways.

But God doesn’t just rain them down like manna from heaven, He looks to us to deliver them. Godly folks have to do their part for those gifts to deliver the full goodness God intends. 

That’s where Joseph and Daniel come in. They are good examples of what it looks like when that happens.

Although both men played key roles in salvation history, they also had “day jobs” that delivered God’s love via His temporal gift of government. Joseph’s work kept millions from starving. See Genesis 41:1-42:6.  Daniel contributed to fairness and honesty in government. See Daniel 6:1-6. See also Daniel 13:1-14:22 (not in most protestant Bibles).  Both men delivered a lot of God’s love by doing a lot of day-to-day good.

And of particular importance, they were particularly effective because they did it not only for their earthly “bosses,” but also tried to glorify God in how they did it.  See e.g. Genesis 39:8-9, 41:14-16; Daniel 2:14-19, 6:17 & 19; Hebrews 11:32-34.  As St. Paul would later put it, they worked “willingly for the sake of the Lord and not for the sake of human beings.” Ephesians 6:7. See also, Colossians 3:23.
We should follow their examples. God calls each of us to take some part in delivering His temporal gifts. Our individual roles are probably not as dramatic as Joseph’s or Daniel’s, but everyone of us has some responsibility for delivering God’s temporal helps. Each of us therefore needs to get to work, and to consciously try to glorify God in how we work.