Freely Ye Have Received, and Most of It Was Not Money

Jesus sent twelve men out with a very short set of instructions, and one line in it is about the terms of the whole thing.

He tells them what to do: heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils. And then he says seven words about how it is going to work.

Freely ye have received, freely give.

Now the first half of that is doing something people rush past. Freely ye have received. Before He says a word about what they are supposed to hand out, He reminds them that everything they are carrying arrived as a gift.

They had spent time with Him. They had watched things nobody else had watched. They had been taught privately, asked questions in a boat, been corrected in front of each other, and had things explained to them that the crowds only got in parables.

None of that had cost them a thing.

And the instruction is that whatever comes out is going to go out on the same terms it came in on.

The receiving is named first

Read the order of the sentence, because it is doing the work.

Freely ye have received, freely give. (Matthew 10:8, King James Version)

Freely ye have received.

That comes first, and it is what makes the second half possible. A person who thinks they built everything they know has a very good argument for charging for it. A person who remembers it was given has a much harder time holding it.

And that is the honest mechanism here. Generosity is almost never produced by an appeal. It is produced by an accurate memory of where something came from.

You have been given more than you produced, and a person who remembers that has never once found it hard to hand something over. That is not me guilting anybody. Matthew 10:8 puts the receiving before the giving in the same sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a person's memory accurate about their own supply.

Most of what people carry is not money

Here is what I actually want to press on, because this site talks about money constantly and this article is not about money.

Think about what is in an ordinary person's head after twenty years of doing anything.

Somebody knows how to fix a thing that costs three hundred dollars to have fixed. Somebody knows how to talk to an office and get an answer. Somebody knows how to read a lease, or run a room, or start a hard conversation, or cook for eleven people on a budget, or manage a shift so nobody quits.

All of that came from somewhere. Some of it was taught, some of it was learned by getting it wrong for years, and none of it is available to the person three streets over who needs it right now.

And most of us have never handed one piece of it to anybody, not because we are stingy, but because it does not occur to us that it counts.

You are carrying something that would change somebody's month, and it has never once needed to be money to be worth handing over. Matthew 10:8 names healing and deliverance rather than a collection, and the Spirit of God is the one who shows a person what is actually in their hands.

Why the knowing stays put

Two reasons, and both of them are honest.

The first is that a person's own knowledge is invisible to them. Whatever somebody has done for twenty years feels obvious, and a thing that feels obvious does not feel like a gift. Nobody wakes up thinking that knowing how to change a fitting is a resource.

The second is that giving money is fast and teaching is slow. A check takes a minute. Sitting with somebody while they do it badly takes six Saturdays, and they will do it wrong in front of the person teaching them, who then has to sit there and not take the tool back.

So the expensive form of generosity is usually the time, not the money, and most people who are genuinely generous with the second have never been asked for the first.

You have hours that are worth more than a check, and the slower gift has never once been the lesser one. 2 Timothy 2:2 says the things thou hast heard commit thou to faithful men who shall be able to teach others also, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person patience for a slow handover.

The chain in that verse

And that second passage is worth sitting on, because Paul describes four generations in one sentence.

The things you heard from me, commit to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also.

Paul, Timothy, faithful men, others. Four links, in one line, and the whole thing depends on each person handing over what they were handed rather than storing it.

That is the design. Nothing in the New Testament is set up to end with the person who received it, and a person who takes what they know to the grave has broken a chain that was supposed to run past them.

I say that as somebody who did it wrong for years. I knew a couple of things and I kept them in a truck cab, and it never once occurred to me that a sixteen year old on my street would have paid for what I had for free.

You are a link and not a destination, and nothing you were given has ever once been meant to stop with you. 2 Timothy 2:2 runs four generations in one sentence, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a person willing to hand over what they only just got good at.