God’s Indescribable Gift

Merry Christmas from Growing Fathers! One of my favorite Christmas verses is 1 Corinthians 9:15:

“Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift!”

As part of my role of overseeing children’s ministries at our church, I get to teach junior church every four months. My lessons focus on building Christian character. Each month, we study a characteristic of God that we can also have (like mercy or love), talk about how He displays that character quality, and then discuss how we should display it as well. In May, our theme was “generosity.” I showed the children 1 Corinthians 9:15 and asked them, “What do you think this passage means by ‘the indescribable gift’?”

How would you answer that question?

In the context, Paul is encouraging the Corinthian church to give generously to a collection he is taking for poor believers living in Jerusalem. He seeks to motivate them by sharing the example of the Macedonian believers, who were very generous despite their own poverty.

However, Paul goes on to point out that the Macedonians were also following someone else’s example. The generous Macedonians were following the example of God, the greatest Gift-Giver.

James 1:17 says, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.”

So God is the Gift-giver in 1 Corinthians 9:15, but what is the gift—this ultimate, indescribable gift that Paul mentions but does not name in the passage? Picture your child’s nativity set on the coffee table. The gift is a person; the gift is Jesus.

In an effort to parse out all the blessings of salvation (including regeneration, forgiveness, redemption, adoption, sanctification, glorification, Spirit-filling, etc.), we must not forget that at the heart of all of these gifts is a relationship with God Himself.

John 17:3 says, “And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.” Eternal life is defined as knowing Jesus.

Do you consider God Himself to be the ultimate gift?

If you worship God for what He can give you, you’ve missed the whole point. God is the most beautiful, desirable thing in the universe. Do you desire the Gift?

The apostle Paul said, “I count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ” (Phil 3:8). Oh that we would share that same passion!

“Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift”!