The Extravagance of God

God is not thrifty with you. He never has been. That is the scandal at the center of everything.

We're used to a careful world. Careful with our time, careful with our money, careful with our affections. We portion things out. We measure the pour. We keep a little back for ourselves, because you never know.

Then you open the Bible and the first thing you meet is a God who is not careful at all.

He speaks and there are galaxies — hundreds of billions of them, most of which no human eye will ever see. He fills the sea with creatures no fisherman will ever catch. He hangs a sunset over an empty stretch of prairie every single evening and no one applauds and He does it again tomorrow. The whole creation is a God who cannot stop giving, throwing beauty into corners of the universe where nobody is looking.

That is who made you.

And then, as if the extravagance of creation were not enough, He goes further. He does not merely make — He comes. The infinite God squeezes Himself into a Jewish girl's womb in a backwater town, is born in a feed trough, grows up smelling of sawdust, and eventually lets Roman nails go through His hands. For you. For a species that had, at that point, done nothing but disappoint Him.

Read the Gospels slowly and you'll notice Jesus is always the most in every room. The most patient with the ones nobody has time for. The most generous with the wine at a wedding He was barely invited to. The most tender with a woman caught in a sin the crowd is already picking up rocks about. The most reckless with forgiveness — handing it out to tax collectors and thieves and a man dying next to Him on a cross, as if grace cost Him nothing. (It cost Him everything.)

The Pharisees hated Him for it. Extravagant love always offends the careful. It makes the rule-keepers nervous. If God is that free with His mercy, what was the point of all our fences?

But listen: this is the God who is actually there.

Not a bookkeeper tallying your last week. Not a distant executive reviewing your file. Not a stern father with His arms crossed on the porch, waiting to see if you'll be good enough this time.

A Father who — when the runaway son is still a long way off, still smelling of pigs, still rehearsing his little apology speech — runs. Robes hiked up, dignity thrown to the wind, running down the road because he has been watching for months, because love this big cannot walk. (Luke 15.)

Do you know how much of your life you've spent editing that scene? Making the father sterner, the reception cooler, the terms stricter, because a God that lavish seems too good to be true? Most of us have a small, safe god in our heads and we call Him Yahweh, and we spend our lives wondering why prayer feels like talking into a filing cabinet.

The real God is not in the filing cabinet. The real God is on the road, running.

"See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God." (1 John 3:1.) The Greek there — potapēn — is closer to what sort of exotic, otherworldly, foreign kind of love is this? John cannot get over it. Decades in, an old man on Patmos, and he still cannot get over it.

Neither should we.

So this Saturday, before you check the news, before you make your lists, before you tell yourself the tired lie that you have to earn your keep in the kingdom — stop. Sit with this: the God who made every galaxy is not stingy with you. He is not weighing you. He is not tired of you. He is, at this very moment, more generous with His love than you have the categories to receive.

Open your hands. He is already pouring.

🌾 You are loved more than you can bear. Let Him carry it.

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