Capacity to receive God’s blessing

Peter and his friends had one net. God provided one net full of fish. But he did not provide more than one net full. (John 21)

The mother and her two sons filled every jar they had and every jar their neighbors had. It was not just a few, but many jars. But when all the jars were full, the flow of oil stopped. (2 Kings 4)

Peter, James and John went fishing when Jesus encouraged them to try again after a long, fruitless night. They “filled both boats so full that they began to sink.” Two boats. Two boats full of fish. But not three boats of fish, because there were only two boats.

I’ve spoken on this before.

God blesses us to the limits of our capacity. He stewards his blessings to not exceed our capacity. If we want more of God’s blessing, we must increase our capacity to receive.

Building capacity is the focus of our operational task in Campus Crusade for Christ. It’s the drumbeat we are marching with in operational areas. Capacity to sustain and increasingly accelerate everyone knowing someone who truly follows Jesus.

One of the things we are asking God to do is to help our staff around the world partner with donors to receive 100% of their financial need every month. There are four parts to seeing this dream become reality.

1. Training in the skills of how to approach ministry partnership and growth in faithful trust that God will provide. One form of this training called DMPD is expanding around the world.
2. A  donation process for the donor to send his or her monthly donation to the ministry. In many countries, this can be through a bank check or credit card. One way we are doing this in more challenging places is through mobile phones as I wrote recently. We call this the mGiving project.
3. A financial process to receive the donation, receipt the donor, deposit the funds into each staff member’s accounts, and pay salaries and ministry expenses. We do this through the Donorwise and Microsoft Dynamics tools which we have packaged into the Financial ConneXion.
4. A reporting process to inform staff of the donations so they can personally thank the donors and report ministry activity to their partners. One way we are doing this is through the TntMPD and Data.Server tools.

We are building the capacity by faith that God will provide the blessings. When the DMPD training was done in one part of the world, there was a 400% increase in funding in one month! We want to be ready for God to provide that blessing everywhere.