Sermon Bible Commentary
1 Chronicles 29:14
I. The nature of the gift. It was a gift distinctly for the public good, a gift which brought back no profit to the giver save as he shared in the public good.
II. The source of David's and the people's joy. (1) Giving under the constraint of love is the most joyful exercise of the human powers. (2) The joy man takes in the accomplishment of a noble public object is the purest and loftiest of all human joys. (3) I suppose a vision passed before David's sight of what that work would be to man, and would do for man, through ages. (4) Concord in good works realises perhaps more than anything in our experience the angelic benediction "Peace on earth and goodwill to men."
III. The reason of the praise. (1) It is God's inspiration. (2) Praise and bless the Lord, who inspires this spirit, for it commands an abounding blessing.
J. Baldwin Brown, The Sunday Afternoon,p. 362.
These words plainly express a truth which rises high above the occasion to which they immediately refer. All the blessings of this life, they tell us, are God's gifts; and here is a motive for generous gifts, namely, that, give God what we may, it is already His own. "All things come of Thee."
I. This is true, first of all, of that which was in David's mind of material possessions, of property. Property is both originally, and as long as we hold it, the gift of God.
II. So it is with the powers of the mind. God gives them, and we hold them, so long as He pleases, and no longer. There are days when we feel that the higher and more original powers of the mind are just as little within our control as the weather, and the sense of this may well suggest from whom indeed we hold them, and how precariously.
III. "All things come of Thee." Need it be said that this especially applies to those powers by which our souls are raised to a higher level than unassisted nature knows of, and are enabled to hold communion with the Being who made us? Grace, which proceeds, as the word implies, from God's bounty, is itself much more than mere favour, such as results in no form of active assistance. Grace is an operative, impelling, controlling force; it is a Divine presence in the regenerate man.
IV. "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights." This great truth should express itself in the spirit of sacrifice, resting on the conviction that whatever we give to God is already His. And the spirit of sacrifice is engaged constantly in twofold activity: it is either consenting with humble resignation, if not with glad acquiescence, to that which God exacts, or it is making some effort of its own to acknowledge the debt of which it is never unconscious.
H. P. Liddon, Penny Pulpit,No. 1101.
Reference: 1 Chronicles 29:14. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. ix., p. 91.