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By Tierce Green What do you do when you receive a gift that you don’t want? You might have a pretty good poker face, and say, “Wow! I’ve never received anything like this before!” Or maybe, “You’re so thoughtful!” What you mean is, “What were you thinking?” My favorite is, “You shouldn’t have!” What you mean is, “You really shouldn’t have!” The person who gave it to you may have received it themselves, and now they’ve regifted it to you. You might add it to your own regifting stash, but you had better keep good records, or you could be guilty of back-gifting. Back-gifting is giving someone a gift they gave you. And it’s a good idea to carefully inspect the packaging to make sure there’s not a personal note to you from your Aunt Martha before you regift it to someone else. Things like that happen. That’s bad regifting. The best kind of regifting is the kind Jesus commands us to do. He said, “Freely you have received. Freely give.” We have freely received God’s grace. And it’s our privilege and purpose in life to regift it to others. God’s grace is defined as unmerited favor. It’s redundant to say it, but His grace is a free gift. No amount of religious works, good behavior, or acts of social justice can earn it. It’s God’s love and kindness towards undeserving people. It’s His gift of forgiveness and salvation, and our adoption and blessing through Jesus that we have freely received. Now, why wouldn’t we be passionate about freely regifting that? I think we make it more complicated than it is. I grew up in a church hearing words like “witnessing,” “evangelism,” and “soul-winning.” Sometimes those labels can shift the emphasis away from who we are to a separate thing we do. Jesus does command us to do something of great importance—to go and make disciples. But for it to be authentic, it’s got to flow from who we are. There are courses to train us and tools to help us share our faith, but if we’re not careful, we can become more transactional and less relational. Our tendency is to sound like a telemarketer following a script, with responses to our questions driving a canned presentation from a flow chart, aimed at closing the deal. I call that bad regifting. We can learn a lot from a First-Century church in Thessalonica that excelled in the art of regifting the grace they had received. Click to watch this 35-minute message from 1 Thessalonians Chapter 1.
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