It Is FinishedSample

“Deserving”

Do you know the story of the Little Red Hen? It’s the children’s story in which a little red hen finds some grains of wheat and asks the duck, the pig, and the cat for help in all the different stages of making bread. None of them want to help her plant the wheat, harvest wheat, take the wheat to the miller, and so on. When she finally takes a hot and fresh loaf of bread out of the oven, though, and needs help eating it, the other animals finally do what to help! “No you won’t,” said the Little Red Hen. “You wouldn’t help me plant the seed, cut the wheat, go to the miller, make the dough, or bake the bread. Now my three chicks and I will eat this bread ourselves!”

This is how the world works: if you don’t put in, you don’t get to take out. You don’t get to reap where you did not sow. Ronald Reagan even told a version of this story in which the Little Red Hen was forced to share her bread with those who hadn’t worked for it and lost her motivation to keep working hard, which resulted in the entire barnyard ending up in poverty! If the moral of the story is that you can’t reap the benefits of something you didn’t work for, Reagan took it one step further and said that if you were to get the benefits of something you didn’t work for, it would ruin everything.

Though the world works this way, Christianity doesn’t. We have a God who doesn’t require that we be involved in the recipe for salvation. We have a God who does the planting, the cutting, the carrying, the kneading, and the baking all by Himself, and who then offers us delicious bread to eat. We take out, though we don’t put in; we reap where we do not sow. God’s generosity doesn’t ruin everything; it pours out every good gift on us, His underserving children.