When the God who owns all things asks for one
Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO
There is a moment in the wilderness of Sinai that I have long passed over too quickly, and I repent of that carelessness now. The thunder has quieted. The mountain has ceased its trembling. Moses has descended from the cloud with the tablets of stone. The covenant has been ratified with blood – the blood of oxen, sprinkled first on the altar and then on the people, with the solemn declaration: *”This is the blood of the covenant that the LORD has made with you in accordance with all these words.”* (Exodus 24:8, NLT).
The Law has been spoken. The moral architecture of a nation has been laid down, word by thundering word, on the mountain that no one was permitted to touch. And then – in the sacred hush that follows the giving of the commandments, in the strange silence after the fire – God speaks again. Not about sin and its remedy. Not about judgment and its apparatus. Not about law and its demands. He speaks about a house. His house. He tells Moses He wants to come and live among His people. And the very first thing He says about how that house is to be built – the foundational word, the word that precedes every measurement, every specification, every golden ring and every acacia plank – is this: bring Me an offering from every person whose heart moves them willingly to give it…
What does this mean for me? What does it mean for the interior of my ordinary life, this morning, in this place? That is the question I am bringing to this verse today – and I am bringing it honestly, which means I am bringing it with trembling, because this verse cuts close to the bone of the religious life I have been living. Before I go even a sentence further, I must stop and ask myself – not as a rhetorical device but as a genuine examination of conscience – what have I actually been giving God?
Not in theory, not in aspiration, not in the version of myself I present to Sunday morning. In the actual, daily, unglamorous reality of my interior life: what have I been bringing, and has it come from a willing heart? When I give my time – to prayer, to service, to the needs of others – is the giving from the moved and open centre of who I am, or is it the tax of the religious life, paid with the resentment of one who gives because they feel they must, because the cultural expectation of their community requires it, because the guilt of not giving is more painful than the discomfort of giving?
Is what I bring to God each day an act of the heart, or is it the performance of a heart – the carefully maintained appearance of willingness covering the reality of managed compliance? Do I even know the difference anymore? Have I been in the Tabernacle-building business for so long – gathering and arranging and constructing the outward forms of devotion – that I have lost touch with what it felt like, once, to bring something because I simply could not help myself?
There was once a great king who possessed everything that earth and sea and mountain could offer – mines of gold beneath his hills, forests of cedar on his slopes, weavers in his workshops who could produce cloth of impossible fineness, and quarries that yielded stone so beautiful that travellers stopped on distant roads to describe it with their hands when words failed. He had built, from all this abundance, a palace that caused entire delegations to fall silent when they entered it. It was vast and magnificent, built by the skilled and the conscripted and the paid, assembled from every resource his kingdom commanded. And the king lived in it, and everything was arranged to perfection, and he was, in all the ways kings measure such things, surrounded by splendour.
But there was a problem – one that the court did not speak of openly, one that the king himself could only acknowledge in the long silences of the night. In all that palace, with all its dimensions and all its grandeur, there was no room that felt like home. The marble was cold and true. The gold reflected light but gave none. The vast ceilings amplified silence into loneliness. The palace had been built from everything the earth could produce, assembled by every skill his kingdom commanded – but it had been built without love. Every craftsman had been paid. Every stone-setter had worked under supervision. Every weaver had fulfilled a contract. And what is built from contract produces compliance, not devotion. What is assembled from compulsion produces a structure, not a sanctuary.
So the king did something that astonished his court. He went to his people – not his architects, not his treasury officials, not the guilds of his skilled craftsmen – he went to the ordinary people of his kingdom and he said: I want to build a second dwelling. Not a palace. A home. And I will accept only what each of you brings of your own free will, from your own heart, without compulsion, without payment, without penalty for those who bring nothing and without reward beyond my gratitude for those who give. What you bring is yours to give. What you hold back is yours to keep. I am not commandeering anything. But what is freely given from a willing heart – that, and only that, is what I will use to build the place where I intend actually to live.
What followed humbled the court’s expectations utterly. A shepherd brought the wool from his finest ewe. An old woman brought a length of blue cloth she had been saving for her daughter’s wedding. A fisherman brought bronze clasps he had kept for years without knowing why. A child brought a smooth stone she had carried in her pocket since the day she found it by the river. A merchant brought gold without counting it first, without recording the amount, without requiring a receipt. The court officials shook their heads – this is not how palaces are built. This is not how great structures are assembled. You cannot build a worthy dwelling for a king from the odds and ends of ordinary people’s love.
But the king knew something his court did not. He understood that a dwelling built from willing hearts would hold something that all his commanded palaces could never contain: the presence of the one who gave it. Every thread of that blue cloth would carry the old woman’s love into the walls. Every bronze clasp would carry the fisherman’s hope. Every smooth stone from the child’s pocket would carry something as precious as any gem in his treasury: the pure, uncalculating gift of a child who simply wanted to give something beautiful to someone she trusted. And in a dwelling saturated with the offerings of willing hearts, the king would not merely be accommodated.
He would be surrounded, in every wall and every beam, by love – freely given, impossible to manufacture, irreplaceable by anything his wealth could command. When the dwelling was finished and the court expected him to return to the palace, they found him in the small house. Someone asked: Why here? And he said only this: Because here is where I am wanted. Not hosted out of protocol. Not accommodated out of duty. Wanted. And what a willing heart builds is always this, and only this: a place where God is not merely endured but desired.
*”Tell the people of Israel to bring me their sacred offerings. Accept the contributions from all whose hearts are moved to offer them.”* – (NLT)
*”Tell the Israelites to get offerings for me. Receive whatever offerings they wish to give.”* – (MSG)
*”Tell the Israelites to make an offering to me. Receive whatever offerings they wish to give.”* – (GNT)
*”Tell the people of Israel to take up a sacred offering for me. Receive the sacred offering from every person whose heart moves them to give it.”* – (TPT)
*”Speak unto the children of Israel, that they take for me an offering: of every man whose heart maketh him willing ye shall take my offering.”* – (RV)
*”Speak to the children of Israel, that they bring Me an offering. From everyone who gives it willingly with his heart you shall take My offering.”* – (NKJV)
I want to begin where the verse begins – with the word *”Speak.”* The Lord says to Moses: Speak. Not: wait until someone asks. Not: if the mood is right. Not: suggest to the people when it is convenient. Speak. This is divine initiative at its most arresting. Before a single Israelite has thought about giving, before any community announcement has been made, before the need has been published or the campaign has been launched, God breaks the silence. He initiates. He is the one who wants the Tabernacle. He is the one whose longing to dwell close to His people drives the entire enterprise into existence. And in this breaking of the silence, I hear something that has the force of a revelation: God is not waiting for me to think of Him.
He is already thinking of me. He speaks first. He reaches first. He initiates the movement toward closeness that my own heart – too distracted or too wounded or too self-occupied or too dulled by years of religious routine – has been too inert to begin. Before I think to give, He has already asked. Before I consider what I have to bring, He has already told me that He wants something from me specifically and that He has already named it as His own. And the fact that He speaks first is not a burden. It is the oldest love letter in human history. To be spoken to is to be noticed. To be asked is to be valued. God does not ask for what He does not want.
And here is a question I need to sit with until it does its work in me: why does the God who spoke the world into existence – the God whose own book says in Psalm 50:10–12 (NKJV): *”For every beast of the forest is Mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills. I know all the birds of the mountains, and the wild beasts of the field are Mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell you; for the world is Mine, and all its fullness”* – why does this God ask human beings for offerings? He does not need our gold. He does not need our acacia wood or our blue thread or our goat hair. The entire planet is His raw material. He could speak and the Tabernacle would rise complete and perfect from the desert floor without a single human hand involved. He could will it and gold would flow from the hillside and linen would weave itself in the air. *”The earth is the LORD’s, and all its fullness, the world and those who dwell therein.”* (Psalm 24:1, NKJV). He owns everything. He needs nothing. So why does He ask?
Because God is not building a structure. He is building a relationship. And relationships – genuine, living, breathing, mutual relationships – are not constructed by divine fiat. They are woven from the willing participation of every heart involved. The Tabernacle was never, at its deepest level, about the gold and the linen. It was about the willingness of the hearts that brought them. The dwelling God wanted to build among His people in the wilderness was not made of acacia wood. It was made of love. And love – this is the heart of the verse, the mystery inside the mystery – love cannot be commanded. It can be invited. It can be asked for. It can be received when it is freely offered. But the moment you compel it, it ceases to be what you wanted. God wants love. And love, by its very nature, must come willingly – or it is not love at all.
The word translated as “offering” in this verse carries, in its deepest root, the sense of something *lifted up* – something elevated, presented with deliberate upward intention. It is not a contribution in the passive modern sense of dropping something into a box as you pass by. It is an act of active elevation – I take what I have, I hold it up, I direct it consciously and intentionally toward God. And in that lifting, something happens to both the offering and the one who offers. The offering is sanctified – it is moved out of the category of the merely useful or the merely beautiful and into the category of the holy, the set-apart, the dedicated. And the one who lifts it is also, in the lifting, transformed – because you cannot truly hold something up toward God without being, in that moment, in some real sense lifted yourself. The act of genuine willing offering is an act of interior ascent. The hand goes up, and the heart rises with it.
Now I must press into the most critical phrase in the verse, the phrase that carries the full theological weight of this divine request: *”willingly with his heart.”* The New Living Translation says *”whose hearts are moved to offer them.”* The Revised Version says *”whose heart maketh him willing.”* The Amplified Bible opens it up to reveal “every man whose heart impels and makes him willing” – the heart is the engine, the initiating force, the source of the movement. Not the law. Not the tradition. Not the social expectation of the community. Not the fear of religious penalty or the desire for religious recognition.
The heart. God is attaching to His request a qualifier so narrow and so radical that it reframes the entire nature of what offering means: I will receive what the heart moves you to bring, and nothing else. He is not simply asking for a collection. He is insisting on a particular quality of interior engagement without which, apparently, the gold is not the gold He wants and the linen is not the linen His house can be built from. He only wants what is freely given from a willing heart.
This is the lie I must now name and dismantle, because I have lived inside it for too long without recognising its shape. I have believed – somewhere in the architecture of my religious assumptions, buried below the level of conscious theology but operational in my daily life – that what matters to God is the act of giving, regardless of the state of the heart behind it. That if I fulfil the obligation – the tithe, the church attendance, the ministry commitment, the service rota – then whether or not my heart is genuinely in it is, in some sense, beside the point. I have believed that God, like an institution that needs its machinery maintained, cares primarily about consistent deliverables, and that the interior state of the deliverer is a pastoral concern, a nice extra, but not the substance of the requirement.
Exodus 25:2 dismantles this belief with a single instruction. When God told Moses how to take up the collection, He did not say: take from everyone. He said: take from those whose hearts are willing. Let the reluctant keep their gold. Let the resentful hold their silver. Let the grudging take their blue thread home. I am not in the business of building My dwelling from coerced gifts, however valuable the material. I will not live in a house built from the offerings of hearts that were not truly offered with it.
And Paul, writing to the Corinthian church across more than a thousand years of history from this wilderness moment, says exactly the same thing from exactly the same God: *”You must each decide in your heart how much to give. And don’t give reluctantly or in response to pressure. ‘For God loves a cheerful giver.’”* (2 Corinthians 9:7, NLT). The same God. The same requirement. From Sinai to Corinth and forward to this morning: the heart comes first. Always first. Before the amount. Before the frequency. Before the category of gift. The heart. What is your heart doing when you give? Is it present? Is it moved? Is it willing? Without that – without the interior yes that precedes the external act – what you are doing is maintenance, not worship. It is paying dues, not building a dwelling. It is obligation fulfilled, not love expressed.
What strikes me with even greater force is what God does *not* do in this verse. He does not compel. He asks. He could compel. He who parted the Red Sea and shook the mountain of Sinai until the people at its base trembled, He who sent plagues through Egypt and led a nation through the depths of the sea as through dry ground – this God says to Moses: receive what is offered willingly. Do not take what is withheld. Do not manufacture giving through fear, through guilt, through the leveraging of communal pressure. Because a compelled offering cannot build a dwelling place. The materials of compulsion do not have the structural integrity required for the house of a God who is love. Fear produces performance. Obligation produces compliance. But neither produces the Tabernacle. Neither produces the space in which God actually dwells. Only love, freely given, can build what God actually intends to inhabit.
I need to sit with the context that surrounds this verse, because Exodus 25 does not float free of its history. Moses has just come down from forty days in the presence of God on the mountain – forty days in which the blueprint for the covenant community was being formed in the divine mind and communicated to a human one. And immediately before the Tabernacle instructions, in Exodus 24, the covenant was ratified not merely with words but with blood. Moses took the blood of the sacrificed oxen and he said to the people: *”This is the blood of the covenant that the LORD has made with you.”* (Exodus 24:8, NLT).
Blood. Covenant. The most binding and solemn commitment that a people of that era could make. God has just bound Himself to these people in an unbreakable pledge of faithfulness. And the very next word He speaks – the word that follows the covenant, that comes immediately after He has declared His permanent, unconditional commitment to them – is: I want to live with you. Come and build Me a dwelling place. Let me be close.
The Tabernacle is, at its heart, God’s response to His own covenant love. He has bound Himself to His people, and He cannot now be content with a long-distance relationship. He will not be satisfied with annual mountain-top encounters and occasional burning-bush moments. He wants to be in the camp. In the middle of the noise and the ordinary days and the complaints and the cooking fires. *”Have them build me a holy sanctuary so I can live among them.”* (Exodus 25:8, NLT). Live *among* them.
Not above them, not in a distant heaven they look up at. Among. And this desire of God – to be close, to be present, to be Emmanuel, God-with-us – is the heartbeat of the entire biblical narrative from the walking-with-Adam in Eden’s cool of the day to the New Jerusalem of Revelation where *”the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them.”* (Revelation 21:3, NLT). The Tabernacle is one chapter in a love story that was always moving toward Incarnation, toward a body, toward a person, toward Jesus Christ who is the Tabernacle of God with skin on and a heartbeat and tired feet and calloused hands.
Now I must linger over the list of materials that follows in Exodus 25:3–7, because it is one of the most underread passages in the Old Testament and one of the most revealing about the nature of God’s economy. He says, through Moses, receive these things from those whose hearts are willing: gold, silver, and bronze; blue, purple, and scarlet thread; fine linen and goat hair; tanned ram skins and fine leather; acacia wood; olive oil for the lamps; spices for the anointing oil and the fragrant incense; onyx stones and other gems for the priestly garments. Read that list carefully. Notice what is on it: gold and goat hair.
Precious gemstones and tanned leather. The most valuable material available in the ancient world and the most ordinary – the daily provision of the shepherd, the functional product of the herdsman. God is not making a hierarchy of acceptable offerings based on their market value. He is receiving from every stratum of Israelite society – from those who can bring gold and spices, and from those whose most valuable possession is the hair of their goats. What every item on this list has in common is not its value. It is the willing heart that brings it.
This reaches across four thousand years of history and takes me by the shoulder and refuses to let me go. I have lived for years with the quiet belief that what I have to bring God is insufficient. Not impressive enough. Not large enough, not refined enough, not significant enough to warrant placing on the altar beside the extraordinary offerings of those around me. I look at the gold others carry – the extraordinary gifts, the platform ministries, the financial capacities, the intellectual brilliance, the artistic excellence – and I set my goat hair down beside their gold and I withdraw it, because it seems beneath the dignity of the occasion. But God says to Moses: receive the goat hair. Receive it as gladly, as specifically, as deliberately as the gold.
The Tabernacle needs both. The structural coverings of the sanctuary were made of goat hair – eleven panels of it, sewn together, forming the outer tent that contained and protected everything inside. The goat hair was not decoration. It was structure. It was essential. The gold could not function without the framework that the ordinary materials provided. God uses the goat hair and the gold together. He uses my ordinary alongside the extraordinary of others, and together – only together, never in competition with each other – the dwelling is complete.
And there is a detail so beautiful it almost breaks me, hidden in Exodus 38:8 (NLT): *”Bezalel made the bronze washbasin and its bronze stand from bronze mirrors donated by the women who served at the entrance of the Tabernacle.”* Women brought their bronze mirrors. Their looking glasses. The instruments by which they saw their own faces reflected back to them – the only self-reflection available to them in that world – they brought these and gave them up, willingly, so that the bronze basin could be made, in which the priests would wash their hands before approaching God. Think about what this means.
They gave up their self-image, their capacity for self-contemplation, the tools of their own self-regard, so that the instruments of cleansing might exist. The willing heart does not only give what it can spare. The willing heart gives what it loves. And what comes from that giving – the basin of priestly washing – is a type of the one basin that truly cleanses, the blood of Jesus Christ of which John writes: *”the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.”* (1 John 1:7, NLT). Women’s mirrors, willingly surrendered, became the vessel of holy cleansing. My willing heart, whatever mirrors of self-regard I carry that God asks me to set down, can become – in His hands – material for holy purposes I cannot foresee from my present position.
And then something extraordinary happens when the collection is actually taken up – a detail so staggering that I return to it again and again as one returns to a flame on a cold night. In Exodus 36:5–7 (NLT), Bezalel and Oholiab – the craftsmen appointed by God to oversee the Tabernacle’s construction – come to Moses with a remarkable problem: *”We have more than enough materials on hand now to complete the job the LORD has commanded us to do!”* And Moses, astonished, sends word throughout the camp: *”Men and women, don’t prepare any more gifts for the sanctuary. We have enough!”* And the text adds the line that should live in us permanently: *”Their contributions were more than enough to complete the whole project.”*
Moses had to announce – in what may be the most improbable fundraising communication in human history – please stop giving. Stop. We have too much. We cannot use it all. The willing hearts had given until there was surplus. They had not given minimally, cautiously, calculating the legal minimum of their obligation. They had given extravagantly, abundantly, unstoppably – until the craftsmen were overwhelmed by the provision. This is what willing hearts do when God has truly moved them. This is what happens when love is the engine of giving rather than law. You cannot contain it. You cannot predict its quantity. You cannot budget for its generosity. The surplus is always more than the requirement, because love does not calculate its output with the same tools that duty uses.
I think of the Moravian community of Herrnhut – that band of refugees who gathered on the estate of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf in what is now the Czech Republic in the early eighteenth century, and who in August 1727 experienced a visitation of the Spirit so complete and so disorienting that it reshaped the entire purpose and character of their community. They began a prayer watch – one hour for each member of the community, taken in rotation, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week – that continued without interruption for one hundred years.
And from the fire of that sustained intercession, they became the most disproportionately productive missions movement in the history of the church: a community of six hundred people who sent missionaries to the Caribbean, to Greenland, to the indigenous peoples of North America and South America, to South Africa, to Lapland, to places where the name of Christ had not been spoken. Some of those missionaries – learning that the enslaved people of the Danish colonies in the Caribbean could not be reached except by someone willing to live and work alongside them as a fellow slave – actually sold themselves into slavery to reach people who could not otherwise be reached. They were not compelled. No church law required it. No ecclesiastical authority commanded it. Their hearts moved them, having been moved first by the love of God in those hundred years of prayer. Zinzendorf himself said:
Preach the Gospel, die, and be forgotten.
That is the willing heart’s full articulation: give everything, require no recognition, let the offering be its own reward because the One who receives it is reward enough.
I think of Frances Ridley Havergal – the Victorian English hymn-writer and poet whose life was a sustained and increasingly radical experiment in willing surrender. She wrote the hymn that is perhaps the most thorough catalogue of willing offering in the English language:
Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to Thee. Take my moments and my days, let them flow in ceaseless praise. Take my hands and let them move at the impulse of Thy love.”
The hymn was written in February 1874 after a night of intercession in which she described feeling, for the first time, the full reality of being entirely surrendered to God. But what distinguished Havergal from many who sing that hymn was that she lived it into the concrete. In December 1878, she wrote to a friend:
I have been putting away my jewels. I never packed a box with such pleasure in all my life.”
She had gathered everything – rings, chains, brooches, lockets, every piece of jewellery she owned – and given it all to the Church Missionary Society, retaining only a few pieces that held portrait photographs of those she loved. The pleasure she describes in the packing was not the pleasure of performance or of spiritual pride. It was the pleasure that only the willing heart knows: the discovery that the thing you feared losing cost you nothing in the losing and gave you everything in the giving. The Tabernacle she built that December was not made of silver and gold. It was made of willing joy.
Then there is Maximilian Kolbe – the Polish Franciscan priest who stands as perhaps the most literal enactment of the willing offering in the twentieth century. In the summer of 1941, in the killing architecture of Auschwitz, the camp authorities selected ten men to die in a starvation bunker as collective punishment for an escape. One of those selected was Franciszek Gajowniczek, a husband and father who cried out when they called his number: “My wife! My children!” And from the row of condemned men, a figure stepped forward – a priest with round glasses and a habit grown thin, a man whose only institutional power in that place was the power to kneel – and said to the commandant:
I am a Catholic priest. I would like to take his place. He has a wife and children.
The commandant, reportedly stunned into momentary silence by something he had not in all his experience encountered – a willing substitution, a freely chosen exchange – allowed it. Kolbe entered the starvation bunker in place of the father and husband. For two weeks, he sustained those dying with him through prayer and the singing of hymns. When the others had died and he remained alive, he was given a lethal injection. He died on August 14, 1941, his arm extended willingly for the needle that ended what his choice had already, in the deepest sense, given away. He was not compelled. He was not required. No law of man or institution commanded his step forward. His heart moved him.
Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.”* (John 15:13, NKJV).
That is Exodus 25:2 taken to the extreme of the possible – a willing offering so total that nothing remained.
And all of this – every willing human sacrifice, every act of free and costly love in the long history of the human response to God – every thread of it leads back to and is ultimately explained by One whose willing heart preceded and makes possible every other willing heart that has ever opened. Before Kolbe stepped forward in Auschwitz. Before Havergal packed her jewels. Before the Moravians crossed oceans. Before a single woman in the Sinai wilderness brought her bronze mirror to the collection – before all of it, before time itself, there was One whose heart moved Him to give what nothing in the universe could compel from Him and no power in existence could take from Him against His will. Hear His own words in John 10:17–18 (NLT):
The Father loves me because I sacrifice my life so I may take it back again. No one can take my life from me. I sacrifice it voluntarily. I have the authority to lay it down when I want to and also to take it up again.”
There it is. The ultimate Exodus 25:2. The ultimate willing offering. The Father spoke – not compelled in any coercive sense, but spoke the eternal counsel of love – and the Son’s heart moved Him. Every nail was permitted. Every moment of darkness was entered willingly. Every hour on the cross was chosen from the freedom of a love so secure in its relationship with the Father that it had nothing left to protect and nothing left to fear and could therefore give absolutely everything.
And what did that willing offering build? Listen to John 1:14 (NKJV):
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
The word for “dwelt” in the original language carries the specific meaning of tabernacling – of pitching a tent, of setting up a temporary dwelling in the midst of the people. The Word of God, the eternal Son, tabernacled among us. He built, from the willing offering of His own body and blood, the Tabernacle that Exodus 25 was always only a shadow of. The gold of the ancient Tabernacle was a type of His divine nature – incorruptible, glorious, eternal. The acacia wood was a type of His humanity – strong, incorruptible in its own particular way, rooted in the earth. The fine linen was a type of His perfect righteousness.
The scarlet thread was a shadow of His blood. The veil – the great curtain that separated the Holy Place from the Most Holy – was His body, which was torn as that curtain was torn when He gave up His spirit on the cross, opening the way into the immediate presence of God for every willing heart that comes through Him. Every detail of Exodus 25 was a living prophecy, articulated in gold and goat hair and olive oil and onyx, pointing forward across the centuries to the One who is both the Tabernacle and the willing offering that builds it.
This is the archetype that runs through Exodus 25:2 and changes everything about how I read it. When God asks for a willing offering to build His dwelling place, He is not primarily giving Israel a civic instruction about community fundraising. He is projecting onto the screen of history the shape of what He Himself will one day do – the movement of the eternal heart of God toward humanity, the voluntary descent from glory, the willing giving of everything for the sake of making a home among the people He loves. And when He asks me – through this verse, this morning, in this particular life – for the willing offering of my heart, He is not asking for something He Himself has not first given. He is asking me to participate in the most fundamental movement of reality: the movement of love, freely given, building a place for God to dwell.
Now let me speak of the countercultural force of this verse, because it is enormous, and we diminish it when we confine its application to stewardship campaigns. We live in a world – and I live in a body – that runs on compulsion. The systems that govern our lives are constructed on the management of human behaviour through incentive and penalty: you give because you owe, you serve because you fear the consequences of not serving, you attend because you need to be seen, you contribute because the social contract of your community requires it.
And into the middle of this ancient system, God drops Exodus 25:2 like a stone into still water: I only want what your heart moves you to give. Not your compelled gold. Not your pressured silver. Not your managed compliance dressed up in the language of devotion. The thing that no law can produce and no threat can generate: the willing gift of a moved heart.
In South Korea, in the 1970s and 1980s, during the period of most intense political repression under successive authoritarian governments, the church grew at a rate that astonished missiologists around the world. Churches were meeting before dawn – not because the law required it, but because the hearts of the faithful were moved. Prayer mountains filled with people who came voluntarily, at personal sacrifice of sleep and time and comfort, to pray through the night for their nation and their world.
By the mid-1980s, South Korea was sending out more Protestant missionaries per capita than almost any other nation on earth – an extraordinary proportionality for a country that had only received the gospel a century earlier. No one compelled this missionary outpouring. No church authority mandated the pre-dawn prayer gatherings. Hearts moved, and the movement of hearts moved the mission of God into the world in ways that institutional programming could not have manufactured. That is Exodus 25:2 made flesh in the late twentieth century – willing hearts so overflowing that Moses would have had to stop the collection.
And in the valleys of the Piedmont in northern Italy, across nearly nine centuries from the twelfth to the twentieth, the Waldensian communities lived out the willing offering at its most costly and most stubborn. They were persecuted for believing that ordinary people could read Scripture in their own language. They were hunted, executed, driven into caves and high mountain passes. Their communities were repeatedly decimated by crusades and inquisitions that used every available instrument of compulsion to extinguish a faith that no instrument of compulsion could extinguish – precisely because it was not built from compulsion in the first place.
What the violence could not destroy was what violence never produces: the willing heart. Each generation of Waldensian believers decided afresh, in the full knowledge of what the decision might cost, to remain in the faith they had received and to pass it on to their children. The offering was not the gold and the silver – they had little of either. The offering was the willingness itself, renewed in each generation, the heart that moved again and again toward the God who had first moved toward it, regardless of the cost that movement incurred.
Let me bring this now to somewhere close and ordinary, because this verse must not remain only in the grand narratives of martyrdom and missions. The Tabernacle is also built in the texture of my daily hours. What does God ask me for willingly today? He asks for the morning – the first moments before the world makes its demands – when I could scroll or sleep or rush or sit with Him. He asks for the conversation I have been avoiding – the hard one, the one that will cost me comfort and possibly a portion of someone’s approval. He asks for the cheque I have not written and the hour I have not given and the prayer I have begun and abandoned.
He asks for the particular gift He placed in me – the one I have been hoarding out of fear, keeping in the tent of my private self because what if I offer it and it is rejected, what if I bring my goat hair to the collection and everyone around me is bringing gold and I am embarrassed by the smallness of what I carry? He says: bring it willingly. I designed your particular gift. I placed it in you. I already call it Mine. Bring it to Me and watch what I do with it in the building of the dwelling that only your particular life can make possible.
I think of Blessed Cyprian Iwene Tansi – born in what is now Anambra State in eastern Nigeria, ordained as a Catholic priest in 1937, and beloved by his parish community in the Diocese of Onitsha as a faithful, energetic, deeply committed pastor. He was needed there. He was effective there. His people were nourished by his presence. And yet in 1950, responding to an interior calling he had been carrying for years, he gave up his parish, his community, his cultural familiarity, the warmth of his people’s love – and entered the Cistercian monastery of Mount Saint Bernard in Leicestershire, England. He left the known world and entered a life of radical obscurity and austere discipline in a foreign country whose climate and culture bore no resemblance to the red-earth landscapes of his childhood.
He lived and died there in 1964, largely unknown to the world beyond his monastery. But what seemed to the world like a disappearance was, in God’s economy, a willing offering that bore fruit across generations – because when Pope John Paul II beatified him in 1998, before a crowd of hundreds of thousands in Onitsha, the fruit of that hidden willing life became visible in ways that no amount of visible ministry could have produced. The Tabernacle Tansi built in his thirty years of monastic silence was not made of platform ministry and community recognition. It was made of willing obscurity, and in it God dwelt.
Here I must say something difficult and necessary about one of the lies that has done the most damage in the history of the church: the lie that God’s work requires coerced generosity. The lie that if we do not pressure people into giving – with emotional manipulation, with the shaming power of public comparison, with the implicit suggestion that your financial giving is the thermometer of your spiritual temperature – the mission will fail, the building will not be funded, the work will stop.
This lie has produced, across centuries of religious institution, something far more damaging than the deficit it was designed to address: a generation of religious people who have learned to give from obligation rather than love, who have been trained by pressure into a performance of generosity that exhausts the giver without building the dwelling God intends to inhabit. The people in the Sinai wilderness gave until Moses told them to stop. They gave so much that the craftsmen were overwhelmed.
This was not the result of a sophisticated campaign. It was the result of hearts that had truly encountered God – at the Red Sea, at the mountain, in the cloud, in the fire – and that could not contain what the encounter had produced. When God truly touches a willing heart, the overflow is always sufficient and usually exceeds the need.
The problem is not the willing heart’s insufficiency. The problem is when we have, through years of managed giving culture, produced religious people who do not have moved hearts because we have not led them close enough to God for their hearts to be moved.
Richard Wurmbrand understood something about willing hearts and compelled ones that very few people in comfortable Christianity ever have to learn. In the prisons of Communist Romania, where he spent fourteen years – including years in solitary confinement, years of sustained torture designed to break the self and produce compliance – he discovered that what had been freely given could not be forcibly taken. He had chosen his God willingly. He had given his life voluntarily to the service of Christ and the underground church. And when the apparatus of a totalitarian state applied everything it had to compel a retraction of that willing offering, it discovered, repeatedly, that it could compel the body but not the heart.
What is freely given, Wurmbrand said in different ways across decades of testimony, becomes inviolable – because it was placed beyond the reach of compulsion in the act of its original free giving. The willing offering is the most secure offering in the universe, because it is kept not in the vault of external circumstances but in the heart that chose it, and the heart, when it has truly given itself to God, is the one territory that no earthly power can finally and permanently occupy.
Now let me bring this to the interior life – to the quiet question that this verse presses into the palms of my hands when I hold it honestly. What does it mean for me to give willingly? I have sometimes thought that willingness is a feeling – that warm surge of religious enthusiasm that occasionally arrives unexpectedly and produces, in its wake, magnificent gestures of generosity and devotion. And I have spent portions of my life waiting for that feeling before giving, which means that in the absence of the feeling, I have given nothing, or I have given the performance of willingness over the reality of a heart that was not truly moved. But the willing heart of Exodus 25:2 is not primarily a feeling. It is a direction.
It is the deep orientation of the inner person, set toward God from its foundation, from which giving flows not because the emotional weather is always clear and warm but because the compass of the soul is fixed. There are mornings when Havergal did not feel the surge that produced her great hymn. There were nights in the Moravian prayer watch when the assigned brother did not feel the fervour of 1727. There were days in Tansi’s monastery in Leicestershire when the weight of what he had left must have been palpable and the interior landscape was not warm. The willing heart is not the heart that always feels willing. It is the heart that has made – at some deep and non-negotiable level – a decision: I belong to God. I have given myself to Him. And from that given self, I give, because to have given yourself and then to withhold your daily offerings is a contradiction that the given self cannot sustain.
And yet – and this is where grace enters and does not leave – God does not want a mechanical compliance performing the outward form of willingness over the interior reality of a heart that is somewhere else entirely. He is precise in what He asks for. The Amplified’s phrase “every man whose heart impels and makes him willing” carries within it the requirement of genuine interior movement. God can tell – and this truth should undo every attempt at spiritual performance – the difference between a heart that has chosen from its depths to give, even on the days when the feeling is absent, and a heart that is performing the theatre of willingness while privately begrudging every coin. This is why the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in me is so crucial. Not to produce perpetual religious fervour – the manufactured emotion that exhausts itself and collapses – but to do what Paul describes in Romans 5:5 (NLT):
And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love.”
When the Spirit fills my heart with God’s love – genuinely fills it, as opposed to sprinkling it with enough religious sentiment to maintain appearances – what flows out of that heart is not managed compliance. It is overflow. It is the natural, unstoppable outpouring of a heart too full of what it has received to withhold what it has been asked to give.
Here I must also expose a subtler version of the lie about willing giving – the one I tell myself not to avoid giving but to avoid giving *truly*. I sometimes give in ways that are technically willing but actually quite calculated: I give what I can afford to give without disruption to my plans, my comfort, my sense of financial security. I give willingly from my surplus. I bring my gold freely, as long as there is plenty of gold remaining in the tent. But the women who brought their mirrors did not bring them from surplus.
They brought the instrument of their daily self-regard. They brought something they actually used and actually needed and actually valued. The question Exodus 25:2 is pressing into me is not merely: do you give willingly? But: do you give from the places that cost you something real? Do you bring the mirror? Do you bring what you actually treasure, from a heart that has decided the dwelling place of God is worth more than the possession of the thing?
Charles de Foucauld – that extraordinary French aristocrat who moved from dissolute military life to geographical exploration to conversion to a radical discipleship that brought him eventually to live alone as a hermit priest in the Sahara desert among the Tuareg people of Algeria – left behind a prayer that has become one of the most widely prayed texts of the twentieth century, precisely because it articulates with absolute fidelity the posture of the willing heart:
I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you: I am ready for all, I accept all. Let only your will be done in me and in all your creatures. I wish no more than this, O Lord.”
De Foucauld lived this prayer in the Saharan silence for eleven years, surrounded by a people who initially rejected his presence and his faith, receiving almost no visible fruit from his ministry, maintaining his willing offering of presence and prayer in conditions of extreme isolation. He was murdered by a raiding party in December 1916, having converted, in all his years among the Tuareg, a handful of people. By the world’s accounting, his willing offering was inefficient, poorly deployed, and unproductive.
By God’s accounting, the fraternity of religious communities his life inspired – the Little Brothers and Little Sisters of Jesus – now carries his willing presence into slums and factories and migrant communities across the globe, and his influence on twentieth-century spirituality has been incalculable. The willing heart brings its offering and leaves the calculation of the return entirely to God.
Jan van Ruusbroec – the fourteenth-century Flemish mystic who withdrew with two companions to a hermitage in the Sonian forest outside Brussels and spent thirty years in the silence of contemplative prayer and writing – understood the interior dynamic of Exodus 25:2 with the precision of one who had lived it from the inside:
The love of God is the burning ground of all our works. Without this fire our works are all cold. But with this fire, the simplest offering becomes a sweet-smelling sacrifice.”
This is the truth that unlocks the mystery of why the goat hair is as welcome as the gold. It is not the material that makes the offering sweet. It is the fire of love behind it. The burning ground. The willing heart is always the heart that has been standing close enough to God’s own love to have caught fire from it. And a heart on fire does not calculate what it gives. It gives extravagantly, freely, abundantly – because what it is carrying is already burning, and burning things must be released or they consume the one who holds them.
Thomas Kelly – the early twentieth-century American Quaker philosopher and mystic whose brief life ended at forty-seven but whose luminous book *A Testament of Devotion* has quietly and permanently changed thousands of lives since its publication in 1941 – wrote of what he called the inner sanctuary, the deep willing center of the soul from which all authentic offering flows:
There is a Divine Center into which your life can slip, a new and absolute orientation in God, a Center where you live with Him and out of which you see all of life, through new and radiant vision, tinged with new sorrows and pangs, new joys unspeakable and full of glory.”
The willing heart of Exodus 25:2 is the heart that has found – or is finding, in the slow patient work of the Spirit – this Center. The heart that gives from the Center gives differently from the heart that gives from its edges. From the edges, giving is always a negotiation with loss. From the Center, giving is an expression of overflow. The Center is the place of encounter with God’s love, and from that encounter the willing offering rises as naturally as breath – not forced, not manufactured, not managed, but given from the very source of the life God has placed in me.
And Hildegard of Bingen – the twelfth-century German abbess whose visions, music, natural philosophy and theological writings made her one of the most remarkable figures in the history of the church – illuminates the nature of the willing heart’s offering with her characteristic imagery drawn from the created world:
The marvels of God are not brought forth from one’s self. Rather, it is more like a chord, a sound that is played. The tone does not come out of the chord itself, but rather, through the touch of the Musician.”
The willing heart does not manufacture its willingness from the stored resources of its own religious discipline. The willingness is the sound that God’s own touch produces in the instrument of my life. When His fingers press the strings of what I am – through Scripture, through encounter, through suffering, through love, through the patient ministry of the Spirit – the sound that results, if I have not muted the strings with resistance, is the willing offering of a note that only I can play, at the frequency and pitch that only my particular life and history and set of gifts can produce. He is not looking for a single repeated note from all His instruments. He is composing something, from the willing sound of every heart that yields to His touch, that is larger and more beautiful and more complete than any single voice can comprehend.
Now let me speak to the “now” and the “not yet” of this verse as they press into my actual life today, because to acknowledge only the eternal truth without anchoring it in the daily moment is to do what I am most tempted to do with verses like this one: admire them from a distance while remaining unchanged by them.
The “now” of Exodus 25:2 is this: the collection is open. God is speaking to Moses this morning. Moses is speaking to the community of my inner life. And the question is being asked, now, today, in the particular hour I find myself in: whose heart is willing? What is my answer in this moment? Not the answer I planned to give when I had more time, more clarity, more spiritual maturity, more financial stability. Now. In this ordinary morning, with this ordinary heart, in this ordinary life – what does willingness look like for me today?
It might be small. It might look like goat hair beside someone else’s gold. It might be simply the decision to give the next hour – not to my own agenda, my own scrolling, my own anxiety about the future – but to the God who spoke first and who is still speaking. That is a willing offering. That is Tabernacle material. That is what God will build His dwelling from, in me, if I bring it.
The “not yet” is this: I am not yet fully a willing-hearted person. I am a person in process. There are rooms in me still locked, areas of my life where my hand is still closed and my heart is still guarded, where I bring the performance of willingness but hold back the substance of it. There are particular possessions – not necessarily material ones, though sometimes those too – that I have not yet been able to bring to the collection. A relationship I have been withholding. A forgiveness I have been refusing to give, which is itself a form of offering God asks for. A talent I have been hoarding out of fear.
A wound I have been protecting that God is asking me to trust Him with. And God does not compel the not-yet into performance. He waits. He speaks. He applies the warmth of His love – the love demonstrated in the willing offering of His Son – to the closed places of my soul, until the warmth penetrates and the hand opens and the offering is brought, not because I finally achieved sufficient spiritual maturity, but because His love became, at last, more real to me than my fear, and the willing heart emerged from behind its protections into the light.
And Jesus – if I ask Him what He would say to me today from this verse, if He sat down across from me in this quiet moment – I think He would not lecture me. I think He would look at me the way He looked at the rich young man in Mark 10 – with love – and He would ask:
What are you still holding back?
Not with condemnation. With the patient interest of a Carpenter who knows exactly which board in the structure is the load-bearing one, the one whose giving will open up the whole dwelling to the presence of God.
What is the thing you have named as yours that I already call Mine? What is the mirror you are still looking into when I am asking for it? What is the particular blue thread you have been saving for a purpose of your own, when the Tabernacle has been waiting for it?
And He would wait. He has always been a patient waiter. He waited in a garden for Adam. He waited at a well for a Samaritan woman. He waited at the tomb of a dead man He had not come too late to reach. He is still waiting, at the door of whatever room in my interior life I have not yet opened to Him, with the patience of infinite love and the gentleness of a God who will not force what He has designed to be freely given.
Let me now extend this word, this ancient and living word, to every soul who stands at the edge of a different kind of offering – the soul who has not yet given God the willing offering of the whole self, the entire interior, the life that He asks for not to impoverish it but to fill it beyond anything that cautious self-management can produce. If you are holding yourself back – if you have been circling the collection point for years, watching others bring their offerings, knowing in the deepest place of your heart that God is asking you for something you have not yet been willing to give – He is still asking.
The invitation of Exodus 25:2 has not expired. Moses is still announcing: whoever’s heart is willing, bring it. God is still speaking. The Tabernacle of His presence in your life is still under construction, waiting for the particular material that only you carry, that only your willing heart can provide. Bring it. Whatever it is. Whatever the cost. He will receive it. He already calls it His. And in the bringing, you will discover what the women with the mirrors discovered, what Kolbe discovered in his cell, what Havergal discovered packing her jewel box: that what you feared losing was costing you far more in the keeping than it ever could in the giving.
The ultimate invitation of this verse is not about money, or time, or talent, though it includes all of these. The ultimate invitation is in Proverbs 23:26 (NKJV):
My son, give me your heart, and let your eyes observe my ways.”
The heart. That is what God is building His Tabernacle from. That is what He asked for in the wilderness and what He is asking for now. Not the performance of a heart. Not the record of a heart. Not the history of a heart, with its failures and its griefs and its particular forms of stubbornness and self-protection. The heart itself. Given willingly.
Offered freely. Brought to the collection point of this present moment by the one thing that no law can produce and no compulsion can manufacture: a soul that has encountered the love of God and decided, from the freedom of that encounter, to give back what was always His.
He does not want the performance. He wants the heart. He has always, from Sinai to Calvary to this quiet morning, only ever wanted the heart.
FIVE VOICES FROM ACROSS THE CENTURIES ON EXODUS 25:2
Julian of Norwich (1342 – 1416), English mystic and anchorite of Norwich:
Love was His meaning. Who revealed it to you? Love. What did He reveal? Love. Why did He reveal it? For Love. Remain in this and you will know more of the same.”
Jan van Ruusbroec (1293 – 1381), Flemish mystic of the Sonian forest:
The love of God is the burning ground of all our works. Without this fire our works are all cold. But with this fire, the simplest offering becomes a sweet-smelling sacrifice.”
Thomas Kelly (1893 – 1941), American Quaker philosopher and mystic:
There is a Divine Center into which your life can slip, a new and absolute orientation in God, a Center where you live with Him and out of which you see all of life, through new and radiant vision, tinged with new sorrows and pangs, new joys unspeakable and full of glory.”
Charles de Foucauld (1858 – 1916), French hermit-priest of the Sahara:
I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you: I am ready for all, I accept all. Let only your will be done in me and in all your creatures. I wish no more than this, O Lord.”
Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 1179), German abbess and visionary:
The marvels of God are not brought forth from one’s self. Rather, it is more like a chord, a sound that is played. The tone does not come out of the chord itself, but rather, through the touch of the Musician.”
A CLOSING PRAYER
O Lord – God of the burning mountain and the still small voice, God who spoke to Moses out of the cloud and speaks to me now out of this verse, out of this morning, out of the deep and patient movement of Your love toward a heart that has held too much back for too long – I come.
I come not with a full basket. Not with the surplus of a life that has been pouring itself out freely and abundantly and without reservation. I come with what I have actually brought today, which is mixed: some gold and much goat hair, some willing gladness and much reluctant duty, some open hands and many closed ones. I come as I am, which is the only way anyone has ever truly come to You, because the appearance of coming fully prepared is itself a form of withholding – withholding the truth, withholding the actual interior, offering You the presented self instead of the real one.
So receive me, Lord. Receive what is willing in me, however small. And then – by the patient, persistent, never-coercive work of Your Spirit – move in the closed places. Melt what has hardened. Open what has been locked. Let the warmth of the love that moved You, in eternity, to offer Your Son for me – let that warmth reach the places where my hand is still a fist. Let me become, in time, the person who packs the jewel box with pleasure, who steps forward from the row, who brings the mirror. Let me build, from the ordinary and extraordinary material of my particular life, given willingly and daily and truly, the dwelling in which You actually choose to live.
Build Your Tabernacle in me, Lord. From whatever I bring today. Receive the goat hair with the gold. Receive the ordinary willingness alongside the extraordinary sacrifice. And dwell here – in this particular, complicated, hopeful, failing, rising, loving, sometimes reluctant soul. Dwell here, because I am asking You to. Because that is the one thing the willing heart builds that nothing else can build: a place where You are wanted.
Come and dwell here. That is the only offering I know how to make today that is entirely true. Come and dwell here.
Amen.
THE COLLECTION THAT NEEDED STOPPING
I have been thinking about the morning Moses sent word through the camp —
and the word was: enough,
the word was: stop,
the word was: do not bring anything more because we have more than we can use —
and I have been sitting with the miracle of that announcement,
trying to understand a generosity that cannot be contained,
a giving that overruns its purpose and must be halted by decree,
a willing heart so completely moved that it cannot stop moving —
I have been thinking about the women who brought their mirrors,
who came to the collection point carrying the polished bronze instruments
by which they saw their own faces each morning,
and set them down without ceremony,
without requiring anyone to notice the cost of it,
without keeping a receipt —
and what grew from that giving was a basin,
a vessel of cleansing,
the means by which hands were made clean enough to approach the holy —
I have been thinking about how you cannot command this,
how no law in the world produces a willing heart
the way no greenhouse can produce the particular quality of light
that falls through an open window on a clear day,
how the compelled giving and the willing giving look the same
from the outside —
the same gold, the same thread, the same acacia plank —
but only one of them builds the dwelling where God chooses to live,
only one of them becomes the holy sanctuary,
only one of them holds the presence that fills the whole place
so completely that the priests cannot stand —
and so God said: speak,
and Moses said: whoever’s heart moves them,
and the people came in the morning and in the evening
and in the long middle hours of the desert day
with their gold and their silver and their goat hair and their mirrors,
with what they had and what they treasured
and what they had kept for years without knowing it was always meant for this —
and I am standing at the edge of the collection,
holding what I have,
which is more ordinary than I would like
and more precious than I have understood,
which is mine only in the sense that a borrowed thing is mine,
which was always His before I held it,
which He already calls His offering even before my hand opens —
so let my hand open,
let the heart move that has been slow to move,
let me bring what I carry into the willing morning
and set it down
and find,
in the setting down,
that I am not emptied by the giving
but made room for
by the One who fills every space the willing heart
dares to leave open.
