Hank Smith: 00:02 Hello my friends. Welcome to another followHIM Favorites. My name is Hank Smith. I’m here with the incredible John Bytheway. Hello, John.

John Bytheway: 00:09 Hi Hank.

Hank Smith: 00:10 John, we’re going to take one question from this week’s Come, Follow Me lesson. This is Acts 16-21. We’re going to look at a single verse and our question comes from Acts 20:35 where Paul says, it is more blessed to give than to receive. At face value that doesn’t seem right. I really like receiving gifts, so can you help me out and understand why it’s more blessed to give than to receive?

John Bytheway: 00:35 That’s a great verse, and as a kid, I don’t think I understood that either. What’s interesting about this verse is Paul says the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, and it’s one of those verses that’s in Acts that’s not in the Gospels, so here’s more words of Jesus, but okay, how does that work? Because I always thought it was more blessed to get stuff, and it’s been really fun probably for you too, to watch your kids when as they grow and they find something perfect they want to give their sibling, and how that excitement lasts from the time they got the gift until it’s wrapped under the tree for a couple of weeks or whatever, and they start to see that a really fun Christmas is when I found the perfect thing for so-and-so. And that’s just talking about Christmas. But we all revere people who have given things to us, and usually that means their time or their attention or when we’ve gone through a hard time, they show up.

Hank Smith: 01:31 I wrote a book on happiness once. It sold dozens of copies.

John Bytheway: 01:35 It’s a good one.

Hank Smith: 01:36 I learned something in writing this book. I read a study where they would give random college students $40 and they would say, you can have this $40 if you will go spend it in the next two hours on someone you love, and then come back and tell us what you got.

  01:52 And then to the other people, they said, go spend this $40 on yourself and then come back and tell us what you got. They took their little survey afterwards. The difference in their happiness levels were stark. Those who bought for themselves sometimes felt worse than when before they got the $40. They said, “No, I regret what I got. I didn’t have enough time. I shouldn’t have gotten that.” And those who bought for others, their happiness levels were much higher. They were excited to give this gift. They wanted to give this gift. And what the researcher said was, it’s true. It is more blessed to give than to receive. You’re going to end up happier in finding things to give other people than you are in looking for those things in yourself. It’s kind of a backwards way of thinking, contradictory to what you might think would happen, but it is true.

John Bytheway: 02:41 Boy, that is a great story. And to back it up with experiences like that, that is great. I’m thinking that, yeah, I should have done this for someone else. That’s kind of, because they had that option. Wow.

Hank Smith: 02:54 Those who bought for themselves just said, “I wish this wouldn’t have happened to me.”

John Bytheway: 02:59 This is the worst thing. It’s the worst $40 that’s ever happened to me.

Hank Smith: 03:02 Yeah, I wasted my day and now I’m mad at what I bought. Yeah, so we got to believe Paul here, Jesus himself, it is more blessed to give than to receive.

  03:13 We hope you join us on our full podcast. It’s called followHIM. You can get it wherever you get your podcasts. We have a guest joining us this week, Dr. Susan Easton Black. We think you’re going to love what she has to say on these chapters, so come find us on followHIM, and then join us next week for another followHIM Favorites.