Give What You Want to Get

“Give What You Want to Get” is the book’s eighth step and the practical expression of its central harvest logic: what a person gives is what that person should expect to receive. The teaching moves generosity beyond a pleasant sentiment. It makes giving a discipline, a way to treat other people, and a model for handling money and blessing. Its governing contrast is between a pipe, through which blessing continues to flow, and a bucket, where whatever is collected can grow stale.

Definition and Place in the Book

The step begins with the claim that reaping what one sows is a law that has been in effect since the beginning of time. The examples make the rule concrete: sunflower seeds yield sunflowers, watermelon seeds yield watermelon, and a dead Christmas tree yields no living tree, however it is decorated. The book then applies this agricultural pattern to conduct: generosity is the seed, while blessing is the harvest. Giving is therefore not treated as an optional supplement to a blessed life. It is the means by which the reader participates in one.

The book supports this rule with the biblical teaching that the person who sows sparingly reaps sparingly, while the one who sows generously reaps generously. It then condenses the lesson into a reciprocal formula: to receive blessing, a person must become a blessing to others. The emphasis falls not only on the expected return but on the direction of the giving: generosity is meant to benefit someone else. The reader is warned that agreement in principle is not enough. Resenting the absence of a convenient parking space or poor restaurant service exposes how quickly the principle can be forgotten in ordinary encounters.

Reciprocity in Everyday Relationships

The Golden Rule supplies the teaching’s interpersonal test. The book presents the familiar instruction to treat others as one would wish to be treated, then draws an inverse rule from it: people will treat someone according to how that person treats them. Its example concerns a wife who wants more respect from her husband. Instead of complaining that he does not help around the house or nagging him to pick up his underwear, she is urged to show him honor, encourage him, and even pick up the underwear herself. The point is not that the action is effortless or immediately rewarded; it is that she should sow the treatment she hopes to reap.

The anticipated objection is that generous treatment might give the other person permission to continue behaving badly. The book identifies that fear as a reason to withhold blessing and counters it with biblical assurances that the generous person will increase and that the one who waters others will also be watered. It argues that stinginess can become self-defeating: someone who wants money may hold on to every penny, or someone who wants more time may refuse to help, yet withholding the desired good is presented as a route to continued want. The proposed response is active generosity rather than waiting for the other person to change first.

Giving as a Flow, Not a Storehouse

The image of the pipe distinguishes giving from accumulation. The author describes children taking good pots and pans outside to make concoctions; when a pot goes missing, she finds it filled with mucky sludge and has to clean it before it can be used again. The analogy turns the household mess into a warning about collected blessing. A person is not placed on earth merely to gather what comes in: blessing should pass through that person to others. If it is received but never shared, the book says, it eventually stagnates.

In this image, God is associated with movement and expansion, not containment. The pipe remains useful because blessing flows through it; the bucket merely collects. The book assigns different responsibilities to the believer and to God: the person’s task is to be a blessing, while God’s task is to bless. This makes the teaching both a promise of return and a demand for outward action. The reader cannot make generosity meaningful merely by wanting its benefits; the model requires giving to someone else.

Money, Tithing, and the Cost of Obedience

The principle reaches its sharpest personal test in the author’s account of financial strain. One summer, when money was tight, Hannah Keeley waited until the household bills had been paid to see whether enough remained for a tithe. She knew that this put God’s share last, rather than offering the first fruits, but feared she would not be able to afford groceries or keep the electricity on. After several weeks, her husband’s car needed a replacement fuel pump; two weeks later, one of her tires blew and she needed a new set. A month after that, she found a note under the car’s windshield warning that its worn tire treads could cause a blowout. In prayer, she asked why God was doing this and understood the answer as a question about why she was not trusting him.

A related account identifies the reasoning behind the delay: the household believed it could pay debts faster by withholding ten percent. The author calls an excuse a lie made to protect someone from a truth that person is unwilling to accept; in this case, she says the deeper issue was unwillingness to change the household’s lifestyle enough to tithe. The decision to give ten percent off the top did not produce instant surplus. Each month, however, they had enough to make ends meet, stopped going further into debt, and experienced relief from stress and worry. The teaching presents this outcome as a change in their relationship to financial pressure, not as an immediate windfall.

Selflessness and the Meaning of the Harvest

The step also gives the harvest rule a human consequence beyond material provision. In a story of an unnamed woman who says she had lost all hope in God but believes again, the book stresses that she did not need a first-class seat; she needed to know that God was real and still cared for her. An unspecified act of kindness had become the means through which that reassurance reached her. The episode makes the pipe image personal: the giver’s selflessness matters because it carries help to someone who needs it, not because the giver first knows what return will follow.

The concluding call broadens the seed to include kindness, love, money, time, encouragement, mercy, and forgiveness. Readers are told not to second-guess the act of planting, but to give and trust that God will grow the seed into a harvest that can itself be poured into other people’s lives. In this way, “Give What You Want to Get” joins a promise of abundance to a repeated obligation: receive blessing as something to pass onward, rather than something to keep.