A generous person will prosper; whoever refreshes others will be refreshed.
Proverbs 11:25
The Second Line Is a Field
Proverbs works in pairs, and the second line usually restates the first from another angle, so the second line is where you find out what Solomon actually means.
The Hebrew behind "whoever refreshes others will be refreshed" is agricultural, and it's the language of watering a field. The one who waters will himself be watered. Solomon is describing a person who spends their days carrying water over to somebody else's ground, and his promise is that the same water comes back to them.
The first line can be misread badly on its own. A generous person will prosper sounds like a transaction, and plenty of people have turned it into one. The second line rules that reading out, because you give water away and you end up watered, which is not the same as getting paid.
The verse just before it says the same thing more bluntly. "One person gives freely, yet gains even more; another withholds unduly, but comes to poverty." So Solomon has already told us that hoarding is what makes a person poor, and verse 25 isn't adding a reward on top of that. It's explaining how what he already said actually works.
Watering also tells us what kind of giving he has in mind. It's unglamorous, it's repeatable, and it's for something that grows slowly rather than something that changes today.
I wrote about the same instruction showing up in Hebrews in The Sacrifice God Is Actually Pleased With, where doing good and sharing with others is called the sacrifice God is pleased with.
Be the Answer
As Steve Chesnut wrote in The Power of Connection in the Church, don't just pray for a prayer request, try to be the answer to it, or connect the person to the answer.
This looks like hearing that a family is between jobs, then buying an extra hundred dollars of groceries on your next shop and driving them over that evening. This looks like texting the friend whose car is in the shop to say you'll drive them to work all week, because you already know their shifts. This looks like sending a message on the morning of somebody's biopsy to say you remembered, and asking that night how it went. This looks like making the introduction you have been meaning to make for two months, because the person job hunting in your small group needs that contact more than you need to hold onto it.
Every one of those costs you something real, and none of them costs you everything at once. That's why Solomon picked watering rather than harvesting. You carry one bucket, and then you carry another one tomorrow.
His promise is that you won't run dry while you do it. We protect ourselves from generosity because we assume it takes something we can't replace, but Solomon says the water comes back.
My encouragement to you today is to pick one prayer request you've been praying, and to ask God whether you're meant to be part of the answer to it.
Prayer
Father, thank you that you have never once been stingy with us. Make us generous people, and not only with money. Show us today whose ground is dry, and give us the courage to carry the water over there ourselves. Thank you that you refresh the ones who refresh others, and that we have never lost anything by giving it to you first. We pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen.