Everyone is going through something, and they don’t want to hear that the answer is to help someone else. They don’t want to hear your testimony of the love of God, without hearing what you did and what they must do to earn His love. They don’t want to hear, “Love one another.” They want a list of things they can do, but when they had the list they didn’t want that. The truth is, “You did/do not earn God’s love, He gave/gives His love.”
We were created in the image and likeness of love. What happened? We chose to choose who we wanted to consider good enough to love and who we wanted to consider evil enough to hate. We gave ourselves permission to hate. We were given daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly animal sacrifices so we could forgive what we considered to be evil. Then we were given one sacrifice to take the place of all the temporary sacrifices, but we choose not to believe. We were given grace and we say grace doesn’t go far enough or grace is taken too far.
We were created to be charitable, but we choose to be selectively charitable. Charity is a way that we can be helped in our time of need and help others in their time of need. We choose to govern our giving and add requirements for our charity. If we never needed a hand up, we may not ever understand the reason to be part of the solution. But in our created state the need for charity was reason enough to be charitable. The need was reason enough for the solution.
God gives to us, but is that charity? Is what we do for our children charity? We may choose to think not, because we want to think of charity as treating strangers like family. What of those we do not consider God’s children, then are the blessings of God charity? The answer should be, “We do not decide such things.” Then is what we give to one another charity if what we are giving is passing on a blessing from God? We need to change our heart about charity. Charity should be a hand up when needed, not a hand out to keep someone down.
Charity is not a barrier to separate the haves from the have nots. Charity is a society investing in itself. We invest in our children, we invest in the stranger in our land, and we invest in our elders. The return on our investment is the growth of our children, strangers who are no longer strangers, and confidence that in our old age we will be cared for. When we invest in society we are investing in our future. Charity is not intended to put dollars in the pockets of the rich and pennies in the mouths of the poor.
We don’t give to earn God’s love. We give because we are loved by God and we want to share the blessings. We don’t love one another to earn God’s love. We love one another because we want to share the love. Will some take advantage of love? Yes, until they learn that they don’t need to take an advantage. Love itself is the advantage. Will some take advantage of charity? Yes, until they learn that charity is the advantage.