TRUE GIVING | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 19, 1894

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 20, No. 16.

TRUE GIVING.

THAT only he who loves truly gives is a great but oft unrecognized truth. The following from the Sunday School Times on that point is worthy of consideration, and should lead every reader to ask the questions, "Why do I give? What is my motive?"

Certainly all giving which is after the fashion of God's must be the outflowing of a loving heart. God so loved the world that he gave his Son. That supreme act of giving furnishes the light in which to interpret every other gift of God and to order every gift of man. Our Maker is the greatest of givers. He opens his hand and supplies the needs of every living thing. He pours out his life into the whole universe in gifts to enrich and strengthen and cheer all sentient existence. And all that comes from him is the outflow of his love. The outstretched hand discloses the loving heart. In no act of his can the two be dissevered.

So all true and rightful giving is the expression of love in the giver:—

Gifts of one who loved me! 'Twas high time they came, When he ceased to love me, Time they stopped for shame!

Yes, for they shame the recipient. Much of what has passed as Christian charity in the relief of the needy and the dependent classes has been so destitute of this divine mark of love that the very word has lost its old meaning. Once it meant love in the highest and most unselfish shape. Now it is fallen from this high estate, until "cold as charity" has become a proverb, and the revisers have had to seek another word for Paul's magnificent outburst in 1 Corinthians 13. What a story of heartless and loveless giving is summed up in that piece of verbal history,—giving not as to a brother in need, with a brother's claim on our hearts, but to rid our consciences of the sense of obligation, and perhaps to acquire a little merit towards God for our own souls.

The poor club exercised her Christian gifts Of knitting stockings, stitching petticoats, Because we are of one flesh, after all, And need one flannel—with the proper sense Of difference in the quality.

The hearts of the givers have grown the harder and the colder for such giving, which has been itself a peril, as hiding from us how far we are from Him who "so loved that He gave."

And the hearts of the recipients have been harmed no less. A gift from a brother, given in the brotherly spirit, can harm no one. It lowers no self-respect and weakens no motive of self-exertion. But the heartless, unloving gift demoralizes. It is such gifts that have created the greedy army of professional beggars, who live at the expense of society, and not by honest work.