Transcript: Episode 0072

“Love: Sacrifice and Charity”

This transcript:
  1. Was machine generated.
  2. Has not been checked for errors.
  3. May not be entirely accurate.
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00:00:37 – 00:00:39:	Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast.

00:00:39 – 00:00:40:	I am Corey J.

00:00:40 – 00:00:41:	Mahler.

00:00:41 – 00:00:43:	And I'm still, whoa.

00:00:45 – 00:00:51:	On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be in the first of a three-part series on various facets of love.

00:00:53 – 00:00:57:	Love is a word that's present in the English language and every other language, duh.

00:00:58 – 00:01:02:	It also has lots of variables and adjectives and modifiers to it.

00:01:03 – 00:01:07:	And then there are related words that we don't typically think of as love, at least in English.

00:01:08 – 00:01:16:	But when we look at some of the other older languages that fed in English, we do find that there are different words that we consolidated into one.

00:01:16 – 00:01:22:	And so this three-part series is for the purpose of talking about some of those different facets.

00:01:23 – 00:01:26:	Just a very brief introduction, I want to lay a couple ground rules out.

00:01:27 – 00:01:33:	One, I think the term facet is a really vital part of how we're trying to explain this.

00:01:34 – 00:01:45:	If you've ever been in a nice jewelry store with, you know, the white lights and maybe the salesman hand you a loop and you look at a nice stone under that loop with that light shining down, it just pops as sparkles.

00:01:45 – 00:01:52:	You see incredible variety of light shining through, reflecting through the facets in the gemstone.

00:01:53 – 00:01:58:	The way we're handling love in the next few weeks is that love is basically that gem.

00:01:58 – 00:02:04:	And in the various words and aspects that we're talking about in these sequential weeks are the facets.

00:02:05 – 00:02:11:	And I highlight that because these things are not an exclusivity to each other.

00:02:11 – 00:02:20:	So as we talk about, you know, words like agape and eros and others, we're not trying to subdivide them to the point that we're making them exclusive.

00:02:21 – 00:02:27:	Because as we talk about them over the next few weeks, what we're going to find is that frequently you'll have a couple of them in play at the same time.

00:02:28 – 00:02:45:	But when you properly understand the nature of them, it becomes clear that although they're all facets of love, you won't have them all simultaneously for the purpose, for the reason that different aspects of love have different people on both sides.

00:02:46 – 00:02:52:	Their relationships, you know, love is fundamentally a relationship, and a relationship between two different people.

00:02:52 – 00:02:59:	And so the love of a parent is different than the love of a spouse is different than the love of a brother is different than the love of a neighbor.

00:02:59 – 00:03:03:	And at some point, you know, the words that we use in English cease to be love.

00:03:03 – 00:03:10:	We use words, for example, like friendship, but it fundamentally means the same thing, but it means different facets of the same thing.

00:03:10 – 00:03:15:	So the love that you have for a friend, you typically just call friendship.

00:03:15 – 00:03:19:	Sometimes you might say you love your friend, but friendship really properly encompasses all of that.

00:03:20 – 00:03:27:	So as we're talking about all these various things, I just don't want people to think that we're reducing all of this to a spreadsheet or a bunch of check boxes.

00:03:28 – 00:03:29:	Different things come into play at different times.

00:03:29 – 00:03:32:	It's important just to understand that they're all there.

00:03:33 – 00:03:39:	The other important point to lay as groundwork for all these episodes is that these are human things.

00:03:39 – 00:03:42:	They're things God has put in creation.

00:03:42 – 00:03:44:	They're not explicitly Christian.

00:03:44 – 00:03:46:	They're not explicitly philosophical.

00:03:46 – 00:03:49:	They're not tied to certain vocabulary.

00:03:49 – 00:03:50:	It's all there.

00:03:50 – 00:03:57:	Whether you have the word for it or not, you have the inherent behavior, the inherent attitude towards others as you're just living your life.

00:03:57 – 00:04:02:	You're going to have friends, you're going to have family, you're going to have different relationships with them.

00:04:02 – 00:04:05:	And those will have varying degrees and natures of love.

00:04:06 – 00:04:10:	So the different words are because those different aspects all matter.

00:04:10 – 00:04:26:	Part of the problem that we're trying to solve by tackling these subjects in this episode series is that the misapprehension of the words in our minds is causing us to make substantial categories where some will come along and say, you must love X because of Y.

00:04:26 – 00:04:28:	And usually Y is something in the Bible.

00:04:28 – 00:04:32:	And everyone's like, well, the Bible says I gotta love, so obviously.

00:04:33 – 00:04:50:	It's a good argument if it's true, but the problem is that when someone uses the collapsed English word love to encompass things that perhaps have different duties in nature and in scripture, then the person who's trying to convict your conscience says, you have to be careful.

00:04:50 – 00:04:56:	Be careful, because you can actually end up sinning inadvertently by being sloppy about this stuff.

00:04:56 – 00:05:06:	You know, we talk a lot about 1 Timothy 5, 8, where God says that the duty that we have inside our family is greater than the duty that we have outside our family.

00:05:06 – 00:05:10:	And someone who despises that is worse than an unbeliever.

00:05:11 – 00:05:16:	That's, it's talking about love, not in that explicit term, but it's also talking about scope of duty.

00:05:17 – 00:05:26:	And so when we're tackling these things that are political, they're religious, they're social, it's important to get the scope of duty right as we're looking at these subjects.

00:05:27 – 00:05:42:	So the reason we're breaking up into three different parts over a few weeks, we're going to end with marriage, with Eros, and a couple related things, but we want to sequester that by itself, as I said in the last episode, specifically because that one is going to be not at all child-friendly.

00:05:42 – 00:05:54:	We're going to have Frank talk about those specifics because it's basically going to be the talk, because for centuries there have been so many euphemisms around some of those things, that people have forgotten what it actually means.

00:05:55 – 00:06:06:	So as I said online, and I think I said last episode, we're going to make a lot of people angry and uncomfortable with that, but we're going to say specifically what scripture says and what we find in nature about it.

00:06:06 – 00:06:09:	So that's going to be sequestered for your safety and your children's safety.

00:06:09 – 00:06:12:	So you can just skip over it entirely if that's not your cup of tea.

00:06:12 – 00:06:17:	This week and next week we'll be basically tackling everything else that doesn't kind of fall into the marriage bed.

00:06:18 – 00:06:25:	And so as we go through this, just keep in mind that we're not trying to isolate these things from each other.

00:06:25 – 00:06:28:	We're just trying to help lay out kind of on a board.

00:06:29 – 00:06:30:	Here's how these things are related.

00:06:30 – 00:06:33:	You have a person over here with an arrow drawn over here.

00:06:33 – 00:06:45:	And once we finish this series, Corey is going to be publishing a finished version of the very nice flow chart that he made to kind of collapse his thinking, the explanations that we're working through.

00:06:46 – 00:06:50:	It's going to look like the guy in front of the crazy board with all the arrows and stuff.

00:06:51 – 00:06:52:	Sometimes that's how the stuff looks.

00:06:53 – 00:07:03:	And part of the reason that he did that is that we started looking a few weeks ago when we decided to do this particular series, we looked at some of the other explanations from throughout history, and they're kind of rubbish.

00:07:03 – 00:07:06:	They don't tackle all these things at once.

00:07:06 – 00:07:14:	So we wanted to just do it all in one place and consolidate it so that, not that this is going to be authoritative, but this is another way of looking at it.

00:07:14 – 00:07:18:	And it will give you some ideas about how you can evaluate your own life.

00:07:19 – 00:07:27:	When you have various facets of love in your heart for your family and your friends and your neighbors, how do they play out?

00:07:27 – 00:07:35:	Because their duties associated with these shows and their limits, their limitations, where the type of love that you have for one person is in fact forbidden for another.

00:07:36 – 00:07:41:	And that's not a failure of love, that's just the scope of the nature of the thing that God has given us.

00:07:41 – 00:07:48:	So these are fundamentally about God's blessings and about his obligations and about how we relate to them as humans.

00:07:49 – 00:08:08:	Again, this isn't just Christian stuff and it's not philosophical, because throughout history, before Jesus came, when the Jews were just kind of off in their own corner, the Romans and the Greeks were also tackling these subjects philosophically and they're playing things through and trying to come up with good answers to how man naturally acts towards man.

00:08:09 – 00:08:22:	It's a worthwhile endeavor, and it's something that's worth keeping in mind as we're living our lives, because if you're sloppy and you don't think about it, you don't pay attention, you can very easily drop something on the floor that if you just gave it a little bit of thought, you would have done it well.

00:08:23 – 00:08:25:	I often give the example of nutrition.

00:08:25 – 00:08:27:	You're going to eat something.

00:08:27 – 00:08:38:	If you think about what you're eating, you think about not eating too much, you think about the nutrient balance you're getting, you will have a better life simply for having been cognizant of what you're putting in your mouth.

00:08:38 – 00:08:46:	Whereas someone who's never cognizant, just shoveling out of the box or out of the bag, is inherently going to be worse off because they didn't think.

00:08:46 – 00:08:51:	So, as with Stone Choir in general, we just want people to think about this stuff.

00:08:51 – 00:08:54:	So as we lay this out, I hope people won't get confused.

00:08:54 – 00:08:58:	I hope you'll come along as we present the various facets of this.

00:08:58 – 00:09:07:	And just keep in mind, this is all about love in the broad sense, in the love encompassing all the various things that are part of being a human.

00:09:08 – 00:09:24:	So one way in which you can think about this all being facets, all of these different terms, aspects of love being facets of the same thing, is you can relate it to the transcendentals, which we have mentioned many times before.

00:09:25 – 00:09:32:	Goodness, beauty and truth are not different parts of God's nature, because God does not have parts.

00:09:33 – 00:09:35:	They are facets, they are aspects.

00:09:36 – 00:09:42:	To some degree, that is, of course, just so that we as human beings, as limited creatures, can understand it.

00:09:42 – 00:09:43:	But the same is true here.

00:09:45 – 00:10:11:	There are some topics that are sufficiently expansive that you have to address them in pieces in order to understand them, not because those pieces are actual parts, not because they are discrete, but because you have to look at the different facets one at a time or two at a time, three at a time, however many it happens to be, in order to build up that understanding of the whole.

00:10:11 – 00:10:15:	And that is why we're doing this as a series, why we're doing three episodes.

00:10:16 – 00:10:20:	In this episode, we are going to be discussing agape and caritas.

00:10:21 – 00:10:34:	Now, these terms are obviously first Greek and then Latin, but the reason we're using these terms is because it helps to distinguish the different facets one from another.

00:10:34 – 00:10:40:	We're also going to use the English equivalents, because there's nothing special about the terms.

00:10:40 – 00:10:47:	It's not that this language has a concept and that language does not, particularly for something like this.

00:10:48 – 00:10:58:	I won't go so far as to say that there are not untranslatable words in certain languages, because there are, but they can always be translated with a paragraph, an explanation.

00:10:59 – 00:11:05:	In the case of the terms we'll be using in this series, most of them can be translated with one or two words.

00:11:06 – 00:11:08:	Caritas, for instance, is charity.

00:11:08 – 00:11:12:	We have that word in English because we took it from Caritas.

00:11:12 – 00:11:14:	We took it from Latin and just used it.

00:11:14 – 00:11:18:	The same is true of piety, pietas, which we will get into in a later episode.

00:11:19 – 00:11:38:	Agape, however, has to be translated as two or three words instead, not just as one word because we simply don't have a one-word version of it in English, other than just using the Greek term agape, which many Christians are going to understand from looking at the Greek of Scripture.

00:11:40 – 00:11:45:	But what agape is fundamentally is self-sacrificing or sacrificial love.

00:11:46 – 00:11:52:	It is a love that puts the good of the other first, that seeks the good of that other.

00:11:53 – 00:12:00:	And so it is a particular facet of love because not all love rises to that particular level.

00:12:00 – 00:12:04:	It's not necessarily to say that agape is the best or the ultimate form of love.

00:12:05 – 00:12:14:	To some degree it is because it's at the far end of that spectrum in terms of the intensity of the sacrifice of the individual for the other.

00:12:15 – 00:12:22:	But that's not to say that it's superior, say, to shtorghe, to familial love, to the love you would have for a sibling or a parent or a child.

00:12:22 – 00:12:28:	Of course, a parent for a child is going to be agape, and we'll get into some of the nuance of that.

00:12:29 – 00:12:32:	Some of it in this episode, most of it in the next episode.

00:12:33 – 00:12:39:	But both of these terms, both of these facets of love, are closely related and yet distinct.

00:12:40 – 00:12:42:	And that distinction is important.

00:12:42 – 00:12:46:	It's why we are doing these two facets of love in this one episode.

00:12:47 – 00:12:52:	Because agape is not charity, and charity is not agape.

00:12:53 – 00:13:02:	At the edges, they may shade one into the other, because for instance, when you are being charitable, you are seeking the good of another, most certainly.

00:13:03 – 00:13:14:	You are giving of yourself, whether it is in terms of your time or your resources, to aid another, but it is not agape, it is distinct from it.

00:13:14 – 00:13:22:	And part of the reason for that is that agape necessarily flows from some sort of relationship.

00:13:23 – 00:13:24:	Charity does not.

00:13:25 – 00:13:29:	You can have charity for someone with whom you have an arm's length relationship.

00:13:30 – 00:13:34:	You don't have agape for a person with whom you have an arm's length relationship.

00:13:35 – 00:13:41:	And so, I mentioned one of the examples of agape would be for a child from a parent.

00:13:41 – 00:13:44:	That is, the love a parent has for a child.

00:13:44 – 00:13:47:	That is, of course, its shtorge, which is familial love.

00:13:47 – 00:13:49:	We'll get into that in the next episode.

00:13:49 – 00:13:55:	But it is also agape, and every parent knows this, and every child, which is to say every human being, should.

00:13:57 – 00:14:13:	Because parents sacrifice of themselves for the good of their children, whether it is the father who goes out and sacrifices his time and his sweat in order to provide for his family, or the woman who does the same in her household in order to raise her children.

00:14:13 – 00:14:14:	That is agape.

00:14:14 – 00:14:17:	It is a self-sacrificing love.

00:14:17 – 00:14:22:	It is giving of oneself for the betterment, for the good of another.

00:14:23 – 00:14:26:	Now, the inverse of that is not true of young children.

00:14:27 – 00:14:30:	A young child does not have agape for a parent.

00:14:30 – 00:14:35:	Now, of course, for a very young child, it's simply because there's no way a very young child can have that.

00:14:38 – 00:15:01:	However, once children are grown, and particularly once parents are aged, and then it becomes a duty of the child to care for the aged parent, then things sort of switch, because now it is agape on the part of the child for the parent, because now it is the grown child who has to sacrifice in order to care for the aged parent, which is how this is supposed to work.

00:15:01 – 00:15:03:	We've gone over that in a previous episode.

00:15:04 – 00:15:07:	Primarily and usually it falls to the eldest child, but not always.

00:15:09 – 00:15:13:	The grown child is supposed to care for the aged parent.

00:15:14 – 00:15:27:	And so you see sort of an inversion of that relationship as the ages change over time, because the parent no longer has the capacity to have that sort of self-sacrificial love.

00:15:28 – 00:15:38:	A man in his 90s can no longer go out and work to provide for his family, and so he relies on his children to care for him, at least if things are ordered as they should be.

00:15:39 – 00:15:47:	Contrary to agape, distinct from agape, is the concept, the facet of love, that is charity.

00:15:48 – 00:15:49:	Now we all know what charity is.

00:15:50 – 00:16:01:	Charity, very simply, is to provide for the needs of another, usually the poor, because that is typically the correct target for charity.

00:16:01 – 00:16:04:	The correct recipient of charity would be the needy.

00:16:04 – 00:16:08:	You are not going to provide charity for the wealthy.

00:16:08 – 00:16:09:	That wouldn't be charity.

00:16:10 – 00:16:13:	That would be typically political corruption, but that is not charity.

00:16:13 – 00:16:23:	And that highlights an important aspect of all of this, a way to break down and to understand these concepts.

00:16:24 – 00:16:26:	You have really three aspects.

00:16:26 – 00:16:33:	There are essentially two that are vitally important, but there's a third that is just inherently an aspect of almost everything in life.

00:16:34 – 00:16:45:	And so we'll go over that one first, which would be who is doing the loving, who is doing whatever it happens to be that constitutes the facet of love.

00:16:46 – 00:16:51:	And so in many cases, that's going to be you are the one doing it because you are analyzing your own actions.

00:16:51 – 00:17:08:	But if we are analyzing the actions of another, that person is relevant because you have to have, for instance, in familial love, there has to be a relationship, a familial relationship between the who doing the action and the whom receiving it.

00:17:08 – 00:17:10:	And of course, that is the second part of this.

00:17:12 – 00:17:18:	There are appropriate targets, appropriate recipients for each kind of love.

00:17:19 – 00:17:27:	And if that love, supposed love, is directed toward a recipient that is not appropriate, that is a disordered love.

00:17:28 – 00:17:34:	And if it is sufficiently disordered, it rises to the level of sin and may very well not be love whatsoever.

00:17:35 – 00:17:43:	This, of course, is more obvious for some forms of love than for others, Eros being probably the most obvious example, which we will get into in the third episode.

00:17:45 – 00:17:52:	But in addition to who and whom, we have the nature or scope of the type of love in question.

00:17:53 – 00:18:00:	And so again, I mentioned that the wealthy are not an appropriate target for charity, the poor are.

00:18:01 – 00:18:04:	And so that is who and whom, but there's also a scope there.

00:18:05 – 00:18:10:	What is the extent of the charity that is appropriate to give to the poor?

00:18:11 – 00:18:24:	Scripture says, the one who does not work, let him not eat, and so it is not appropriate simply to provide endless so-called charity for those who refuse to work.

00:18:25 – 00:18:41:	Endless welfare is not charity, it is not love, it is in fact hate, because not only are you wasting the resources of those who have given or have had that money taken from them, you are also harming the one who is just doing nothing.

00:18:42 – 00:18:45:	It is harmful to sit and do nothing.

00:18:45 – 00:18:46:	Man was made for work.

00:18:47 – 00:18:52:	Now, of course, there's the distinction between labor and work, and we live in a fallen world, but that's for another time.

00:18:54 – 00:18:57:	Man must do something productive with his time.

00:18:58 – 00:19:16:	If you are providing endless so-called charity for one who is not doing anything with his time, it is no longer charity because you have exceeded the scope, you've corrupted the nature of the thing, and that person, that whom, is no longer an appropriate target.

00:19:17 – 00:19:28:	And so those are the three aspects, as it were, of each of these facets that has to be analyzed when you are determining whether or not something is a particular kind of love.

00:19:28 – 00:19:30:	Who is doing the thing?

00:19:31 – 00:19:32:	Whom is receiving the thing?

00:19:33 – 00:19:37:	And what is the appropriate nature or scope of the love in question?

00:19:39 – 00:19:45:	Because if any one of those is absent or wrong, it is a disordered love at best.

00:19:46 – 00:19:48:	Now, as I said, that's a spectrum.

00:19:48 – 00:19:50:	That's the case with much of this.

00:19:50 – 00:20:11:	Well, when I were discussing this before we started recording, one of the reasons that this topic is complex, that there is some challenge in order to map out all of these connections between the various kinds of love, is that each analysis more or less falls along a spectrum.

00:20:13 – 00:20:24:	And so, charity, you can have the abject poor, the destitute, who are of course the strongest case in terms of whom to receive charity.

00:20:25 – 00:20:35:	And then you can have those who are just marginally below the level that we would consider the appropriate level for someone living in our society.

00:20:35 – 00:20:36:	That's a spectrum.

00:20:37 – 00:20:40:	The charity should of course go first to those who are in dire need.

00:20:41 – 00:20:50:	For instance, if you are going to provide clothing to those who need it, you probably provide it to the person who is naked first, because he needs it most.

00:20:50 – 00:20:56:	The person who is liable to freeze to death, if you do not clothe him, needs your charity first.

00:20:57 – 00:20:59:	But that is the case for all of these.

00:20:59 – 00:21:01:	There is a spectrum underlying it.

00:21:02 – 00:21:10:	And so, as Woe said in his introduction, we cannot necessarily give you a set of rules.

00:21:11 – 00:21:13:	If this, then that, if that, then this.

00:21:14 – 00:21:15:	That's not how any of this works.

00:21:16 – 00:21:22:	As is the case with so many of the things we cover on this podcast, this is a matter of wisdom.

00:21:23 – 00:21:30:	You are going to have to apply the gifts that God gave you to the facts as you find them, to the things set before you.

00:21:31 – 00:21:41:	And so, for instance, when it comes to familial love, you are going to have to decide the extent of that with each one of your siblings, each one of your family members.

00:21:41 – 00:21:43:	How much do I aid this person?

00:21:43 – 00:21:44:	How much time do I invest here?

00:21:45 – 00:21:48:	Do I have to pull back because this is causing problems?

00:21:50 – 00:21:51:	There is wisdom involved.

00:21:52 – 00:21:58:	For instance, you know, as we've used as an example previously, you don't give money to a sibling who is a drug addict.

00:21:59 – 00:22:00:	That's not love.

00:22:01 – 00:22:02:	That's not charity.

00:22:02 – 00:22:04:	You're not actually helping that person.

00:22:05 – 00:22:08:	The same thing holds in general with charity.

00:22:08 – 00:22:14:	If you are giving money to drug addicts, you are not helping them.

00:22:15 – 00:22:22:	Now, if you get them a job or help them to get cleaned up, help them to get treatment, that's charity.

00:22:22 – 00:22:23:	That's appropriate charity.

00:22:24 – 00:22:25:	That's a good thing.

00:22:25 – 00:22:35:	But you can see that in each case, society, at least our fallen corrupt society, would call both of those things charity.

00:22:36 – 00:22:43:	If you give money to, in this case, poor drug addicts, many will call it charity, but it's not.

00:22:44 – 00:22:52:	Because the nature, the scope of the thing you are doing isn't appropriate, even if the target is appropriate as a recipient of that charity.

00:22:52 – 00:23:05:	And so each one of these aspects has to be correct for the kind of love in question to be love, because otherwise, again, it is disordered or it may very well just not be love.

00:23:06 – 00:23:10:	And again, the most obvious examples will be in the episode on Eros.

00:23:11 – 00:23:17:	One of the substantial aspects of the ancient definition of agape has to do with preference.

00:23:18 – 00:23:23:	As Corey said, agape love is necessarily relational.

00:23:23 – 00:23:26:	There's a subject and there's an object, and it's a known object.

00:23:26 – 00:23:30:	There's some reason why you extend agape love to someone.

00:23:31 – 00:23:41:	And even though there's self-sacrifice involved and you're willing to give up something for the person for whom you express this type of love, it's a preference.

00:23:41 – 00:23:47:	Because we are not omnipotent, it is necessarily a limited preference.

00:23:47 – 00:23:51:	What I mean by that is I can't possibly agape everyone in the world.

00:23:52 – 00:23:55:	It's impossible and it's stupid to want to try.

00:23:55 – 00:24:00:	It's actually evil to think that I can have the same amount of love that God has.

00:24:01 – 00:24:03:	Because that's not how God made us.

00:24:03 – 00:24:04:	We are not infinite.

00:24:04 – 00:24:05:	We are finite.

00:24:05 – 00:24:09:	We are situated in certain places with families, neighbors, communities.

00:24:10 – 00:24:13:	The whole hierarchy that we go through so frequently.

00:24:14 – 00:24:23:	In our situation, we have the obligation from God to love our neighbor, to care for those who are around us, to care for family, and to care in different ways.

00:24:24 – 00:24:26:	And so, all of those are expressing preference.

00:24:28 – 00:24:46:	Yet, what you find in the wicked corners of the Church, which are not corners anymore, it's the majority of the Church today, and almost the entirety of the secular world, is that there can be no preference, which is itself inherently a preference, because they are always expressing a preference.

00:24:46 – 00:24:50:	But what they will do is they will say, you can't prefer your own.

00:24:51 – 00:24:55:	You have to prefer the far away, and then that means it's agape.

00:24:55 – 00:24:56:	What's nonsense?

00:24:57 – 00:25:03:	Having it be alienated from your own personal situation doesn't make it more loving, because you're finite.

00:25:04 – 00:25:05:	You're not omnipotent.

00:25:05 – 00:25:08:	You can't love everyone the way God does.

00:25:08 – 00:25:17:	There's necessarily a trade-off when you give to one when you love one, preferentially, someone else isn't going to get it.

00:25:18 – 00:25:24:	Now, there are situations where that subdivision doesn't really apply nearly as much, for example, inside a family.

00:25:24 – 00:25:28:	But again, that's going to be another facet of a different type of love.

00:25:30 – 00:25:35:	When we're talking about agape, we're talking about, I prefer to do this for this type of person.

00:25:35 – 00:25:40:	And as Corey is saying, another facet of another flavor of love is charity.

00:25:41 – 00:25:52:	And so there's a preference involved in charity, but it tends to be more externalized, because the duty of charity, and in one particular case in Scripture and historically in the Church, has been almsgiving.

00:25:53 – 00:25:55:	You give alms to a stranger.

00:25:55 – 00:25:57:	You don't give alms to your family.

00:25:57 – 00:26:01:	Your family's needs fall under 1 Timothy 5, 8.

00:26:01 – 00:26:05:	If you're not caring for your own household, you're not failing to give alms.

00:26:05 – 00:26:10:	You're failing on a much more basic, much more crucial level.

00:26:10 – 00:26:11:	And so it's a different thing.

00:26:11 – 00:26:28:	It's the absence of love, but that opportunity cost of, well, I'm going to give alms to the poor person, you know, across the road or 10,000 miles away when your own family is suffering, the world will say, oh, that's wonderful.

00:26:28 – 00:26:29:	Isn't that a blessing?

00:26:29 – 00:26:43:	Well, no, it's not, because the opportunity cost is that you've deprived those to whom God has situated you most closely and where you may well have greater duties, because all of these facets have different types of degrees of duties.

00:26:44 – 00:26:56:	As we'll get into in the third episode, the duties of love that a spouse has to each other is very different than the type of duties of love that you have to a neighbor or to a sibling.

00:26:57 – 00:27:07:	They're fundamentally different, but they're all duties to some degree, and some of them are very particularized, and some of them are diffuse, and some of them are situationally random effectively.

00:27:08 – 00:27:12:	The example of the Good Samaritan was basically random.

00:27:12 – 00:27:15:	The man happened to be a neighbor for the moment.

00:27:16 – 00:27:21:	When the Samaritan passed by and saw the man who had been beaten and bloodied, he took care of him because he was right there.

00:27:21 – 00:27:23:	It was happenstance that he came by.

00:27:23 – 00:27:25:	He was situationally his neighbor.

00:27:26 – 00:27:27:	He showed love for him.

00:27:27 – 00:27:30:	He showed charity for him by taking care of those immediate needs.

00:27:31 – 00:27:34:	But that was basically the end of the relationship.

00:27:34 – 00:27:35:	He didn't then adopt the man.

00:27:35 – 00:27:38:	He didn't become his lifelong adopted brother.

00:27:38 – 00:27:40:	He took care of his needs and that was it.

00:27:40 – 00:27:42:	And that's not hostility.

00:27:42 – 00:27:45:	I think that's one thing is we look at these various facets.

00:27:46 – 00:27:55:	The world and the evil parts of the church want to say, if you don't use an unlimited form of every one of these facets, you're being evil and hostile.

00:27:55 – 00:27:58:	Well, in the third episode, we're talking about marriage.

00:27:59 – 00:28:01:	Obviously, that's wicked.

00:28:01 – 00:28:04:	If I want to be your friend, that's one thing.

00:28:04 – 00:28:07:	If we want to have a brotherly relationship, that's great.

00:28:07 – 00:28:12:	If I want to have this sort of relationship with your wife, that's a completely different matter.

00:28:13 – 00:28:15:	It becomes inherently wicked.

00:28:15 – 00:28:16:	There are lines.

00:28:16 – 00:28:17:	There are lines.

00:28:17 – 00:28:18:	There are duties.

00:28:18 – 00:28:20:	There are scopes of all these things.

00:28:20 – 00:28:21:	And so it's not the same.

00:28:22 – 00:28:24:	The marriage is one to one.

00:28:24 – 00:28:27:	The family unit is ordained and created by God.

00:28:28 – 00:28:30:	You can't make more children than God gives you.

00:28:30 – 00:28:34:	And the scope of your family, your immediate family, is bounded.

00:28:35 – 00:28:38:	You can adopt, and that's also bringing someone into your family.

00:28:38 – 00:28:38:	That's grafting.

00:28:39 – 00:28:42:	And it's a blessing that we have always had that.

00:28:42 – 00:28:45:	Jesus was adopted by Joseph functionally.

00:28:45 – 00:28:47:	He became his father legally.

00:28:47 – 00:28:48:	He was his father.

00:28:48 – 00:28:50:	He was his earthly father.

00:28:50 – 00:28:51:	And it was by adoption.

00:28:52 – 00:28:56:	And then we become adopted sons of God through baptism, through faith.

00:28:57 – 00:29:06:	When we look at things like agape and we look at the preference that's inherent to it, we have to just be clear about the fact that it's okay to have preference.

00:29:06 – 00:29:19:	I think that's one of the things that we hope to get across in the series is that there's an attack on the idea that you can prefer anyone or anything, which again is always fundamentally a preference, because they're never telling the truth when they say that sort of thing.

00:29:19 – 00:29:27:	When I say, well, I prefer my race, I prefer my community over some other random community somewhere else, they'll say that's hateful.

00:29:28 – 00:29:37:	But what they're actually saying is that I have a moral obligation to love strangers, to have agape and charity for those who are somewhere else.

00:29:37 – 00:29:38:	It's still stating a preference.

00:29:39 – 00:29:44:	All of these are inherently preferential, and that's okay, because we're not omnipotent.

00:29:44 – 00:29:47:	We can't possibly love in any degree everyone.

00:29:48 – 00:29:49:	We have to do it where we are.

00:29:50 – 00:30:04:	And so as we discuss the various aspects, just keep in mind, understanding the limitations and the scope and the giver and the receiver for all these types is important because people are coming along every day and saying, no, no, no, not like that.

00:30:05 – 00:30:21:	You have to love in this different way, in this different circumstance, and they end up inverting that which is ordained by God, and they end up causing you to do evil because of the opportunity cost of preferencing that which is far away or whatever perverted preference they're giving you.

00:30:21 – 00:30:23:	And it's always a perversion of preference.

00:30:23 – 00:30:25:	That's the flip side of all these things.

00:30:26 – 00:30:43:	When the world, when Satan perverts these types of love, it is always to take that which is ordered by God as a good preference and rather to prefer something that's awful, something that's disordered, something that can only do harm, even if it's doing good for someone who's far away.

00:30:44 – 00:30:49:	If you give all your money to someone 10,000 miles away, they're probably going to be better off for it, at least for a little while.

00:30:50 – 00:30:53:	But what's the opportunity cost that you've done here?

00:30:53 – 00:30:56:	We did the entire episode on inheritance.

00:30:56 – 00:31:04:	Part of that was about the delinquency of the older generations today, despising giving an inheritance to their children.

00:31:04 – 00:31:10:	That's an obligation that is inherent, and yet they're preferring strangers.

00:31:11 – 00:31:18:	So love and preference are bound up, and as limited creatures, we don't have unlimited love.

00:31:18 – 00:31:21:	We only have so much, it can only go so far.

00:31:21 – 00:31:32:	And so when we prefer to give it to others, sometimes it's a conscious choice, sometimes it's situationally dictated, and sometimes you just sort of luck into it.

00:31:33 – 00:31:38:	You meet someone, if it's someone of the opposite sex and you're attracted to him, that's one kind of love.

00:31:38 – 00:31:42:	If it's the same sex and you just really get along very well, it's a different kind of love.

00:31:42 – 00:31:45:	We call it friendship, brotherhood, things like that.

00:31:46 – 00:31:49:	Whichever one of those you have, it's still limited.

00:31:49 – 00:31:51:	You can only do it for a few people.

00:31:51 – 00:32:00:	Even if you get up to the Dunbar number of 150 we've talked about a number of times recently, that's really the maximum scope of any kind of meaningful relationship.

00:32:00 – 00:32:09:	And then within those relationships of about 150 people, you're going to have a winnowing of the degrees and types of love that are even possible.

00:32:09 – 00:32:13:	And when you get to the very closest and most intimate level, you have your family and you have your spouse.

00:32:14 – 00:32:16:	Those are all preferences, and they're all good.

00:32:16 – 00:32:24:	It's okay to prefer your own, because that's what God gave you, and it's okay to say, well, I have to do this duty first.

00:32:24 – 00:32:25:	This is what's in front of me.

00:32:25 – 00:32:26:	This is what God gave me.

00:32:27 – 00:32:29:	I'm going to prefer it, because that's the way it is.

00:32:30 – 00:32:31:	Pagans understand this.

00:32:31 – 00:32:33:	Pagans can live godly lives.

00:32:33 – 00:32:38:	It doesn't save them, but they intrinsically understand that this is how God ordered the world.

00:32:39 – 00:32:51:	And this modern notion of despising self and despising nearby and despising family for the sake of aliens is profoundly wicked in a way that is predicted as a sign of the end times.

00:32:51 – 00:32:56:	That's something we'll cover in detail next week in one portion of another facet of love.

00:32:57 – 00:33:05:	But just keep in mind that you have a permission slip from God to prefer certain people in certain situations.

00:33:05 – 00:33:18:	And when you have an outpouring of these facets of love, there's basically a guidebook in Creation and in Scripture that says this is a good, properly ordered version of it, or this is disordered.

00:33:18 – 00:33:22:	And so think about it, check your work, see if you're doing it right.

00:33:23 – 00:33:25:	And if you are, you should have a clean conscience.

00:33:25 – 00:33:30:	You should have a clean conscience about preferring that which God says for you to prefer.

00:33:31 – 00:33:42:	Many of the terms that we're going to use in this episode and in this series in order to describe certain things overlap each other.

00:33:42 – 00:33:49:	There are going to be terms that have a core sense and then sort of a gray area and emanation around them.

00:33:49 – 00:33:56:	And one of those is going to be preference, which has a range of meanings, of intensities in English.

00:33:56 – 00:34:10:	And so I'm going to use the term in a slightly different way from how Woe just used it, because I want to give you a sort of hierarchy to help structure some of this in your mind and many other things as well.

00:34:10 – 00:34:11:	This is a general hierarchy.

00:34:11 – 00:34:15:	It's not just for this episode or this series.

00:34:17 – 00:34:20:	And the hierarchy is duty, love and preference.

00:34:23 – 00:34:27:	And that is in order, because as I mentioned, as I said, it is a hierarchy.

00:34:28 – 00:34:33:	Duty is highest, love is second, mere preference, we could call it, is third.

00:34:34 – 00:34:37:	And so when you have a duty, that trumps everything else.

00:34:37 – 00:34:43:	When you have a specific duty, and duties of course all flow from God, that's the reason they trump everything else.

00:34:45 – 00:34:47:	So God has given you certain duties to your wife.

00:34:49 – 00:34:54:	You are to fulfill those duties, period, because they're from God and it's a duty.

00:34:54 – 00:34:55:	It trumps all else.

00:34:56 – 00:35:00:	Love is second to that, and so love is going to trump a mere preference.

00:35:01 – 00:35:10:	And so, for instance, the love that you have for family is going to trump the mere preference you have, which is a form of love for friends.

00:35:12 – 00:35:14:	So keep that general hierarchy in mind.

00:35:14 – 00:35:20:	It helps to keep some of this clear and order some of it as we go through this topic and other ones as well.

00:35:22 – 00:35:49:	But to emphasize something that Woe said, and to use another term from economics, you are limited with regard to not just how many people you can love, as Woe was saying with the Dunbar number, but also any instance of using your resources or even just your time, because many times loving someone is a function of time invested.

00:35:49 – 00:35:52:	We'll get more into that in the next two episodes.

00:35:54 – 00:36:01:	But there's a utility aspect to this, not in the economic sense necessarily strictly of utility.

00:36:01 – 00:36:05:	I'm not saying that there's a unit of love and you spend it in the most productive way.

00:36:05 – 00:36:06:	It's not like a dollar.

00:36:06 – 00:36:08:	I'm not talking about it as being fungible.

00:36:08 – 00:36:21:	But to some degree, there is, because there's that unit of time, and you can invest it in certain ways, or there's the unit of money in the case of charity, and you can invest that in certain ways.

00:36:23 – 00:36:29:	There is a hierarchy with regard to these things, and so you owe a higher duty to your family.

00:36:29 – 00:36:32:	That love trumps that you're going to have for a stranger.

00:36:33 – 00:36:50:	We'll get more into this in the next episode in this series, but just to emphasize this as an example, if you have a poor family member who needs aid, you are to help that family member before you help a stranger.

00:36:51 – 00:37:10:	The charity that you would give to a stranger has to take a back seat to the love of family, which trumps the alien, which trumps the stranger, because as we have mentioned many times before, there is a hierarchy when it comes to those you love, when it comes to your duties to others.

00:37:12 – 00:37:15:	It flows first of all to those who are closest.

00:37:16 – 00:37:23:	Now, as Woe was saying, today society would tell us that that is a wicked thing, that you can't preference your own over the alien.

00:37:26 – 00:37:28:	Step back and think about that for a minute.

00:37:29 – 00:37:36:	Those who are closest to you are closest to you because of the way that God has designed the world.

00:37:38 – 00:37:52:	It is not random that your children are closest to you after your spouse, and in fact in some ways closer to you than your spouse, because they are related to you by flesh and blood more directly.

00:37:52 – 00:38:00:	Your spouse should be a distant cousin because that's the way God has designed things in terms of fertility, which is a clear indicator of God's approval.

00:38:01 – 00:38:09:	But the reason that your children are closest to you is because that's how God designed the system.

00:38:10 – 00:38:23:	And so when those who believe that it's a wicked thing to preference your own, tell you that you cannot prefer your family or your extended family or your nation, what they're actually saying is God got it wrong.

00:38:24 – 00:38:25:	We're more moral than God.

00:38:25 – 00:38:27:	We'll be better than God.

00:38:28 – 00:38:37:	And ultimately, the goal, of course, because it's Satan behind it, and he knows exactly what he's doing, the goal is to make it impossible to love anyone.

00:38:39 – 00:38:41:	When you love everyone, you love no one.

00:38:43 – 00:38:55:	If you were to show the same sort of love that you have or should have for your spouse to every single person you meet, you don't love your spouse, and quite frankly, you're probably a pest.

00:38:55 – 00:38:56:	You should be put in prison.

00:38:57 – 00:38:59:	But fundamentally, you no longer love your spouse.

00:39:01 – 00:39:10:	Part of loving someone is showing that preference, is having a partiality for that person, a partialness to that person.

00:39:11 – 00:39:15:	Now, there are those, of course, who are going to say, well, doesn't scripture say that we can't be partial?

00:39:16 – 00:39:19:	We have gone over what that means in that context in scripture.

00:39:20 – 00:39:29:	There is a wicked partiality, which is inappropriate, and there is a proper partiality, which is not only appropriate, but is required.

00:39:29 – 00:39:30:	It is a duty.

00:39:30 – 00:39:33:	You are required to be partial to your family.

00:39:34 – 00:39:37:	We will get into that when we are discussing Storge.

00:39:38 – 00:39:46:	And it is one of the signs of those who are not Christian, who are worse than unbelievers, that they do not have this form of correct partiality.

00:39:48 – 00:39:59:	And so, you cannot say, well, I have set aside my money in order to provide charity for these people who are 5,000 miles away.

00:39:59 – 00:40:06:	So, I can't possibly aid my poor family members or those who are in my own community because I'm being charitable.

00:40:06 – 00:40:07:	I'm doing exact...

00:40:07 – 00:40:09:	No, you're not doing what you're supposed to do.

00:40:11 – 00:40:21:	Because you are pursuing something that is lower down the priority list with regard to your moral duties, and then saying, look at how holy I am.

00:40:23 – 00:40:26:	That alone should worry you if you are engaged in that.

00:40:27 – 00:40:32:	Also, the kind of people who engage in it, if you look at them, that should worry you as well if you want to be in that camp.

00:40:32 – 00:40:33:	Who's in that camp?

00:40:33 – 00:40:35:	Who is the leader of that camp?

00:40:35 – 00:40:39:	It's the wicked Pharisee who prays, thank you, God, that I am not like other men.

00:40:40 – 00:40:46:	That's what you're doing when you are engaged in that sort of telescopic philanthropy, one could call it.

00:40:47 – 00:40:57:	When you're engaged in supposed charity for those who are thousands of miles away at the expense of those who are close to you, that's the key aspect of this.

00:40:59 – 00:41:14:	If we lived in a country that was so wealthy, so perfectly ordered and run, that we don't have any poor, which is very unlikely in this life, as Christ says, the poor will always be with you.

00:41:14 – 00:41:20:	But let's say we manage to get rid of that kind of poverty, the worst sorts of poverty.

00:41:20 – 00:41:22:	We solve these problems.

00:41:23 – 00:41:24:	In that case, fine.

00:41:25 – 00:41:30:	Direct your charity to those who are more distant, because you have already helped those who are closer.

00:41:31 – 00:41:37:	That is a requirement from God, because again, God has created these hierarchies.

00:41:38 – 00:41:42:	Those who are closer to you are not closer to you by random chance.

00:41:42 – 00:41:45:	They are closer to you by design.

00:41:45 – 00:41:48:	God has given you a higher duty to them.

00:41:49 – 00:42:03:	And so if you engage in supposed charity with those who are farther away, you are not engaging in charity, because that is disordered to the point that it rises to being a sin.

00:42:04 – 00:42:19:	It is possible to engage in something that the world calls love, and one would think this is obvious and particularly when we get to Eros later on, but it is possible to engage in something the world calls love, and have it actually be a sin.

00:42:19 – 00:42:25:	It's one of the reasons that we are going over these two topics in this episode.

00:42:25 – 00:42:29:	Partly they lay the groundwork, and partly they serve as a contrast.

00:42:30 – 00:42:52:	Because if you have someone to whom this agape love is owed, and instead you are engaging in supposed charity, you are sinning at both ends, because you are not fulfilling your duty to the first person, and you are wrongfully pursuing a wicked, manufactured duty, one that does not exist, to the second person.

00:42:55 – 00:43:07:	There are things that are supposedly good, that if they were in a vacuum would be good, that in context, when you run a fact-specific analysis, may very well be wicked.

00:43:08 – 00:43:12:	And so charity, all else being equal, is good, period.

00:43:13 – 00:43:27:	But charity that comes at the expense of those to whom a higher duty is owed is no longer charity, because you have fundamentally violated that third step of the analysis, as it were.

00:43:27 – 00:43:34:	They're not really necessarily steps, but that third aspect of the analysis, the nature and scope of the thing.

00:43:34 – 00:43:45:	And of course, you have directed it to the wrong person, but you've directed it to the wrong person because you didn't realize or you didn't care that you have a higher duty to others.

00:43:48 – 00:43:52:	This is not a buffet, all of these terms.

00:43:52 – 00:43:59:	You don't look at a table with all of the different kinds of love and just pick whichever one you want and pursue that, and that seems good.

00:43:59 – 00:43:59:	I'll do that today.

00:44:00 – 00:44:01:	There are duties.

00:44:01 – 00:44:02:	There's a hierarchy.

00:44:03 – 00:44:10:	There are those to whom these things are owed, just as we pay taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed.

00:44:10 – 00:44:13:	We also owe love.

00:44:13 – 00:44:20:	We have a duty to pursue the good of certain people that may very well even be at the expense of others.

00:44:22 – 00:44:40:	Because if you have a poor family member and you have X amount of money left over or X amount of money that you can set aside to help someone, if you help that family member as you should, that is at the expense under a certain conception of others to whom you could have given charity.

00:44:41 – 00:44:47:	The reason you don't give that particular charity is because you have the higher duty to the family member.

00:44:48 – 00:45:00:	The world wants to tell you you don't have a higher or a lesser duty, or even in some cases, most perversely, the world will invert it, as Woe was saying, and will tell you you have the highest duty to the most distant person.

00:45:02 – 00:45:03:	That is satanic.

00:45:04 – 00:45:08:	That is incredibly wicked, and we will go over this at greater length in the next episode.

00:45:08 – 00:45:19:	But to invert the one to whom love is owed the most, and give instead that love to the one to whom it is owed the least, is satanic.

00:45:19 – 00:45:23:	That is Satan attempting to destroy love.

00:45:25 – 00:45:29:	If you treat everyone the same, then you have no friends.

00:45:30 – 00:45:33:	If you treat everyone the same, then you have no family.

00:45:34 – 00:45:38:	As Wo was saying, part of having a friend is showing a preference.

00:45:40 – 00:45:51:	If A is your friend, and B is a stranger, and both of them ask you to go out to dinner, you're going to say yes to your friend and tell B another time.

00:45:52 – 00:46:02:	Because that's part of what it means for A to be your friend, is to show that preference toward him, and yes, at the expense of that other.

00:46:03 – 00:46:07:	As Wo was saying, we do not have infinite capacity.

00:46:07 – 00:46:08:	We are not God.

00:46:08 – 00:46:12:	We cannot be perfect with regard to these things.

00:46:13 – 00:46:20:	Now, in this case, we're saying perfect in an absolute sense, not perfect in a relative creaturely sense.

00:46:20 – 00:46:27:	Because in the creaturely sense, to act perfectly is to act in accord with the hierarchy God has created.

00:46:27 – 00:46:31:	And so, preferencing A over B is in a creaturely sense perfect.

00:46:32 – 00:46:38:	It is not perfect in an absolute sense, because you cannot be two places at the same time.

00:46:39 – 00:46:40:	God can do that.

00:46:40 – 00:46:44:	God can perfectly love each and every thing he has created.

00:46:46 – 00:46:48:	You cannot do that, because you are limited.

00:46:48 – 00:46:50:	You are a creature.

00:46:50 – 00:46:51:	You have a limited amount of time.

00:46:52 – 00:46:54:	You have a limited amount of resources.

00:46:54 – 00:46:57:	You have a limited number of relationships that you can maintain.

00:46:59 – 00:47:05:	That is a very important point here, and that is why we have mentioned it so many times.

00:47:06 – 00:47:19:	If you are attempting to pursue the same kind of relationship with every single person you meet, or God forbid, every single person in the world, you will ultimately have a relationship with no one.

00:47:20 – 00:47:22:	That will make you inhuman.

00:47:23 – 00:47:25:	That is a wicked pursuit.

00:47:26 – 00:47:35:	You have to invest the greater amount of time, the greater amount of resources, in those closer to you, because God has put them there.

00:47:36 – 00:47:39:	And God has required of you that you do that.

00:47:39 – 00:47:43:	That is obvious not just from Scripture, but also from nature.

00:47:44 – 00:47:58:	This is one of those cases where the noble pagan is much more Christian than the modern so-called Christian who inverts that and pursues the good of the alien over family or over nation.

00:48:00 – 00:48:02:	There are very real demands here.

00:48:02 – 00:48:04:	There is a very real hierarchy.

00:48:04 – 00:48:09:	And you do not just get to pick and choose whichever one you want, because it is a hierarchy.

00:48:10 – 00:48:22:	You are to fulfill and you are to pursue those things that are higher, that have a greater demand, that carry a greater moral weight above and before those that are lower down the list.

00:48:24 – 00:48:31:	The world doesn't want you to do that because the world, the flesh and the devil seek to subvert and destroy.

00:48:33 – 00:48:37:	Because if you love everyone equally, you no longer love your family.

00:48:37 – 00:48:42:	And if you can destroy the family, you are destroying that fundamental unit of everything.

00:48:44 – 00:48:46:	That is the beginning of society.

00:48:46 – 00:48:48:	It is the beginning of civilization.

00:48:48 – 00:48:55:	It is of fundamental importance, and we will go over that in the next episode, which will cover more in depth familial love.

00:48:57 – 00:49:02:	But if that can be subverted, then Satan is one because he can subvert everything.

00:49:03 – 00:49:16:	And if you don't realize that these are concentric circles, that they emanate outward from the family unit, if you say, well, I don't have to preference my nation because my nation isn't my family, your nation is your family.

00:49:18 – 00:49:23:	If you manage to subvert any point of this, you will eventually subvert the totality.

00:49:23 – 00:49:35:	And so when Satan says, no, you have to love the stranger over your fellow citizen, over the fellow member of your nation, what he's telling you is that he wants to subvert your family, and he will eventually get there.

00:49:37 – 00:49:49:	And today we have many who think that they do not owe a greater duty to those who are of the same blood than those who are of alien blood, because we've been told that's wicked, we've been told that's evil.

00:49:49 – 00:49:56:	And yet scripture and nature both testify that you owe a higher duty to those who are closer to you.

00:49:58 – 00:50:20:	And so if you think that you are pursuing charity by aiding those who are entirely distant from you, entirely unknown, earlier I said that charity has sort of an arm's length aspect to it, that agape does not, because agape has that very real, very tangible relationship that is a necessary part of it.

00:50:21 – 00:50:24:	But charity does have a relationship as well.

00:50:25 – 00:50:28:	It is not as close, but it's not no relationship.

00:50:29 – 00:50:39:	You have no relationship with someone who is 5000 miles away, a person you will never meet, a person you do not know, a person with whom you have no connection whatsoever.

00:50:40 – 00:50:49:	It is not charity to send your money to that person who may very well not exist in many cases, because we aren't even really touching on the aspects of corruption in this.

00:50:50 – 00:50:58:	But if you are sending your money to that person, in this day and age, most certainly, you are doing it at the expense of those who are closer.

00:50:59 – 00:51:00:	And what you're doing is not charity.

00:51:01 – 00:51:03:	It is disordered to the point of being sin.

00:51:04 – 00:51:13:	And so philanthropy in the US context that is aiding those in Africa or Israel, so called, that's not charity.

00:51:14 – 00:51:15:	That's wickedness.

00:51:15 – 00:51:16:	That is sin.

00:51:16 – 00:51:18:	You should not be doing that.

00:51:19 – 00:51:25:	We went over in a previous episode how not Christian, even Christians in the United States are.

00:51:27 – 00:51:36:	And yet the world tells you to expend your effort and your resources in helping those supposedly who are thousands of miles away.

00:51:36 – 00:51:38:	Well, what are you actually doing?

00:51:39 – 00:51:40:	You're hating your neighbor.

00:51:41 – 00:51:43:	And that is the fundamental point here.

00:51:45 – 00:51:55:	If you are pursuing a love that harms those who are closer to you, what you are actually doing is hating those who are closer to you.

00:51:55 – 00:52:00:	You are exhibiting hatred, not the love that you think you are pursuing.

00:52:01 – 00:52:14:	The example of the hierarchy that Corey gave earlier is also a really good example of how the same word can be used in different contexts to mean either subtly or substantially different things.

00:52:15 – 00:52:18:	He mentioned duty, then love, then preference.

00:52:18 – 00:52:20:	And that is correct.

00:52:20 – 00:52:31:	And to think of preference in terms of I prefer chocolate to broccoli, yeah, absolutely, that sort of preference, even if it's in some flavor of love, is at the bottom.

00:52:32 – 00:52:43:	When I was speaking of agape, in the sense of to prefer, it was actually much closer to the duty of you have a duty to prefer your children over someone else's children.

00:52:44 – 00:52:47:	It's preference not in the, oh, it's what I feel like.

00:52:48 – 00:52:50:	It's preference in that you have a duty to God.

00:52:50 – 00:52:59:	You don't have an option, and it's perverted and it's wicked for someone who has a duty to prefer their own to instead be indifferent or to despise them.

00:53:00 – 00:53:05:	So, just to clarify, that's exclusively the sense of preference that I meant in that context.

00:53:07 – 00:53:27:	An interesting thing about agape that actually appears in the Song of Solomon, which is an interesting book that we'll probably talk about a little bit in the third episode where we discuss marriage, because that book is typological of marriage, of the nature of Christ's relationship to his bride, the Church.

00:53:27 – 00:53:33:	And there's a lot that's going on there in that particular type of love that humans don't fully understand.

00:53:33 – 00:53:41:	And it's kind of a dangerous one, and that's another part of the reason we're kind of sequestering that, because it's very easy to get very weird with that subject very quickly.

00:53:42 – 00:53:56:	And a lot of times that's a hallmark of someone that's doing completely screwy, wicked anti-theology, is they will take something and suddenly turn it into this weird cult that's doing strange non-marriage stuff.

00:53:56 – 00:53:57:	We'll get into more details now.

00:53:59 – 00:54:12:	And yet what we find in the Septuagint is that the word agape is used multiple times in the Song of Solomon to describe that relationship that the man and his beloved have.

00:54:12 – 00:54:53:	Another thing I want to point out, especially for those of you who are still on the King James train, one thing to be aware of and one thing that's important when we're discussing these subjects, we're talking about specific words and definitions and translations, you should be aware that, something we've said before, if you want good advice on what Bible to get or what translation or what type of Bible, the second listener mail episode we did, the first hour we devoted that, and we explained why the King James was a beautiful time capsule of the beginnings of the modern English language, really kind of an archaic version even then, but it is archaic.

00:54:54 – 00:55:08:	And I highlight it here because when you look at numerous places in the New Testament, the King James will translate agape as charity, which if they were trying to make a particular point, might be okay.

00:55:09 – 00:55:16:	And in fact, charity 400 years ago did actually mean something much closer to agape than it does today.

00:55:16 – 00:55:23:	So even the Webster 1828 dictionary definition of charity isn't the one that we're using today.

00:55:23 – 00:55:24:	And that's fine.

00:55:24 – 00:55:29:	I'm acknowledging it because the scope and the nature of words change.

00:55:29 – 00:55:30:	Sometimes that's okay.

00:55:30 – 00:55:31:	Sometimes it's not subversion.

00:55:32 – 00:55:36:	It's just that we're using different words now that haven't lost the sense.

00:55:36 – 00:55:48:	But what it means is that when you look at the King James, you're going to find that in some places, almost at random, they have used agape as charity when it doesn't mean the same thing as we're talking about today.

00:55:48 – 00:55:57:	So if you were to look at your King James Bible, you would find passages in, I think, Corinthians and Timothy, both of them, using the term charity.

00:55:57 – 00:55:59:	It doesn't mean in the sense that we're meaning today.

00:55:59 – 00:56:04:	But if you were to look at the Greek that they were using, they actually translated agape that way.

00:56:04 – 00:56:07:	Like I said, it would be one thing if they were consistent, but they weren't.

00:56:08 – 00:56:11:	Interestingly, caritas, as Corey said, is Latin.

00:56:12 – 00:56:22:	I looked it up earlier, and apparently the King James translators didn't even follow the Vulgate, which was Latin, to make those decisions by using charity.

00:56:22 – 00:56:23:	So just kind of a random.

00:56:24 – 00:56:28:	So it's just another case where it's fine to read whatever Bible you have, although it shouldn't be King James.

00:56:29 – 00:56:33:	Just know that when you're drilling down on specific words, translation choices matter.

00:56:34 – 00:56:36:	The example I gave a minute ago about preference.

00:56:37 – 00:56:38:	Preference can mean two very different things.

00:56:39 – 00:56:40:	I prefer chocolate.

00:56:41 – 00:56:43:	I prefer my parents.

00:56:44 – 00:56:45:	Totally different senses.

00:56:46 – 00:56:48:	I don't get to not prefer my parents.

00:56:48 – 00:56:51:	I can prefer whatever food I want.

00:56:51 – 00:56:54:	So prefer means fundamentally different things.

00:56:54 – 00:57:00:	Even though it's exactly the same word, same context, but the object is different, so the nature changes.

00:57:01 – 00:57:05:	So just don't pigeonhole with whatever your translation of choice is.

00:57:05 – 00:57:07:	It's fine to use one most of the time.

00:57:07 – 00:57:17:	Just be aware that, you know, love in these episodes, slavery in the episode we did on that, we mentioned there are three different words that are used in the Bible.

00:57:17 – 00:57:18:	You have bond servant, slave.

00:57:19 – 00:57:21:	They're different contexts and connotations.

00:57:21 – 00:57:25:	Sometimes they're communicating something clearly, and sometimes it just gets confusing.

00:57:25 – 00:57:41:	So if you're doing your own Bible study and you're drilling down, and you get to one of these words and you're curious, go back and look at the original Greek to see what it said, because that will give you a sense of what the translators were shading in as they made their choices.

00:57:42 – 00:57:44:	I'm not saying the King James is wrong when it says charity.

00:57:44 – 00:57:50:	It's a little inconsistent, which is frustrating, but that's absolutely what the word meant when they translated it.

00:57:50 – 00:57:52:	So I'm not saying it's wrong.

00:57:52 – 00:57:55:	I'm just highlighting it's different than the sense in which we are using it.

00:57:56 – 00:58:02:	The sense of charity that we're talking about is, for example, the challenge coins, which, by the way, we don't have any update at.

00:58:03 – 00:58:04:	They're being manufactured.

00:58:05 – 00:58:06:	That is effectively charity.

00:58:06 – 00:58:07:	It's charity with a kicker.

00:58:07 – 00:58:12:	You're supporting us by buying something, by giving us effectively a donation.

00:58:12 – 00:58:15:	We give you a tchotchke back, a neat thing back.

00:58:15 – 00:58:16:	Forgive me for the Yiddish.

00:58:17 – 00:58:19:	I'm trying to get that crap out of my language.

00:58:20 – 00:58:21:	That's charity.

00:58:21 – 00:58:23:	You have no obligation.

00:58:23 – 00:58:26:	No one has any obligation to give us anything.

00:58:26 – 00:58:34:	And we'll be the first to tell you, don't give us anything if it means that your kids aren't getting something, your family's not getting something.

00:58:35 – 00:58:41:	But at the same time, we are much closer than someone who's a complete stranger, just because you listen to our voices for hours a week.

00:58:41 – 00:58:43:	Which, no obligation.

00:58:43 – 00:58:45:	There's not in the remotest sense saying that.

00:58:45 – 00:58:52:	Just that the connection of charity doesn't have to be absolutely immediate.

00:58:52 – 00:58:54:	It just can't be completely random.

00:58:55 – 00:58:56:	And so there's a hierarchy.

00:58:56 – 00:59:00:	You have to choose to whom am I going to give my limited resources.

00:59:01 – 00:59:02:	Is it going to be used for something good?

00:59:02 – 00:59:08:	As Corey gave the example again, you don't give a brother who's a drug addict money.

00:59:08 – 00:59:10:	You know it might kill him.

00:59:10 – 00:59:11:	That's not love.

00:59:12 – 00:59:18:	The fact that the thing could be used for good goes out the window when you know there's a very high likelihood it's going to be used for evil.

00:59:19 – 00:59:27:	So the closest object of your charity may not be the right one because as Corey said, it may not be charity at all, even if it looks and smells like it.

00:59:28 – 00:59:32:	The fact that we have charitable foundations and all these other things, most of them are just complete griffs.

00:59:33 – 00:59:37:	When you drill down into the way their finances work, it's just, it's rubbish.

00:59:37 – 00:59:48:	You know, 60% of the funding goes to pay salaries for people who spend all their time flying around telling people how generous they are to people you'll never see or meet.

00:59:48 – 00:59:51:	It's a racket in a lot of cases.

00:59:51 – 00:59:58:	Some of them do good work, but even then, the question becomes where is the good work being done versus where it could be done?

00:59:59 – 01:00:08:	This happened last year, I think it was last year, I think it was 2023, when that train exploded in Ohio and that entire town was effectively poisoned.

01:00:09 – 01:00:13:	And the LCMS refused any charity to those people.

01:00:13 – 01:00:18:	They weren't refusing charity to people thousands of miles away in South America and Africa.

01:00:18 – 01:00:25:	But when people reached out and said, hey, all these people in Ohio need fresh water, they need bottled water, can we help them?

01:00:26 – 01:00:30:	The response from our church was, we don't have anybody on the ground there, nothing we can do.

01:00:31 – 01:00:33:	That is despising neighbor and brother.

01:00:33 – 01:00:37:	That is a demonstration that there is no charity going on at all.

01:00:37 – 01:00:39:	There is only theft and grift.

01:00:40 – 01:00:47:	Because they're taking people's money, and what they're doing is they're shipping it as far away as they can get it, but they won't help their own brothers in need.

01:00:49 – 01:00:49:	Why?

01:00:50 – 01:00:52:	Because it violates Satan's rules.

01:00:53 – 01:00:57:	We don't help those whom we have an obligation to prefer.

01:00:57 – 01:01:02:	You should prefer someone who lives in Ohio over someone who lives in Peru.

01:01:02 – 01:01:03:	You should.

01:01:03 – 01:01:08:	As an American, you have a moral obligation to prefer one over the other.

01:01:09 – 01:01:10:	Is that completely exclusive?

01:01:10 – 01:01:10:	No.

01:01:11 – 01:01:15:	You may have so much that it's possible for you to do whatever.

01:01:15 – 01:01:16:	As Corey said, it's a matter of wisdom.

01:01:16 – 01:01:20:	It's not that there's a rule book that says, here's where the bright line is.

01:01:21 – 01:01:24:	But the simple fact is that people have scarce resources.

01:01:24 – 01:01:27:	You shouldn't donate to a podcast before you donate to your church.

01:01:28 – 01:01:33:	You shouldn't donate to foreigners before everyone in your country is Christian.

01:01:34 – 01:01:43:	Somebody mentioned on Telegram a couple days ago that a lot of the Christian missions go to Uganda and mentioned that it's 84% Christian.

01:01:44 – 01:01:44:	Like, huh.

01:01:45 – 01:01:58:	And I had previously looked up the stats in Ohio because I mentioned that there are scumbag false pastors in the LCMS who brag about the so-called missionary work that they're doing to Ethiopians in Columbus, Ohio.

01:01:59 – 01:02:01:	Ethiopia is more Christian than Ohio.

01:02:02 – 01:02:03:	Uganda is more Christian than Ohio.

01:02:04 – 01:02:17:	So if you want to give money for missions to people you want to share the gospel, not only is it a violation of the tenets of charity to send it overseas, it's also a violation of the gospel.

01:02:18 – 01:02:24:	Because our neighbors, as we said in the episode that we recently did on the state of the churches, even the people inside the churches need to hear the gospel.

01:02:25 – 01:02:28:	Even the people inside the churches, for the most part, are not Christian.

01:02:29 – 01:02:30:	You want to talk about a mission field.

01:02:31 – 01:02:36:	How about all these people who say they're Christian, who say that they believe at least some of the Bible, but they don't know what's in there?

01:02:37 – 01:02:38:	How about we start with them?

01:02:38 – 01:02:40:	No one's talking about that.

01:02:41 – 01:02:48:	And yet you want to go someplace where everybody's already Christian far more than your own lands, and spend the money there, and say you're doing good works?

01:02:49 – 01:02:50:	That's stating a preference.

01:02:50 – 01:02:52:	It's stating a wicked preference.

01:02:52 – 01:03:01:	It's preferring the alien, and it's preferring the grift machine over something that would actually serve neighbor and community and family.

01:03:02 – 01:03:04:	We're obligated to have a preference.

01:03:04 – 01:03:06:	It's a duty sense.

01:03:06 – 01:03:08:	It's not the chocolate and broccoli sense.

01:03:10 – 01:03:24:	Another relatively recent example of that wicked inversion of a lack of charity for neighbor in pursuit of supposed charity for aliens comes from Doug Wilson.

01:03:24 – 01:03:39:	We mentioned him in a previous episode for related reasons, but he said that he would feel a greater connection, have more investment in an attack on Israel, so called, than he would on Vermont.

01:03:41 – 01:03:43:	I've never been to Vermont.

01:03:43 – 01:03:45:	I've not visited Vermont.

01:03:46 – 01:03:48:	I don't currently have any plans to go to Vermont.

01:03:49 – 01:03:59:	And yet an attack on Vermont would be an attack on me in a way that an attack on virtually any other country would not be.

01:04:00 – 01:04:02:	Because again, the distance matters.

01:04:03 – 01:04:10:	And so if someone attacks Uganda, that's not the same as attacking Kentucky, the state right next door.

01:04:11 – 01:04:14:	Because we owe that higher duty to neighbor.

01:04:14 – 01:04:29:	And when someone says that he owes a higher duty, he has a greater preference for the distant alien, you should believe him, and you should believe the fullness of what he's saying, because he's saying he is not Christian.

01:04:31 – 01:04:42:	Because Christians are supposed to have rightly ordered loves, and loving the far distant alien at the expense of neighbor is not love.

01:04:42 – 01:04:45:	It is again hatred, it is sinful.

01:04:47 – 01:04:52:	And we see that in so many of our church and other organizations these days.

01:04:53 – 01:05:02:	They supposedly pursue charity, and it's all going out of the country to the distant, virtually unknown alien.

01:05:03 – 01:05:12:	And they do that at the expense of neighbor, even when there is immediate and ample opportunity to aid neighbor.

01:05:13 – 01:05:19:	And aiding neighbor is not just a matter of preaching the gospel to your neighbor.

01:05:20 – 01:05:22:	Of course, that's something that we should do.

01:05:23 – 01:05:28:	But scripture also speaks of providing material aid to your neighbor.

01:05:28 – 01:05:31:	This comes up many times in scripture.

01:05:32 – 01:05:43:	God cares deeply for the poor, and we should be, as a church, as individual Christians, as Christian organizations, we should be aiding the poor in our communities.

01:05:44 – 01:05:47:	We shouldn't just be preaching to them.

01:05:48 – 01:05:49:	That may be part of it.

01:05:49 – 01:05:50:	That's important.

01:05:51 – 01:05:56:	But if you are preaching the gospel to someone who is starving, you're doing something wicked.

01:05:56 – 01:05:58:	Feed him first.

01:05:59 – 01:06:06:	You have to meet some of the material needs of your poor neighbor before you're going to get anywhere preaching the gospel.

01:06:07 – 01:06:11:	In fact, if you preach the gospel first, you are going to undermine the Word of God.

01:06:13 – 01:06:17:	You are going to harm your witness if you are not aiding that man first.

01:06:19 – 01:06:24:	That's just the reality of being a creature, of having these physical needs.

01:06:24 – 01:06:29:	If a man is freezing to death, he doesn't want to discuss philosophy.

01:06:29 – 01:06:30:	He needs a coat.

01:06:31 – 01:06:32:	Clothe him first.

01:06:34 – 01:06:37:	And we do see that many places in Scripture.

01:06:37 – 01:06:40:	Of course, there are the verses that deal with the poor.

01:06:41 – 01:06:43:	Those are all throughout Scripture.

01:06:43 – 01:06:47:	And these just directly address the issue of charity.

01:06:47 – 01:06:51:	And so, some of the Psalms may come to mind.

01:06:51 – 01:06:54:	Psalm 41, Blessed is the one who considers the poor.

01:06:54 – 01:06:56:	In the day of trouble, the Lord delivers him.

01:06:57 – 01:06:59:	The Lord protects him and keeps him.

01:07:11 – 01:07:11:	Or from Proverbs.

01:07:27 – 01:07:38:	I want to address a specific instance in scripture that will undoubtedly come up, because there will be those who look for a way to subvert the actual teaching of scripture.

01:07:39 – 01:07:46:	When the collection for the poor of Jerusalem is taken up from various churches, it is important to remember the context.

01:07:47 – 01:08:05:	Not only the specific context of the fact that these are churches planted by the apostle who is going back to them, or in some cases, perhaps, planted by another apostle, and then Paul is coming to make the collection, or whichever apostle is doing it in a given case.

01:08:06 – 01:08:16:	But these are churches that were planted by the apostles, sending back money via the apostles in order to aid another church.

01:08:16 – 01:08:21:	And not only that, but geographically speaking, these churches are nearby.

01:08:22 – 01:08:26:	This is nothing like an American church sending money to Africa.

01:08:27 – 01:08:29:	That is thousands of miles away.

01:08:30 – 01:08:37:	Here we're dealing with hundreds of miles, and in some cases, it may very well be the next large city over, effectively.

01:08:38 – 01:08:40:	This is also right along trade routes.

01:08:41 – 01:08:51:	We were discussing before we started recording, Paul was not chartering his ship in order to visit these churches and then take back aid to Jerusalem.

01:08:53 – 01:08:58:	He just hopped on the ship in port that was available and going in that direction.

01:08:59 – 01:09:08:	Because this was part of the Roman Empire, all of these cities were trading, they were related, they had connections with one another, there were pre-existing relationships.

01:09:09 – 01:09:13:	This is not at all like what we see today with international charities.

01:09:15 – 01:09:25:	The advent of modern technology and particularly modern banking, which is another topic for another time, but it makes it seem like everyone is next door.

01:09:26 – 01:09:27:	And that's just not the case.

01:09:27 – 01:09:35:	Just because I could send $5 to someone in Uganda with a couple of clicks or taps on my phone doesn't make him my neighbor.

01:09:37 – 01:09:44:	Because as we went over in previous episodes, neighbor fundamentally means the person who is nearby.

01:09:45 – 01:09:50:	Charity should flow first to the neighbor that is part of this.

01:09:50 – 01:09:53:	So it is the poor in your own community you should help.

01:09:55 – 01:10:12:	Not some far distant supposed poor person via some faceless international charity that takes in untold sums of money and is basically being run more as a business to enrich the board and others than as a charity.

01:10:13 – 01:10:14:	That may be easy.

01:10:14 – 01:10:16:	That may be very easy.

01:10:16 – 01:10:17:	Writing a check takes very little effort.

01:10:19 – 01:10:28:	Now again, as mentioned in a previous episode, it may very well have taken a great deal of effort to make the money that is represented by and transferred by that check.

01:10:29 – 01:10:33:	But charity needs to be something that is more involved.

01:10:33 – 01:10:40:	There has to be not the same sort of relationship, again, as with agape, but something.

01:10:42 – 01:10:49:	If you give money to someone who is in your community, there is a relationship to a certain degree because it is a fellow member of your community.

01:10:50 – 01:11:01:	Even if the person is just a fellow member of your nation, there is still that arm's length relationship because you are of the same blood, you are part of the same nation.

01:11:02 – 01:11:06:	And again, charity should flow to those closest to you first.

01:11:06 – 01:11:12:	It can flow to the far distant alien once things have been put in order in your own house.

01:11:14 – 01:11:18:	In this case, to mean the expansive version of your own house, your nation.

01:11:19 – 01:11:28:	But to look at scripture a little bit more with regard to some of the contours of charity, we see an aspect of reciprocity.

01:11:29 – 01:11:34:	Because charity is not a matter of impoverishing yourself or your family, your nation.

01:11:35 – 01:11:39:	It's not a matter of doing these things at the expense of your own to aid the other.

01:11:40 – 01:11:55:	And so from 2 Corinthians, for I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened, but that as a matter of fairness, your abundance at the present time should supply their need, so that their abundance may supply your need, that there may be fairness.

01:11:56 – 01:12:02:	As it is written, whoever gathered much had nothing left over, and whoever gathered little had no lack.

01:12:03 – 01:12:07:	And so as you can see, there is this aspect of reciprocity.

01:12:07 – 01:12:22:	There's an expectation that those who have abundant resources will use them to aid the poor, and that if later fortunes happen to shift, if they invert, the former poor, now wealthy, will help the former wealthy, now poor.

01:12:25 – 01:12:26:	That is part of this.

01:12:26 – 01:12:29:	God gives out resources unequally.

01:12:30 – 01:12:34:	If he has given you a great deal of resources, then you aid the poor.

01:12:34 – 01:12:37:	He has given you the ability to engage in charity.

01:12:38 – 01:12:48:	If you do not have any money, if you have zero left over at the end of the month, God has not given you the resources to give charitably.

01:12:49 – 01:12:57:	Now again, you may be able to give time or something like that, but God hasn't given you money in order to engage in charity.

01:12:58 – 01:13:07:	If God has given you great wealth, that is to aid your neighbor, that is to help others, that is the reason he has entrusted those resources to your care.

01:13:10 – 01:13:17:	This does tie in to the previous episode that we did on tithing, because tithing fundamentally is linked to charity.

01:13:18 – 01:13:22:	In fact, tithing and charity many times are almost synonymous.

01:13:22 – 01:13:30:	Yes, there is also the part of the tithe that goes to the pastor as his due, because you are not to muzzle the ox as it treads out the grain.

01:13:30 – 01:13:36:	You are to aid the one who makes his living from the gospel, to indeed make his living from the gospel.

01:13:38 – 01:13:46:	But from 1 Corinthians, now concerning the collection for the saints, as I directed the churches of Galatia, so you also are to do.

01:13:46 – 01:13:55:	On the first day of every week, each of you is to put something aside and store it up, as he may prosper, so that there will be no collecting when I come.

01:13:55 – 01:14:00:	And when I arrive, I will send those whom you accredit by letter to carry your gift to Jerusalem.

01:14:01 – 01:14:05:	If it seems advisable that I should go also, they will accompany me.

01:14:07 – 01:14:14:	We see here an additional setus doctrinae, an additional part of scripture that supports tithing.

01:14:16 – 01:14:24:	But this is also charity, because in this case, it is going to the saints in Jerusalem who are suffering, who need that aid.

01:14:24 – 01:14:26:	It is going to aid the poor.

01:14:26 – 01:14:29:	But again, there is that pre-existing relationship here.

01:14:29 – 01:14:33:	This is not something that is distant and unknown.

01:14:35 – 01:14:46:	We may risk repeating it almost ad nauseum, but it is vitally important to understand that when it comes to love, there is a relationship of some kind.

01:14:46 – 01:14:50:	It seems like it would practically go without saying, and yet it does need to be repeated.

01:14:51 – 01:15:00:	Because in the modern context, people want to believe that love is just some general emotional feeling, and we will get more into the difference between intellectual and emotional.

01:15:01 – 01:15:04:	Not in this episode, but in a future episode.

01:15:06 – 01:15:10:	But love is based on some kind of relationship.

01:15:11 – 01:15:22:	If what you are doing is just flinging money out into the void and saying you're engaging in charity, you're not engaging in charity, because you're not doing the thing.

01:15:22 – 01:15:30:	You don't have a proper whom that you are targeting, and you don't have the right nature or scope of the act itself.

01:15:30 – 01:15:31:	And so it's not love.

01:15:32 – 01:15:35:	You're not engaging in charity.

01:15:37 – 01:15:45:	You have to pay attention to the whom and the nature and the scope, because obviously if you're the one acting, you're going to be the who.

01:15:45 – 01:15:46:	There's no analysis there.

01:15:48 – 01:16:04:	But the person to whom you are directing that love, in this case, it may very well be charity, or if it's a gope or whatever else it is, the person to whom you're directing the love has to be an appropriate target for that love, and then the nature and scope has to be proper.

01:16:05 – 01:16:07:	Otherwise, it is not love.

01:16:08 – 01:16:09:	It is disordered.

01:16:09 – 01:16:11:	It may very well be sin.

01:16:12 – 01:16:16:	And so just because you can call a thing love, doesn't mean that it is.

01:16:17 – 01:16:27:	As we've gone over a few times in this episode already, a single term may very well encompass a large array of meanings, or a spectrum of meanings.

01:16:28 – 01:16:35:	And that is most certainly the case with love, and most certainly the case with the way that the term love is abused in our society.

01:16:36 – 01:16:42:	Many things that are called love are in fact, the inverse are in fact hatred.

01:16:43 – 01:16:53:	This will be obvious particularly again in the episode on Eros, but it is possible to call a thing love that is not love.

01:16:54 – 01:17:04:	It is necessary to apply wisdom to look at the actual facts, to look at the circumstances what is being done by whom and to whom.

01:17:06 – 01:17:08:	You have to apply wisdom to these matters.

01:17:09 – 01:17:12:	This is not particularly easy in many cases.

01:17:12 – 01:17:16:	Again, we cannot provide you a flowchart, an if this, then that.

01:17:18 – 01:17:28:	God has given you certain abilities, sufficient abilities, to run this assessment, to run these analyses yourself.

01:17:28 – 01:17:30:	And you have to do so.

01:17:30 – 01:17:33:	That is part of being a Christian, it's part of being a human being.

01:17:35 – 01:17:36:	Pagans did this as well.

01:17:36 – 01:17:39:	This is not something that is limited to Christians.

01:17:39 – 01:17:48:	Pagans also made the assessment of preferencing family over stranger, of preferencing national over unknown, over the alien.

01:17:49 – 01:17:51:	This is part of being a human being.

01:17:51 – 01:17:53:	This is something that is inscribed in the human heart.

01:17:55 – 01:18:05:	And it is only in recent decades, in the last half century or century, that this has been subverted so almost totally by Satan.

01:18:07 – 01:18:19:	To the point where you have many Christians who have convinced themselves that they are engaging in agape by engaging in something that doesn't even qualify as charity.

01:18:22 – 01:18:38:	You cannot convince yourself that something that is inherently and extensively wicked is good just because you've applied a label for something that would be good if it were that actual thing.

01:18:39 – 01:18:43:	And so, just because you call something charity doesn't mean that it is.

01:18:43 – 01:18:48:	Just because the world calls something love doesn't mean that it is.

01:18:48 – 01:18:52:	It is the nature of the thing that determines the thing.

01:18:52 – 01:18:54:	It is not the name that we apply to it.

01:18:55 – 01:19:11:	The reason we use the terms is because, well, you can communicate only using words when you are doing a podcast, at the very least, and we have to have some way to delineate these things, some way to identify the different facets of love.

01:19:11 – 01:19:15:	It's not because the term itself is the thing.

01:19:16 – 01:19:17:	The thing is a concept.

01:19:17 – 01:19:19:	The thing stands apart.

01:19:19 – 01:19:21:	The term is what we use to identify it.

01:19:22 – 01:19:35:	The world subverts those terms all the time, and so it is necessary to assess the actual thing, the acts themselves, the things that are being done, not just the words that are used.

01:19:37 – 01:19:45:	And this, of course, ties into the issue of works, because all of this ties into the issue of works, because this is living the Christian life.

01:19:46 – 01:19:47:	And so I want to read from James 2.

01:19:48 – 01:19:53:	What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works?

01:19:54 – 01:19:55:	Can that faith save him?

01:19:56 – 01:20:08:	If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, go in peace, be warmed and filled, without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?

01:20:08 – 01:20:12:	So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

01:20:13 – 01:20:17:	But someone will say, you have faith and I have works.

01:20:17 – 01:20:22:	Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.

01:20:24 – 01:20:36:	This is one of those verses that is often abused, quite frankly, by many camps, but Rome in particular abuses this verse, but others as well do not get it entirely correct.

01:20:38 – 01:20:41:	A living faith will produce works.

01:20:43 – 01:20:48:	In many cases, those works are going to take the form of some kind of love.

01:20:50 – 01:20:53:	In this particular instance, the example used is charity.

01:20:54 – 01:21:05:	Because if you just say you love a brother or a sister who is freezing or starving, and you do nothing to help him or her when you can, that isn't love.

01:21:06 – 01:21:08:	The same thing is true of faith.

01:21:09 – 01:21:14:	If you say that you have faith and it produces no works, it is a dead faith.

01:21:15 – 01:21:19:	It is not a living faith, because a living faith produces good works.

01:21:19 – 01:21:22:	That is why the example of a tree is so often used.

01:21:22 – 01:21:27:	A healthy, living apple tree will produce apples.

01:21:28 – 01:21:31:	If it does not produce apples, something is wrong.

01:21:33 – 01:21:37:	There is something fundamentally wrong with a fruit tree that is not producing fruit.

01:21:38 – 01:21:43:	The same thing is true of faith, because if faith is alive, it will produce fruit.

01:21:45 – 01:21:49:	And many times, that fruit is going to take the form of love.

01:21:50 – 01:21:58:	In this episode, we are extensively discussing charity specifically, because that is going to be the form that that love takes in many cases.

01:21:59 – 01:22:09:	But it is also going to take the form of all of these other kinds of love, because you are going to have that love for your children, for your spouse, for your parents.

01:22:10 – 01:22:19:	You are going to have that sacrificial love for others whom God has placed into your life, if you are actually a Christian, if you have a living faith.

01:22:20 – 01:22:27:	And as we've mentioned a number of times, even a pagan is going to have that kind of love with regard to family.

01:22:29 – 01:22:38:	So if you don't have that love for family, if you don't have that love for those who are placed closest to you, you are worse than a pagan, you are worse than an unbeliever.

01:22:40 – 01:22:45:	That is an abhorrent position in which to find a Christian, a supposed Christian.

01:22:47 – 01:23:08:	And yet we see that with many today, because there are many who do not aid their brothers, who do not aid their sisters, who don't aid their parents, who don't aid those in their community, those in their nation, who in fact despise all of those to whom they owe the highest duties in pursuit of the good of the alien, and then call themselves more righteous than others.

01:23:09 – 01:23:12:	Quite frankly, even the Pharisee was probably not that wicked.

01:23:14 – 01:23:24:	As we wind up this episode, and as we go through this three-parter, it's crucial to keep in mind that love is downstream from God's nature.

01:23:25 – 01:23:28:	We have all these good things from God.

01:23:28 – 01:23:36:	We have these good things, these facets of love, in our hearts, in our societies, in our families, because God put them there for us.

01:23:37 – 01:23:44:	And so, today in the next couple episodes, we're going to give a bunch of obligations, a bunch of duties, and say we should be doing this.

01:23:45 – 01:23:52:	And that's true, and it's important, but it's also, I think, the most important thing to remember where it's coming from.

01:23:52 – 01:23:54:	Because these are God's gifts.

01:23:54 – 01:24:06:	When you have agape love for someone, when you seek the good of another, even at your own expense, that is God doing good through your love for neighbor.

01:24:07 – 01:24:17:	Whatever preference you're expressing by treating someone in a way that's self-sacrificial, that's God making the world a better place and using you to do it.

01:24:17 – 01:24:21:	And the thing is, when we act in these waves, we benefit.

01:24:21 – 01:24:29:	God benefits even those who are giving and perhaps even suffering in their giving through the acts of love that we do for others.

01:24:29 – 01:24:31:	The same is true with charity.

01:24:31 – 01:24:44:	One of the most rewarding things that many people who actually do real, real-world, first-person charity, where they go and work in a soup kitchen once a week or something, they get as much out of it as the people that they talk to.

01:24:44 – 01:24:58:	Because actually interacting with the other human beings who are your neighbors, who live in the community that you live in, who have needs that are not being met until your group shows up and can actually meet them, everyone is rewarded by that.

01:24:58 – 01:25:00:	God is pouring out His blessings to everyone.

01:25:01 – 01:25:05:	And so we're talking about these things in terms of duty and sin and wickedness, and that's part of it.

01:25:05 – 01:25:10:	But that is when we fail, when the world tells us, no, don't do that.

01:25:10 – 01:25:12:	Do the opposite of what God wants.

01:25:13 – 01:25:15:	That is when the wickedness comes in.

01:25:15 – 01:25:16:	That's when the duty has to be hammered.

01:25:17 – 01:25:24:	But obeying God because He reveals it isn't about, oh, I got to earn a higher place in heaven, or man, I got to obey God, or I'm a bad person.

01:25:25 – 01:25:26:	This is a good thing.

01:25:26 – 01:25:27:	These are blessings.

01:25:28 – 01:25:30:	These are God's blessings to others.

01:25:30 – 01:25:33:	And as Corey said, you may well be the recipient of these things.

01:25:33 – 01:25:34:	That's the other part of it.

01:25:34 – 01:25:42:	You know, I've mentioned before, for years, when I was a kid and my dad was in seminary, we ate a lot of donated food.

01:25:43 – 01:25:44:	That was charity.

01:25:44 – 01:25:49:	That was complete strangers feeding my dad's family because we didn't have the money.

01:25:49 – 01:25:50:	We really needed that.

01:25:51 – 01:25:52:	We had a roof over our head.

01:25:52 – 01:25:58:	Like, we were okay materially, but most of our calories came from charity.

01:25:59 – 01:26:01:	And I think that one of the things that...

01:26:01 – 01:26:09:	I don't know what cultural background it has, but there are a lot of people that have this sense of pride about not receiving charity.

01:26:10 – 01:26:16:	And there's a sense in which I think it's important to try to make your own way and to try to do things yourself.

01:26:17 – 01:26:31:	But at the same time, to ever refuse charity when you need it, when it would actually benefit you, is not only depriving you of something that you need, and in many cases, you know, the charity is there for the taking.

01:26:32 – 01:26:40:	You're also depriving those who wish to give the charity in obedience to God, who are being God's hands in the community you share.

01:26:40 – 01:26:41:	Like, oh, I can't take that.

01:26:41 – 01:26:42:	That would be charity.

01:26:42 – 01:26:45:	Well, at some point, that's prideful.

01:26:45 – 01:26:50:	You can be dirt poor and completely broke and be a self-righteous prick about it.

01:26:51 – 01:26:55:	You can be evil and be at the bottom of the totem pole.

01:26:55 – 01:27:02:	That sort of miserly attitude is ultimately harmful, because you are harmed.

01:27:03 – 01:27:06:	You are depriving those who are trying to give the charity.

01:27:06 – 01:27:09:	Like, it's just, it's also unnatural.

01:27:09 – 01:27:19:	And I think that one of the benefits of giving to charity and being involved in charity is that you see the people on the other side and how much it benefits them.

01:27:19 – 01:27:24:	And it also is a reminder that that could one day be you, or maybe in the past it was you.

01:27:24 – 01:27:30:	For a long time, I have recommended to friends to donate to the same food bank at the Fort Wayne Seminary that used to feed me.

01:27:31 – 01:27:34:	Like, if you don't know what else to give some money to, that's a good thing to give money to.

01:27:34 – 01:27:37:	Like, I kept me in frozen fish sticks for years.

01:27:38 – 01:27:40:	I never want to eat them again, but I didn't starve.

01:27:43 – 01:27:49:	When we give or we receive, it's God working in both directions, and everyone benefits.

01:27:50 – 01:27:55:	And so we don't want to make this all about law and all about we got to do and we got to obey.

01:27:56 – 01:28:00:	The duty from God simply comes down to, here's how it works.

01:28:01 – 01:28:03:	Let's just get out of the way and do it.

01:28:04 – 01:28:08:	And knowing and thinking about these things makes that a whole lot easier.

01:28:08 – 01:28:22:	You know, one of the things that's common in people who work in the actual legitimate charity field is that typically a lot of the people who work and who donate are those who are the closest to the edge.

01:28:23 – 01:28:28:	It tends not to be the very wealthiest who give to that sort of thing, or certainly the work in it, although it does happen.

01:28:29 – 01:28:34:	Frequently the folks who participate are one rung up the ladder.

01:28:34 – 01:28:39:	They may well be in that line for food the next year, and they know it.

01:28:39 – 01:28:40:	They're close enough to see over the edge.

01:28:41 – 01:28:51:	And so while they have more than they need, they're very happy and very grateful to be able to give to those who have not enough and actually need to receive that charity.

01:28:52 – 01:29:01:	So all of these facets of love, we'll get into more examples next week, it's God pouring out His gifts for us through each other.

01:29:01 – 01:29:02:	And that's a good thing.

01:29:03 – 01:29:07:	Yes, it's an obligation, it's a Christian obligation, it's a Christian duty, but it's also a blessing.

01:29:08 – 01:29:16:	We don't want any of this to ultimately be about condemnation and leave people feeling beaten up and like, oh man, I got to do a whole bunch of stuff.

01:29:16 – 01:29:19:	Think of all the great ways that we can help our neighbor.

01:29:20 – 01:29:21:	That's a good thing.

01:29:21 – 01:29:23:	That's something to actually be happy about and excited about.

01:29:24 – 01:29:30:	With all the terrible things going on in the world, what better time to help your actual neighbor to show up?

01:29:31 – 01:29:32:	And they say, why are you here?

01:29:32 – 01:29:33:	And you say, I'm a Christian.

01:29:33 – 01:29:34:	I have a duty from God.

01:29:34 – 01:29:35:	You're my neighbor.

01:29:35 – 01:29:36:	I don't know you.

01:29:36 – 01:29:37:	I want to get to know you.

01:29:37 – 01:29:38:	I want to help you.

01:29:38 – 01:29:40:	Let's sit down and have a meal.

01:29:40 – 01:29:47:	Whatever the context is, when we do what God wants us to do, everybody wins.

01:29:48 – 01:29:51:	It's actually a good thing without downsides.

01:29:52 – 01:30:02:	And that gets completely lost when it's turned into this machine that is then just disgorging checks thousands of miles away.

01:30:03 – 01:30:04:	It's unnatural.

01:30:04 – 01:30:05:	It's inhuman.

01:30:05 – 01:30:06:	It's not properly ordered.

01:30:07 – 01:30:16:	Even when the stuff is actually doing some good, it's still at the expense of something that's more immediate.

01:30:16 – 01:30:18:	And you are also deprived of the benefit.

01:30:19 – 01:30:23:	I've often said that it's one thing to write a check, which I used to be good at.

01:30:23 – 01:30:28:	I used to, you know, like I would donate, but I would just, I'd write a check and that was the end of it.

01:30:28 – 01:30:30:	I didn't want to get my hands dirty, didn't want to do the work.

01:30:31 – 01:30:32:	That's kind of a scumbag way to do it.

01:30:33 – 01:30:38:	Because, well, as Corey said, on one hand, maybe it took work to earn the money, and it does do good.

01:30:38 – 01:30:43:	You know, just having dollars transferred from one bank account to another absolutely makes a difference.

01:30:43 – 01:30:50:	You know, someone who is giving from their surplus to the food bank, they had bought a lot of food for my family to be able to eat.

01:30:51 – 01:30:51:	It was cheap food.

01:30:51 – 01:30:52:	It was fine.

01:30:52 – 01:30:53:	It kept us fed.

01:30:53 – 01:30:55:	Not complaining by any stretch.

01:30:55 – 01:30:59:	Dollars can go a long way in someone's more meager context.

01:30:59 – 01:31:00:	That's a blessing.

01:31:01 – 01:31:16:	But at the same time, when the charity is limited to writing checks and to making it completely external and not seeing face to face and not getting your hands dirty, you're being deprived of actually seeing the benefit.

01:31:17 – 01:31:33:	And it's the universal sentiment from anyone who's been involved in actually doing that stuff of how rewarding it is to meet the people and to see the recipients of that charity, see the objects of the love that God has put in our hearts to help a neighbor that we didn't even know we had.

01:31:34 – 01:31:39:	And you go and you meet them in some charitable situation, and it's good for everyone.

01:31:39 – 01:31:42:	You actually feel good about it, and that's okay.

01:31:42 – 01:31:43:	It's like that's part of it.

01:31:44 – 01:31:48:	You know, God gives us good feelings around all of these things.

01:31:48 – 01:31:57:	You know, people say that Cory and I are just filled with hate, and they're going to be making fun of the fact that we're doing a series on love, as though that were just completely ironic and insane.

01:31:58 – 01:31:59:	These are God's things.

01:32:00 – 01:32:09:	Anyone who has the Holy Spirit is going to have an outpouring of God's things, and it's going to be informed by what God reveals in Scripture about how it works.

01:32:09 – 01:32:11:	It's how it actually works.

01:32:11 – 01:32:16:	Whether you're a Christian and you don't know, or you're a Christian and you do know, it's going to work the same way.

01:32:17 – 01:32:22:	But we as Christians have no excuse, because God reveals all this stuff to us in Scripture, and then says, hey, go do it.

01:32:22 – 01:32:23:	Here's how it works.

01:32:23 – 01:32:24:	It's from me.

01:32:24 – 01:32:25:	Have fun.

01:32:25 – 01:32:26:	You're going to love it.

01:32:27 – 01:32:28:	That should be the end of it.

01:32:28 – 01:32:31:	That should be a really simple task for anyone.

01:32:32 – 01:32:33:	It shouldn't even be a task.

01:32:33 – 01:32:35:	Okay, I'm happy about this.

01:32:36 – 01:32:48:	And one of the challenges of charity sometimes is that because there are certain programs set up, like Christmas programs or donations for poor kids or whatever, that's all great.

01:32:48 – 01:32:51:	But the people who are in need are in need year round.

01:32:51 – 01:32:57:	If somebody needs Thanksgiving meal donated, they probably need meals other times too.

01:32:57 – 01:33:06:	And so if your mind and your heart and your pocketbook and your time is oriented around giving in that direction, remember those people year round.

01:33:07 – 01:33:10:	Remember the people who are in need when no one's thinking about them.

01:33:10 – 01:33:14:	Because a belly doesn't just get hungry on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

01:33:14 – 01:33:19:	You can be hungry any time of the year, especially when times get tough economically.

01:33:19 – 01:33:23:	Sometimes those places fall off a lot in their donations.

01:33:23 – 01:33:31:	So pay attention to the world, see who's suffering, and see how you can be God's love in the world.

01:33:31 – 01:33:33:	As I say these things, I fail many of these tests.

01:33:33 – 01:33:35:	I'm like, I'm nailing it all.

01:33:35 – 01:33:39:	I'm thinking about all the ways that I should do a much better job than I am.

01:33:39 – 01:33:43:	I've done some of these things, and better or worse, we all have our strengths and weaknesses.

01:33:44 – 01:33:46:	I don't mean to be a hypocrite by saying something.

01:33:46 – 01:33:49:	I'm not doing a good job at it, but that's the nature of these things.

01:33:49 – 01:33:50:	Sometimes you just say, you know what?

01:33:50 – 01:33:51:	Here's what it says.

01:33:51 – 01:33:52:	We need to do a better job.

01:33:52 – 01:33:56:	And if you're the one saying it, you reflect and say, wow, yeah, I really do.

01:33:58 – 01:34:04:	The fact that these conversations are often missing, even from Christian discourse, is a big problem.

01:34:05 – 01:34:11:	You know, the Roman Catholic Church has long preserved almsgiving, which is stray from scripture.

01:34:11 – 01:34:12:	It's a good thing.

01:34:12 – 01:34:23:	The problem is that they turned it into a ritual that has something to do with the satisfaction of sins, which is Protestant Christians, we understand, is completely excluded.

01:34:23 – 01:34:26:	You're not satisfying your sins by helping your neighbor.

01:34:26 – 01:34:29:	You're helping your neighbor because God satisfied your sins.

01:34:29 – 01:34:32:	The outcome, the actions are the same.

01:34:32 – 01:34:34:	You're just not confused about the causal relationship.

01:34:35 – 01:34:36:	And so all this should be a blessing.

01:34:37 – 01:34:38:	All these things should be a joy.

01:34:38 – 01:34:43:	Even if you find that you're falling short in some area, be thankful.

01:34:43 – 01:34:46:	You're like, oh, I guess I needed that kick in the butt.

01:34:46 – 01:34:52:	I did a poll on X a few weeks ago asking what people's favorite episodes were.

01:34:52 – 01:35:02:	And a number of people made comments that the ones that meant the most to them were the ones that kicked them in the butt the hardest, the ones that really gave them a wake up call.

01:35:02 – 01:35:06:	Because it's one thing when you're just entertained and you're learning something new.

01:35:07 – 01:35:15:	It's another thing when you realize that you've been completely missing a part of the Christian life that has been depriving you and depriving your neighbor and your family.

01:35:15 – 01:35:22:	And when you're missing out on God's things, then you realize, hey, there's a whole bunch more here going on that I just wasn't even thinking about.

01:35:22 – 01:35:23:	It hurts.

01:35:23 – 01:35:25:	You're like, wow, I was sinful.

01:35:25 – 01:35:26:	I was meager.

01:35:26 – 01:35:27:	I wasn't doing the thing.

01:35:28 – 01:35:35:	But that condemnation is immediately, as Christians, we recognize it's satisfied by God forgiving all of our sins.

01:35:36 – 01:35:39:	You're forgiven for the sin of not having done the thing that you should have been doing.

01:35:39 – 01:35:45:	And then once you realize you should have been doing it, not only do you know that you're forgiven, but you should go do it.

01:35:45 – 01:35:48:	Not because of God's wrath, but because of God's love.

01:35:49 – 01:35:51:	For us to be God's love in the world is a blessing.

01:35:52 – 01:35:52:	It's a command.

01:35:52 – 01:35:53:	It's a blessing.

01:35:53 – 01:35:54:	That's the gospel.

01:35:54 – 01:35:55:	It's all these things at once.

01:35:56 – 01:36:02:	It's really simple when you stop worrying about how can I save myself and just say, okay, God is God.

01:36:02 – 01:36:03:	What's next?

01:36:04 – 01:36:14:	There is a particular saying that comes to mind that has really fallen out of use in English, along with many other excellent Christian sayings.

01:36:14 – 01:36:18:	But this one in particular relates to the content of this episode.

01:36:19 – 01:36:23:	There but for the grace of God go I.

01:36:23 – 01:36:32:	I want you not necessarily to bring that back into your vocabulary, but to bring that back into your mindset with regard to charity.

01:36:32 – 01:36:34:	Recognize two things.

01:36:35 – 01:36:43:	One, everything you have is a gift, is a blessing from God, and none of it is guaranteed.

01:36:44 – 01:36:48:	You may wake up tomorrow poor, you may wake up tomorrow wealthy.

01:36:49 – 01:36:51:	That is in God's hands.

01:36:52 – 01:36:56:	And the second point is that we should not shame the poor.

01:36:56 – 01:36:57:	God loves the poor.

01:36:57 – 01:36:58:	God cares for them.

01:36:59 – 01:37:00:	He has concern for them.

01:37:00 – 01:37:06:	And that is why he provides for them using the means of those who have been given wealth and resources.

01:37:06 – 01:37:10:	Charity is the means God uses to provide for the poor.

01:37:12 – 01:37:37:	But in addition to that, to emphasize and to add one additional aspect to what Woe said about the poor and how we interact with that concept and charity in our culture, when you refuse charity, if you need it, what you are doing is setting the precedent that taking charity is shameful, that it is something that men should not do.

01:37:38 – 01:37:41:	And that is the exactly wrong mindset.

01:37:42 – 01:37:49:	Yes, if a man is able, he should work and provide for himself, because again, Scripture is very clear that man is to work.

01:37:50 – 01:38:04:	However, those who need charity should not feel ashamed when they need to take it, because it is a Christian duty to give that charity, and in some cases, it may very well be a duty to take that charity.

01:38:05 – 01:38:14:	If you are the head of a household and you need that charity to care for your wife and children, then it is your duty to take it, and you should not feel ashamed that you need to do so.

01:38:14 – 01:38:17:	God has provided that for you.

01:38:17 – 01:38:27:	Whether he provides the means to care for your wife and children via your job, via an inheritance, or via charity, all of it comes from God.

01:38:27 – 01:38:31:	We need to get rid of this sense of shame with regard to those who take charity.

01:38:33 – 01:38:42:	And so when you refuse it, when you say, no, my pride wouldn't permit me, what you are doing is creating that sense of shame in the next man who needs that charity.

01:38:45 – 01:38:47:	So get rid of that, jettison that from your thinking.

01:38:49 – 01:39:00:	Another matter that Woe raised, that this is actually an action item, as it were, something about which to think, and something that should cause some changes for most people.

01:39:03 – 01:39:05:	Do not set duty and blessing against each other.

01:39:07 – 01:39:10:	They are not mutually exclusive concepts.

01:39:10 – 01:39:15:	It's not, oh, I have a duty to do this, and so it's a burden, and so I have to do this.

01:39:15 – 01:39:16:	There are cases where that's true.

01:39:17 – 01:39:22:	If your nation is attacked as a man, it is your duty to take up arms and repulse that attack.

01:39:22 – 01:39:24:	And so that is certainly a burden.

01:39:25 – 01:39:33:	You should also consider it a blessing in a certain sense, because you get the opportunity to defend that which matters to you most, that which is most important.

01:39:34 – 01:39:38:	But there are also duties where it is simply a blessing.

01:39:39 – 01:39:42:	As a father, you have a duty to spend time with your children.

01:39:42 – 01:39:44:	Do you consider that burdensome?

01:39:44 – 01:39:44:	You shouldn't.

01:39:44 – 01:39:45:	That's a blessing.

01:39:45 – 01:39:48:	You have a duty to spend time with your wife.

01:39:48 – 01:39:49:	That is also a blessing.

01:39:50 – 01:39:54:	In the Christian life, you have a duty to read Scripture.

01:39:55 – 01:39:56:	But don't think of that as a burden.

01:39:56 – 01:39:57:	That's a blessing.

01:39:57 – 01:39:58:	God is speaking to you.

01:39:58 – 01:40:00:	He has given you His word.

01:40:01 – 01:40:04:	That is an inestimable blessing.

01:40:04 – 01:40:06:	That is an enormous blessing from God.

01:40:06 – 01:40:07:	It is also a duty.

01:40:08 – 01:40:23:	It is a duty to spend time in prayer, but it is also an enormous blessing because not only do we get to speak to God, but He tells us that He listens and that He will respond, even if sometimes the response may be no or wait.

01:40:24 – 01:40:27:	We get to speak to God, and He responds.

01:40:27 – 01:40:32:	So don't think that duty and blessing are divorced and totally separate things.

01:40:33 – 01:40:36:	More often than not, they are intimately connected.

01:40:36 – 01:40:40:	They are, in fact, one and the same in many cases.

01:40:40 – 01:40:42:	The duty and the blessing are the same thing.

01:40:44 – 01:40:51:	But we'll close out this episode with another reading from Scripture, this one very clearly related to charity.

01:40:53 – 01:40:59:	When the Son of Man comes in His glory and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne.

01:41:00 – 01:41:08:	Before Him will be gathered all the nations, and He will separate people one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.

01:41:08 – 01:41:12:	And He will place the sheep on His right, but the goats on the left.

01:41:12 – 01:41:21:	Then the King will say to those on His right, Come, you who are blessed by My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

01:41:21 – 01:41:35:	For I was hungry and you gave Me food, I was thirsty and you gave Me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed Me, I was naked and you clothed Me, I was sick and you visited Me, I was in prison and you came to Me.

01:41:36 – 01:41:43:	Then the righteous will answer Him saying, Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?

01:41:44 – 01:41:48:	And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you?

01:41:48 – 01:41:51:	And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?

01:41:52 – 01:41:59:	And the King will answer them, Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these, my brothers, you did it to me.

01:42:00 – 01:42:08:	Then he will say to those on his left, Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

01:42:08 – 01:42:21:	For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.

01:42:21 – 01:42:31:	Then they also will answer saying, Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison and did not minister to you?

01:42:31 – 01:42:39:	Then he will answer them saying, truly I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.

01:42:40 – 01:42:45:	And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.