To Give Or Not To Give

Proverbs 3:28 – Do not say to your neighbor, “Go, and come again, tomorrow I will give it”—when you have it with you.

We don’t like being inconvenienced. We’ve become so used to living in our own family bubbles, that we don’t care for that being interrupted. That’s at least the way many people have become. Don’t come bother me in my house, might be the inner response if someone comes knocking—especially if it’s asking for something.

Lately I’ve had to start changing my tune. When you start investing yourself in helping people who need help, they take more liberties in asking for more help. My friend whom I mentioned in Do Somebody Good, finds ways to need money or other things at the strangest hours. On several occasions he’s called me after I’ve been asleep to ask for some money. Once he was asking for $20 to buy gas for a lady who’s son was stranded downtown with a flat tire.

Every time he calls asking for money, I have to fight a natural impulse to be bothered by it, especially if that call is while I’m sleeping. Sometimes it is a legitimate need, and sometimes it something he could do without. Each time I’ve got to ask God for discernment to know whether or not I should help.

The point is not whether I should give money to someone who calls me in the middle of the night, nor is the point about how to discern when to give and not to give. The point is this, am I a person that is able and willing to give. There was a time when I was not such a person. Today, I’m a new man. I’ve learned to be a giver more than I ever have before. Not giving for my own gain, which was a part of the old man I was, but for the sake of helping someone. Sometimes we give only according to how it might help us in the long run, and certainly that doesn’t honor God.

What I must ask myself is this, “If someone asks something of me, is my first impulse to give or to not give?” These days, I’m much more likely to give, and I pray that I become more and more likely to give. In addition, I pray God blesses me more and more that my ability to give increases greatly. Part of me is convinced that God’s blessing to us is equally proportional to our willingness to bless others.