Posted on 09/29/2019 7:48:47 AM PDT by Salvation
Monsignor Pope Ping!
Faith without works is dead. I will show you my faith by my works; feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless.
The problem is that satan imitates the Light to fool us. Just as a narcissist views the empathy and caring of their victims as a weakness, available to lead them astray.
There are several good books on this topic, one being Toxic Charity which reveals the benefit of teaching people to fish rather than enabling the people to be perpetual victims constantly begging for you to give them a fish.
God allows suffering for us to experience discomfort when we grow off the path that leads us toward Him.
And the poor were fed through gleaning the fields.
Give the poor work.
Who will not work, let him not eat.
Two principles which are not in conflict but rather harmony which tell us not only what God wants us to do but how he wants it done.
You heard the one about teaching a guy to fish, The corollary is those that won’t fish can cut bait or starve.
Help people to grow. Don’t enable them to be perpetual victims.
Jesus did this when He told the rich man to go and sell all his belongings and give the proceeds to the poor before following Him.
When people beg from me and ask for me to enable their victimhood I find that I often disappoint them. When people turn to God in prayer, I find myself helping them and replying, “All gratitude goes to God, not me.”
A life if gratitude toward God is a happier lufe.
Refusing to help those who are poor, due to adverse circumstances, is a sin.
Becoming poor, due to laziness and a bad attitude, and then demanding that others feed you while you decline to lift a finger for yourself, is a far greater sin.
What are the works he's speaking about? And it has nothing to do with salvation.
There’s is a story briefly related by Josephus concerning the behavior of some Priests (though Josephus blames their servants to avoid blaming them) who took the food meant to support their relatives for themselves and the result was that some of those other elderly priests starved.
Which would have been an infamous event in Israel.
Now, the “rich man” may not have been any specific persons BUT Lazaraus who was named certainly might have been.
Interesting to me is the detail of the number of brothers that the rich man had, for if we look at Josephus we also find that the sons of Ananias (who himself Josephus described as “a great hoarder up of money”) we have the same number being High Priest after their father, and a sixth if we include the son-in-law Caiaphas.
That isn’t to say that there’d been one of these boys who had died young, before Christ told the story (if He was referencing this specific family in the story), but a name of one who’d starved (and he was at the doorstep like someone who maybe should have expected to receive something) would have been enough to clue everyone in about who was the villain, who was the victim and if so the story is easily seen as very, very politically subversive by those playing politics with the priesthood (as Ananias did).
Which is to say the story may have been about something more than just neglecting the poor but about injustices inflicted on the poor.
Well when you’re cold and shivering in the middle of Kansas and no lakes around and .....
Almost sounds like communism/socialism.
What if they were unable? What if no jobs available?
I’m often critical of progressives in that they want to do good by proxy, through the government, rather than see that the command is to themselves and not how they vote.
Moreover, I point out that even if the welfare that they support is of a kinder and more agreeable form than that of the poor houses that Scrooge mentions, they too still evidence the belief that the care for the poor is the job of professionals being paid to do so rather than their own business (and like Scrooge feels he’s been demanded to do they make everyone give at the office for their professionally administered programs).
Finally, encouraging people to look to government from which their help (welfare check) comes is having them look the wrong way. That neglects the likely temptation to think you’re being held out on (ingratitude) if what you get is somehow your due, your entitlement, just for being here.
In a way this last dovetails with what I’d earlier suggested as a possibility about who Lazarus might have been (a Priest that starved, as per a story related by Josephus). For those elderly Priests certainly did have a right to expect that support, and so Lazarus might have gone to the guy stealing his food just expecting his right. You don’t have to be grateful for what you’ve a right to the way you should be for gifts. But what amounts to a provision for retirement (Priests had a retirement age, uniquely so in all Israel) is different from modern Welfare. Thus Lazarus might compare better to the pensioners in Hoovervilles than to those getting welfare today.
Thank you - the article needed your perspective lest we be told that supporting idlers who are poor by choice is incumbent upon us.
Even for those who can work there’s always a short term in which work is not yet to be had, in which you’ve stood around in the square and no one has hired you to work in their fields to borrow from another parable.
There is a difference between can’t right now and will not.
But what you bring up, things like invalids or “cannots”, are hard cases and you should not base general principals on hard cases.
Was just saying. People say “get a job” well okay but what if you can’t? There are some people who just can’t pass an interview for whatever reason. True, there are people who scam the system, but ....
Please cite passage about satan being light to fool us. Thank-you.
Read that parable again, with an acute and glistening eye.
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