What Does it Cost?

 What Does it Cost?

November 15, 2024

1 Chronicles 21:23-25 (NASB95) 

23 Ornan said to David, “Take it for yourself; and let my lord the king do what is good in his sight. See, I will give the oxen for burnt offerings and the threshing sledges for wood and the wheat for the grain offering; I will give it all.” 24 But King David said to Ornan, “No, but I will surely buy it for the full price; for I will not take what is yours for the LORD, or offer a burnt offering which costs me nothing.” 25 So David gave Ornan 600 shekels of gold by weight for the site.

In this story, King David had done something that was in disobedience to the Lord, and needed to make amends. He needed to make a sacrifice of a burnt offering, which was the law and custom of that time. Ornan was a loyal subject of the realm and offered the king a plot of ground and oxen for the sacrifice. King David refused the offer saying that he would not present an offering that costs him nothing.

This is precisely the problem with our welfare system, and indeed socialism in general. Anything that costs you nothing is worth nothing to you. If you see a poor person and say “the government will take care of him.”, then it may feel good and compassionate, but it costs you nothing. Likewise, if the recipient has to do nothing or pay nothing for the assistance, it is likewise worth nothing to him. It is a false sense of compassion that says you can take someone else’s money to help someone in need. To be truly compassionate, you need to make some sacrifice of time or money when you help someone.

My wife volunteered at a health clinic in Mobile, that worked on this principle. It wasn’t a free clinic, as everyone had to pay something. It wasn’t the full cost of the care, but it was enough so that the patient had a vested interest in the clinic, and the volunteers had also invested their time into their care. This is true compassion as it involves a sacrifice, an offering of time and/or money so that both the giver and the recipient are grateful and don’t take advantage of one another.

What other issues in modern life work on this principle? There are a lot of things that don’t appear to cost us anything, so we don’t value them, but in truth there is a hidden cost that we aren’t always aware of. Government handouts come from our taxes that are taken out of our paycheck, so we don’t pay much attention to them until April 15. “Free” interned services are actually paid for from advertising. You are paying with your “eyeballs” and personal information. It costs you more than you know to get something “free”. “There is no such thing as a free lunch” as the saying goes.

So let us be like King David and make our offerings to the Lord from our own time, talents and treasure. The Lord will honor our sacrifice if we offer something of ourselves to Him. It doesn’t always have to be anything large, but it has to be yours in order to be an offering.