Freely you have received. Freely give.
Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give. Matthew 10:8b
We didn’t earn or pay for God’s marvelous grace to us. We are not to charge others or ask them to earn it as we share it with them. Our service is to be a sacrifice of love in gratitude for all God’s goodness and His incomprehensible greatness. When Jesus on two occasions cast out those who were doing business in the temple, He was illustrating this. In the Reformation, the opposition to the selling of indulgences was another. Today there is a huge industry built on profiting from the sale of Christian knick-knacks, books, movies, and so on. I believe a good deal of that is no better than those selling in the temple. When it comes to spiritual blessings and insights, what do we have that we were not given? Certainly, there are costs involved in distributing hard copies of books, but it is free to distribute them electronically. Great fortunes are being built from the sale of these items. One major result is that there are many spiritual resources that are only available to those who can pay for them. This distribution issue is one reason why there is such a strong correlation between places that have the least access to the gospel and those who have the greatest material poverty.
