God did. In Christ. To us. For the sake of His name.

You don’t have to be a Christian in order to set an amount of money, time, and energy aside consistently for the welfare of those who seem to be less fortunate than we are. You don’t have to be a Christian to be making donations to a cause benefiting the community. Anybody can do such and still not believe in or know God’s love for them in Christ Jesus.

The difference is simply that, as Christians, we credit God’s love for us and his love for the world as the source of our strength to keep watch over our neighbors, our local community, and even those whom we’ll never have the opportunity to share the same ground under our feet in this lifetime.

There’s no “quid pro quo” with God. He gives without reproach. For as much as we want to believe that there is, there isn’t. All is God’s to start with. And we can have nothing, unless He gives it to us. So what is it that we could “give” to God that’s not already His?

We simply point to His Praises with our hearts and lips. We simply point to His Glory by the preaching and teaching of the gospel. We simply point to Him after He has unveiled Himself to us in Christ Jesus.

There’s no “quid pro quo” with God. He took our sins away with the sacrifice, the full payment of Christ to Death for the whole world, to relieve us of the burden of trying to pay up for our sins. He didn’t have to wait on us to bring our sins over to Him. He healed us when we didn’t even know that we were sick. He gave life, His life, to our spirit, mind and soul when we didn’t even know that we were dead, depleted of the knowledge of Him. There is no “quid pro quo” with God. There is no “give me so that I can give you” with God.

“When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.” (Colossians 2:13-14)

God did. In Christ. To us. For the sake of His name.