TO LOVE PEOPLE
04/01/25 11:44
To tell the truth is to love people.
In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs there is a gradual ascent from survival needs to the more elevated and glorious expressions of humanity in the fullness of being. Only when our basic requirements for food and safety are met, can humans consider higher needs such as achieving the cultivation of our mind and the fullness of our humanity. A corollary of this is that if our obsession is on meeting basic needs, on surviving in a kind of poverty mentality; our imagination shrinks, our intellect withers and we become people without vision and boldness. Jesus is the Bread of Life in every way.
A poverty mentality is noticeable among people who are not poor but who have adopted a scarcity identity out of childhood experiences of poverty or a combination of fear and selfishness that grows a scrooge like attitude to life. This is how a person can have an excellent bank balance but remain a peasant in outlook, living in scarcity when things are not scarce.
SIN MANAGEMNT
To live from the law in sin consciousness is to live from a poverty mentality.
We are wealthy in Christ. We are sons and daughters of God in Christ. Not poor hopeless sinners begging God to have mercy on us. We live not only in God’s mercy but in the abundance of Christ’s life for us in every way. Christ has come in our flesh.
Thomas Torrance writes, “In him our humanity, our human understanding, our human word are taken up, purified and sanctified, and addressed to God the Father for us as our very own - and that is the word of man with which God is well pleased.
With the Incarnation the Sonship of the Son of God has been incorporated into the inter-personal and family structures of our human existence… We are to think of the whole life and activity of Jesus from the cradle to the grave as constituting the vicarious human response to himself which God has freely and unconditionally provided for us.”
We can live in abundance or in a Christian poverty mentality.
If we desire, we can ignore the generosity of this great salvation, convincing ourselves that it is too good to be true and containing ourselves in our self-vindication and attachment to distorted gospels and implicitly charging Jesus with ‘being a hard man, reaping where He did not sow.’ We may do this, because we are attached to the niggardly religion of our forebears from whom we think we have obtained some status and identity. We are more alive in truth than we are in a delusion.
‘For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them’ Matt 25.29 NIV.