He That Hath Pity Lendeth Unto the LORD

There is a proverb about giving to the poor that says something so strange about the transaction that people usually rush past it.

He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the LORD.

Not gives to. Lends to. And not lends to the poor person, which is what the sentence looks like it is going to say. Lends to the LORD.

Solomon is saying that when a person puts something in the hand of somebody with nothing, the party on the other side of that transaction is God, and the person in front of them is where the delivery happened.

Now that changes something that matters enormously for anybody who has stopped giving.

Because the objection almost everybody has, and I have had it, is about the recipient. What will they do with it. Will it help. Is this person going to waste it, or use it badly, or come back next week.

And this verse quietly moves the counterparty. It does not tell you what they will do. It tells you who received it.

Who is on the other end

Read the verse, because both halves matter and the second one is not what people expect either.

He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the LORD; and that which he hath given will he pay him again. (Proverbs 19:17, King James Version)

Lendeth unto the LORD. And that which he hath given will he pay him again.

I have to handle the second half carefully, because it can be turned into a scheme, and this site will not do that. It does not say a person gets more back. It does not name an amount, a timeline, or a currency. What it says is that God does not treat what was given as lost.

That is a statement about God's character, not a mechanism anybody can operate, and the moment somebody starts giving in order to trigger the second clause, they have left the verse and entered something else entirely.

But the first clause stands on its own, and it is what this whole message rests on. The one who received it is God.

You are handing it to Someone who does not misuse anything, and that has never once depended on the person in front of you. That is not me reading something into a proverb. Proverbs 19:17 names the Lord as the counterparty explicitly, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a person give without the calculation that has been stopping them.

The suspicion is usually about protection

I want to be fair about where the hesitation comes from, because it is almost never greed.

Most people who have stopped giving to somebody stopped for a reason that made sense at the time. They gave, and it went badly, or it enabled something, or they found out afterward it had gone somewhere they would not have chosen, and they felt foolish.

Nobody likes feeling foolish, and after that happens twice a person builds a filter, and the filter is usually reasonable.

And I am not going to tell anybody the filter is sin. There is real wisdom in Scripture about not being reckless, and there is such a thing as help that hurts, and anybody who has been close to a person in genuine trouble knows the difference between giving somebody food and funding something that is eating them.

What I will say is that the filter grows. It starts as discernment about one person and after a few years it has become a general posture toward everybody, and most of us do not notice the day it changed.

You are not wrong to have been careful, and a filter that has quietly grown has never once been the same as wisdom. Proverbs 19:17 puts the receiving in God's hands rather than in the recipient's judgment, and the Spirit of God is the one who shows a person what their caution has actually become.

Jesus said it more sharply

And the New Testament version of this is even harder to get around.

Jesus tells a whole scene at the end of Matthew 25 where a King separates people and tells one group that they fed Him, gave Him drink, clothed Him, visited Him. And they are confused. When did we see You hungry?

And He says: inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Unto me. Same structure as the proverb, said by Jesus, about ordinary food and clothes and a prison visit.

And notice what is not in that passage. There is no evaluation of the recipients anywhere. Nobody in that scene is asked whether the hungry people were deserving, or what they did with the food, or whether it helped in the long run.

You are doing it unto Him, and the worthiness of the person has never once been part of the accounting. Matthew 25:40 says inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets somebody see a person in front of them the way God sees them.

What this does not mean

I have to guard this, because a message like this could get somebody hurt.

This does not mean a person has no judgment. It does not mean handing money to somebody in active crisis when what they need is a different kind of help, and it does not mean funding something that is destroying somebody you love. That is not generosity, that is avoidance wearing generosity's coat, and it is often the easier thing to do.

Saying no to a request and then showing up in a harder way is frequently the more generous act, and it costs more.

The verse is not about being undiscerning. It is about who the transaction is with, and a person can be extremely wise about the form of help while being completely free about whether the recipient deserves it.

You are able to be wise about the how and free about the who, and those two have never once been the same question. Proverbs 19:17 addresses the counterparty and not the method, and the Spirit of God is the one who gives a person discernment without suspicion.