There are people in this world who are poorer than you. You should feel bad about having more than them and give your excess away. Oh, and do it out of love for God because He that’s what He commands. If you don’t do it, He’ll be mad at you for being a greedy miser. This is often how Christians are taught to view giving to the poor. It’s guilt, guilt, and more guilt. By the time we’re done preaching about how Jesus said we ought to help the poor, we’ve made the poor out to be some big mistake on the planet that we’re all trying to help God fix. But is that really what they are?

Here’s a useful insight that we rarely hear anyone admit from the pulpit: God wants economic inequality in this world. Don’t think so? Try to make it go away. Down through the ages, countless men and women who told themselves they were more moral than the average fellow have fought, cried, and died for the cause of economic equality. The rich get endlessly lectured for hoarding. The poor get endlessly exonerated as helpless victims. Yet no matter what kind of plan is exacted, that beast of economic inequality remains. Some countries have even tried radical shifts in government—bring on that communism—and still the promise of everyone getting a fair share never works out. America has become famous for being the land of free handouts. Now she’s drowning in debt with a bunch of lazy, entitled slackers living off the dole. Now let’s be clear: is every American who is getting a free ride off of others being a leech? Certainly not. But too many of them are because the system is so badly handled. Guys who shouldn’t be getting anything are rolling in gluttony and stockpiling charitable donations, while guys who are legitimately suffering are being strung out on nothing no matter how much red tape they wade through. Every time free money is being offered, corruption is quick to follow. The guys controlling the money either pocket it for themselves or they get lazy about monitoring where it goes. American parents tire of hearing about how impoverished the schools are no matter how much money is thrown at them. Somehow the money never reaches the teachers and the kids. While everyone’s frustrated and no one learns how to read and write properly, all that money is disappearing into some hole that never gets identified and taxes keep being raised. In this world, the problem has never been that there isn’t enough to go around. The problem is that we humans hate to share.

So why do we hate to share? Who designed us to be such selfish little misers in the first place? That would be God. You can preach all day long about how much God hates sin, but at some point you have to ask yourself how so many things that God supposedly hates are managing to thrive in His own Creation? God is sovereign. He creates and controls all things, not just some things. Poverty, pain, and sickness aren’t signs that God’s grip on the universe is slipping, nor does it mean that Satan has pulled off some clever coupe. Before you can get the right answers to questions about how you should respond to the poor, you need to stop viewing God as some incompetent who is counting on creatures like us to keep this place tacked together.

God is in control. We don’t make His plans rise and fall. We aren’t His indispensable assistants. A lot of really righteous sounding preaching is backed by some really bad theology, and preaching about the poor rarely steps back and looks at the bigger picture. The reality is that this world will always be plagued with inequalities of all kinds. This is how God wants it. He has no intention of abolishing all poverty, war, sickness, and sorrow. So before we Christians set out to save the poor, we need to remember that we are supposed to be operating like servants, not generals. God is our Master. We can’t know what He would want in a given moment unless we ask Him.