The attitude of entitlement is like a wall around the person who has it, walling out love. What is sent to the person in the name of love is received as merely partial payment of a debt. The sender cannot be perceived as having acted in love because the recipient believes that the sender had to do it. It was his job. He owed it, and the debt cannot ever be fully paid. Entitlement is a miserable prison, constructed by the prisoner around himself. What he needs most, he seals outside. He cannot articulate, "I need love." He instead demands, "You owe me."
Though patients build their own entitlement walls, the material is sometimes supplied by well-meaning Christians who support entitlement programs. The usual pleas for the financial involvement of civil government in the delivery of individual health care are "compassion" or "love." Yet compassion and love are precisely not what Medicaid and other entitlement programs express. Compassion is expressed when we reach into our wallet and voluntarily produce something to give another. It is not love when we vote to use the strong arm of the state to pry open the wallets of other persons to make them give. This is coercion. God sometimes coerces, but even He does not coerce love of others (Acts 5:4a). If we would recognize that the effect upon the recipient of such coerced giving is sometimes materially beneficial but ultimately spiritually deadening, as in the entitlement syndrome, we would resist it. We can do this by political, economic or educational means.
As a nation we are walling out the love of God by looking for government entitlement to benefits only God truly provides. God has purposes for governments, but love demonstrated in compassionate individual medical care is not one of them.
Excerpts from "Breaching Walls Against Love"
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