When we live in tight community the way we do, it is not possible for this to happen without some of us becoming indebted to others of us. Scripture says we are to owe no one anything except the debt of love, and this either means no debt or no debt but what is fully consistent with unrestricted and unburdened love. We must not sin our love for others through a financial lack of love.
We have grown accustomed to identify love with a feeling, and from there, we have grown accustomed to a detachment of that feeling from what God specifically tells us to do in our relationships with others. We have drifted so far that when someone displays an expectation that what God requires to be done should in fact be done, we are irritated by the apparent legalism. Why can’t we substitute warm and fellowshippy feelings for the burdensome duty of writing a check? It would be so much nicer.
This is the kind of dualism that afflicts us in virtually everything we do. Hypocrisy has always existed, but in our day we have institutionalized the mechanisms of this hypocrisy, and have organized ourselves corporately so that our internal self is always considered pure and undefiled, and our faults and shortcomings occur out in the external world, which doesn’t matter that much anyway. This is a great sin, and is a profound grief to the Holy Spirit of God.
The Holy Spirit is given to knit us together, one with another, and in our day, it is necessary that He first begin with knitting together our internal man with our external man, our thoughts and motives on the one hand, and our actions and lives on the other. But He is doing this, for which we are grateful.