It is a wisdom adage found in all cultures. I found that true in mine and others' lives.
In my orphanage firm worked several drug addict laborers. They were refugees from east Bengal rehabilitated by Indian government. They got much free land, house, bullocks and firm implements as they were farmers in their homeland. But they got lazy, living long on dole in refugee camps. There infected by addictions and sins in their idleness, they and children were spoiled. They lost the aptitude and emotional drive for farming. So lazy they gradually sold the lands, bullocks. Now they work as day laborers often starving when unemployed. They and their progeny all died prematurely.
But the refugees like us who never lived in free dole in camps had to work for everything. So Satan couldn’t spoil busy us. We also developed aptitude and emotional bond like a mother to the things we got. So we could profitably use them and protected them. So I became a successful farmer of the lands whose previous owners worked there.
Some may say that children get free gift from parents or an embryo get free gift from mother. No! As they are bodily and emotionally attached they share the toil and suffering of their parents. The toil and care to get a thing is necessary to build up an expertise to use it profitably. Besides working to get something our failures and imperfections get obvious to us making us humble and repentant, not proud, while we increase in self-assurance. It is not pride but most necessary thing in life. But vain faith-proclaimers get proud of their hoax of faith.
So Free gift doctrine is wolf in sheepskin.(lk18-22, 19-18). If you want to destroy others with lucrative easy bait of free gift, it is your sin. Don’t put forward another easy bait “Christ has forgiven all our sins on the cross.” I won’t take that. Catholic made bible’s some unreasonable sayings put in the name of (fallible) apostles can’t be allowed to destroy souls. It destroyed the German people to cause 1st and 2nd world war and going for the 3rd
