No doubt, you have heard the phrase, “Charity begins at home.” Usually, this popular expression is employed whenever we wish to justify taking care of our own needs before concerning ourselves with the needs of others.

Several years ago I served on a Presbytery Committee which had the unenviable task of allocating surplus monies to various mission projects. Some of the projects were local; others were in distant lands that the more geographically-challenged among us might have had trouble locating on a map. Still, a strong case could be made for both. The advantage of the local projects is that it allowed us the opportunity to witness firsthand the fruits of our contributions. The advantage of the global projects is that we would be assisting people who were far more desperate for funding.

As our discussion progressed, one of the ministers remarked, “Look, I have nothing against helping people in faraway places. But I think our first duty is to help the folks right here in our own community. As the Good Book says,” he pointed out, “Charity begins at home.”

I didn’t want to embarrass him in front of the committee (although, as a pastor, he probably should have known better); however, the “good book” in which that expression appears is not the Bible. What Scripture teaches us is that, regardless of where it begins, charity should never end at home!

The phrase itself comes from a book titled Religio Medici, first published in 1642 by Sir Thomas Browne. But Browne never intended the phrase to imply that helping people in our own hometown is somehow more important than helping people halfway around the world. He is using the word “charity” in much the same way as the King James Version of the Bible—namely, as a way of speaking about “love.”

What Browne is getting at is that the love we extend to others should grow out of the same love we express to those closest to us. If we are stingy as misers in terms of loving our own families, then chances are, we will be even less generous with the rest of humankind. However, if we start loving our own families, fully and unconditionally, then we may be surprised at how quickly we start seeing the whole world as our brothers and sisters in Christ. That’s the reason “charity begins at home.”