“Wise men have always known the deep and pervading truth that it is better to give than to receive, for even as it conflicts with selfish and ambitious desires, it moderates and controls them.”
QHS Selected Speeches p. 46
“It is better to give than to receive” is a precept of Iyesus Krstòs that is not written in His Gospels, but revealed by Saint Paul in the Acts of the Apostles (20:35), as he says: “to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how He said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’.”
Even if I egoistically desire pleasure and joy and success for myself, to give is more convenient than receive, cause it paves the way to actual satisfaction and reward from God and for eternity. Therefore, it always control selfish desire: it pervades and invades the space usually occupied by the wicked, cause if you really egoistically love yourself, then you serve the Living God and live, otherwise you die.
Our true happiness, wealth, power and pleasure is kept by God, not by the sinful ways of this world, and from Him we will receive. If the wicked played some illusory part about in the past, now his dominion is completely over with the coming of the Kingdom. Now, “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof”, He conquered and freed the land occupied by the wicked (wordly flesh) and He is master above the spiritual as well as the material happiness and success of men.