“Hiding in Plain Sight” – Part 1
Matthew 6:1-4
Giving Alms
Many think that charitable giving is a natural part of human nature. Actually, it is not. Human nature seeks to meet and satisfy the needs of self first. True charity came into the world through Christianity, and the charities that we see that are so effective in the world today are by-products of Christian ministries. The Red Cross, the United Fund, hospitals, orphanages, half-way houses, homes for unwed mothers, etc., etc., are all the result of Christians responding as Jesus taught us to respond to the poor and the needy.
This is not to say that there was no such thing as charity in the world before Jesus came on the scene. There are accounts all throughout ancient historical writings of one person or another giving coins to a beggar. But these displays were small things and noted because of their rarity. Sacrificial love demonstrated by sacrificial giving came immediately after the Christian church was first established. Both the 2nd and 4th Chapters of Acts speak of the widespread charitable giving of the believers, even to the point of selling their possessions to meet the needs of the fellowship.
Before Christianity, there was no real care for the poor, the needy, the sick, the orphaned, and the destitute. There were no laws protecting children, very few laws protecting women, there were few hospitals, no leper colonies, and no one seemed to have anything against the enslavement of their fellow man.
The charity of the Church, from its earliest days clear into this century, was such a remarkable and notable enterprise, that it was held in awe by the outside world. Let me read an excerpt from Aristides defense of Christianity before Emperor Hadrian in 125 A.D.:
“They do not commit adultery nor fornication, they do not bear false witness, they do not deny deposit, nor covet what is not theirs: they honor father and mother; they do good to those who are their neighbors…They love one another: and from widows they do not turn their countenance; and they rescue the orphan from him who does him violence: and he who gives to him who had not without grudging…When one of their poor passes away from the world, and any of them sees him, then he provides for his burial according to his ability; and if they hear that any of their number is imprisoned or oppressed for the name of their Messiah, all of them provide for his needs, and if it is possible that he may be delivered, they deliver him. If there is among them a man that is poor or needy, and they have not an abundance of necessaries, they fast two or three days that they may supply the needy with necessary food.”
At first glance, this may seem normal and ordinary. But think of what the personal cost was to those who followed this principle of Christianity. How many of us have sacrificed our own needs and comforts lately to meet the needs of someone else? How many of us have “risked” our own position for the good of someone else?
Can we be real for a moment? Aristides has given an account of remarkable attitudes and behaviors of Christians. Do people see and talk about those things about Christians today? What do they talk about instead?
We’ll leave that for a moment. Let’s look at what Jesus tells us in our text today.
"Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven. When therefore you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing that your alms may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will repay you.” (Matthew 6:1-4)
The “practice your righteousness” refers to three key practices of the Jews which were to mark a man of righteousness: almsgiving, prayer and fasting. Jesus speaks to all three of these in this section of Matthew. He makes no instruction about the requirement for doing these things – He assumes that it is their practice to do these things. The same holds true for us today. These are disciplines of the faith that the New Testament speaks to many times.
In the first category of almsgiving, we need to understand exactly what that means. Alms, literally, means “money, food or other necessities given out of mercy to the poor or needy”. In Proverbs 19:17, the Word of God says, “He who is gracious to a poor man lends to the Lord, and He will repay him for his good deed.” Proverbs 29:7 tells us, “The righteous is concerned for the rights of the poor, the wicked does not understand such concern.” That tells us also that we can use our concern for the poor as a heart monitor.
The problem, as usual, is that the doing what is good and right easily becomes a matter of appearance and performance. Jesus commands that to come to an end. Look at His words:
Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven.
He specifically addresses the motive of our hearts. Why are we doing it, or why are we NOT doing it? It really is a matter of our hearts. It has to do with our underlying motives. It has to do with who we really are and whom we really serve. If we really love and serve Jesus Christ, then our heart demands that we respond unselfishly – without regard for personal comfort or for accolades – to the needs we see before us. We won’t look for loopholes and justifications for NOT giving. We will seek ways and opportunities to give away what God has put in our care. It is His, after all, isn’t it? Can we really not trust God to replace what we give away if it is something that we really need?
The biggest cop-out for not giving that I hear in Christian circles is, “But, it is really poor stewardship to not look after our responsibilities and obligations first.” Really?! Where is that in our text, exactly? Is it really bad stewardship to give when and where we have opportunity, or is it bad stewardship to NOT give as we have opportunity? It’s not yours! Turn loose of it! For the sake of Christ, let Him use it to show His undying love for someone else. If we clutch too tightly, it will weigh us down and we will be unable to fly.
If our faith is so weak that we have to hang on tightly to what we have, then we need to ask God in His mercy to increase our faith. Be ready…He may well take from us what we hold onto tightest in order to accomplish it.
Now, let’s talk about what Jesus wants us to understand. With His coming, motivations changed. Only in the power of the Holy Spirit that He has given to us can real, honest, meaningful Christian charity flow out of a divine love that overflows from our hearts. We are supposed to be different from the rest of the world. This is just one area where that is so.
Let’s address the idea of reward first, shall we? Many people, wanting to appear noble and righteous, come out and say things like, “Reward has no place in the motives of the believer. We should do what is good and right just because it is good and right.” Why, then, did Jesus Himself teach so much about rewards from our Heavenly Father? He does here three times alone. Unless a thing is good for something, then it is good for nothing. Any action that achieves nothing is meaningless and futile. God knows this. He has given a goal for us in living the Christian life…there is an aim to it. Anyone who thinks that the Christian way and the Christian life has no promise of goodness other than goodness itself does not believe what Jesus teaches about it. He very clearly says in verse 4, “and your Father who sees in secret will reward in secret.” Why would God make sure that we know and understand that there is a reward from Him for faithfulness if reward was a bad thing to seek? He wouldn’t.
If there are no rewards and no punishments, then we say that injustice has the last word. That would mean that the end result for the person of bad character and behavior is the same as the end result for the person of good character and behavior. That would mean that God doesn’t really care whether people are good or not. That would mean that there is no real point in living one kind of life instead of another and that there is no real sense of love or justice in God or His economy. We know that these things are NOT true, so we must then accept that rewards is an honest aim for us to have.
So, let’s look for a moment at that rewards. When Jesus speaks of reward, He is definitely not speaking of material reward. The book of Job was given to us to demonstrate that goodness and material prosperity do not necessarily go hand-in-hand, despite what many are teaching and believing today. Jesus promised trial, tribulation, hatred, suffering and persecution, not health, wealth, beauty, popularity and prosperity.
We must also remember that the greatest rewards do not come to those who are seeking them. Jesus is teaching that God’s rewards are a by-product of our faithfulness, and that He can be counted on for them. To perform with an eye always measuring what the payoff will be is to see ourselves as earning something from God. And, that we know we can never do. We will miss the reward we are seeking because we are looking the wrong direction. We see God as an accountant, a bookkeeper, someone who keeps a balance sheet, and that means we look at God and goodness from the aspect of the Law of This-For-That (quid pro quo). We do this much, we earn this much. “Okay God, I have done this much, now I am claiming my reward.” How presumptuous, how arrogant, how proud, how conceited!
To view life this way is to deny God’s economy of love. To love a person truly and deeply, selflessly and humbly is to love them with the love that Jesus has loved us. To give to another without regard for reward or compensation is to give as Jesus has given to us. To love as Jesus loves and give as Jesus gives is to understand that our debt is to give and to love as Jesus gives and loves, a debt that we can never fully pay. It requires a true and honest sacrifice of self.
Realize, also, that the rewards that God has promised are only rewards to a spiritually minded, Christ-centered person. They are not rewards by any means to a person who is reward minded. When we truly love Jesus with all our hearts, we receive a reward in our hearts when we are obedient to His commands. There is real and authentic reward in this for the true believer, but not for those whose focus is material reward. It may well be that in taking up the way of Christ, a person will lose all their possessions, all their comforts, all their family, all their friends, they may end up in prison or ridiculed on the front page of every newspaper in the world. But, the reward in a job well-done for Jesus is greater than all of that for the person who has a deep and abiding love for Jesus Christ.
True Christian charity flows out of a life surrendered to Jesus Christ.
Look at the early church and learn what that really means. Paul had a long and gratifying relationship with the church at Philippi in Macedonia. When Paul was in need – not once, but twice – they gave sacrificially to meet his needs, and he was in Thessalonica at the time, not even with them. Later, Paul tells them of the needs of the poor at the church in Jerusalem. The area that they were in could be considered similar to the Appalachian region of America today. An outlying and under-developed area where there is not enough work for normal men to earn sufficient wages. The church at Jerusalem practiced commune living in order to meet the most basic needs of its members. When Paul told the believers at Philippi about this, the response was so overwhelming that the Philippians Christians were competing with one another for the privilege of giving. They had first learned by giving to Paul in his need so that, when a greater need was before them, they were prepared and excited about giving in even greater ways than they had before.
How do we know this? In a later letter to the Corinthian church, Paul writes about the outstanding charity of the Macedonian church. He wrote, “Now, brethren, we wish to make known to you the grace of God which has been given in the churches of Macedonia, that in a great ordeal of affliction their abundance of joy and their deep poverty overflowed in the wealth of their liberality. For I testify that according to their ability, and beyond their ability they gave of their own accord, begging us with much entreaty for the favor of participation in the support of the saints, and this, not as we had expected, but they first gave themselves to the Lord and to us by the will of God. (2 Corinthians 8:1-5)”
Here was a church composed entirely of pagans who had known nothing at all about looking out for the welfare of others a few short years ago, yet they were now competing beyond their actual resources to give to poor Jews in a distant area simply because they were fellow believers in need. What made the difference? Verse 5: “and this, not as we had expected, but they first gave themselves to the Lord and to us by the will of God.” They gave because they had first given themselves to the Lord Jesus.
Are we practicing Christian giving like this? Are we giving, not as the world gives or for the reasons the world gives, but giving as our early fathers in the faith gave? As Jesus teaches here in Matthew, we can choose which rewards we want – those of God, or those of men – but, we cannot have both.
Jesus says that anyone who gives in order to have their character acknowledged by other people have been “paid in full” – there is nothing else coming to them. They can expect nothing at all beyond the accolades of those around them. There is no note taken in heaven of their act of giving.
Galatians 6:6-10 is an ideal example of this.
The principles here are simple: money spent on giving in obedience to God for the support of those who are God’s ministers, for the furtherance of the Gospel and to meet the needs of the poor will result in the Spirit of God giving everlasting rewards, while spending according to our own agenda or the agenda of the world will result in nothing of any lasting value at all.
Another thing to take note of: we are not to grow weary in well-doing. There are more needs than we believe that we can possibly meet. Our goal needs to be doing what we can with what God can and will supply us when we ask His help in giving for Him, not worrying about and complaining about our limitations.
Our giving is to be sacrificial. The world does not give until it “hurts”, but Christian do…because they know that there really is no hurt to it at all. Oh, there may be short-term discomfort and inconvenience, but that will not continue on into our eternity with Jesus. And that is where the focus is to be. Isn’t that what Jesus is teaching here? We are not supposed to be like the “hypocrites”, the actors behind the masks. We are to give in the same manner and with the same heart and purpose as our namesake, the Christ.
Have you ever been led of the Lord to give sacrificially out of faith in what He would provide? Not out of the resources that you have on hand, but out of the ones He would provide because you listened to His voice and obeyed Him? Now, you can ask, “Well, how do I know that it’s God and not just me?” Answer: there is a sense of peace and a sense of anticipation, both at the same moment. The real question is: Do you want to put your faith and trust in God, or do you want to continue to rely on what you already have and know?
Are you ready to step out and really be a person of faith, a person who is a real, honest to goodness follower of Jesus Christ? We aren’t talking about believing in His goodness, or trusting the Bible about Him, we are talking about stepping out of our comfort zone and walking in the very same footsteps that He walked.
A life of holiness and devotion to the Word of God, a life of selfless love for those who are least deserving of it, a life of sacrificial giving for the benefit of others with no hope of getting anything back…THAT’S walking in the steps of Jesus Christ! THAT’S following after Him with our focus on heaven and not on the world. THAT’S living out our lives in faith and not in what we can see and understand like simple math! God’s economy promises and requires what does NOT make sense to the average person in the world. His wisdom seems as foolishness to the world…are you ready to be that kind of wise with me?
Let’s not give out of a sense of duty, let’s not give out of a sense of “have-to”, let’s not give out of a sense of “what will I get if I do it?”
2 Corinthians 8:9 summarizes it for us: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, that you through His poverty might become rich.”
Our giving must never be grim and self-righteous, it must never be to enhance our public image; it must be the instinctive outpouring of a heart in love with Jesus Christ and eternally grateful (literally) for how and what He has given to us.
