Transcript: Secret Giving to the Poor: Jesus' Command and Rewards

This is the second video in a very short series of teachings of Jesus which are not absolute. In other words, these are teachings of Jesus that you could choose not to obey, and still not lose your salvation over it. The commands themselves are not trivial, however, and so it pays to understand the various factors relating to why they are optional. The subject for this video is helping the poor. Helping the poor in itself is not optional. We are all commanded to give to the poor. It should be a source of embarrassment that so little is done to help the poor by professing Christians today. You see, along with telling us to forsake everything that we own, Jesus tells us to give to the poor, suggesting that we may need to go so far as to give everything we have to the poor. In most cases, he's not totally specific about what to give or how much to give. Nevertheless, giving as such is essential, and the specifics need to be prayerfully worked out between you and God. Jesus describes some people as goats stand before God on Judgment Day. These goats are cast out of heaven simply because they did not help the poor and needy. He said that the way we treat the neediest people of the world is the way that we treat him. Those are sobering words. They're words which should bring great shame to the average church and the average churchgoer in the Western world today. So why am I talking about this in a series on optional teachings of Jesus? Well, this is secondary behavioral instruction from Jesus, which does not appear to be so absolute. He not only tells us to help the poor, but he tells us to keep our charitable works secret. Don't even let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, he says, suggesting that we may even need to hide it from ourselves that we have helped the poor. Just do it, get it over with, and immediately forget about it. Jesus goes on to point out that any failure in this respect That is any time that someone discovers that we have helped someone and then they praise us for what we done immediately we lose our reward in heaven He says the praise we receive here and now is our reward. That's all you get. Think about how unnecessary and how spiritually dangerous it is for us to get this kind of recognition from other people. Experience has shown us that even those who praise us today can turn against us and become our worst enemies tomorrow. Is such praise really worth the cost? Is it worth being denied from those eternal rewards in heaven that God has for us? Is it worth missing out on the eternal praise of our Heavenly Father, which He will give us for charitable acts which are not discovered here on earth? As I've already said, most Christians need not worry about the secondary step, because we simply never got around to doing anything more than just the most trivial donations to the poor anyway. But I've also noticed that even with a few trivial donations, most people flaunt them, without shame, especially professing Christians. I feel more than a little embarrassment for the many people who write to me, telling me that they're good Christians, because they donated to various charities, or because they've done some other kind of charitable act. And they go on to list the details. I'm embarrassed for them, because I know that if they had really listened to Jesus, they would have picked up what he said about how to give. That is, to do it secretly. If they were really helping the poor because they heard Jesus tell them to do so, they probably would not be blowing their own horn about having done it now. Nevertheless, the fact that you do let others know about what good works you've done does not in itself exclude you from heaven. Jesus says only that you will lose your reward for that act of charity. In other words, in God's eyes, it ceases to be an act of charity, and it becomes an act of self-promotion. The only danger is that you may not have anything left to prove that you're not just one more goat headed for hell. Remember I did say he does require his followers to help the poor If you show by your bragging that you only help the poor and it makes you look good then you may still end up with a zero balance when you get to heaven You might say, but Lord, Lord, I gave five dollars to that pen handler at the mall last week. Did you see that? And he'll say, you didn't do that for me. You did it because the security guard was watching, and you wanted to look good for him. So, it's wrong to show off. So why would Jesus let you choose not to keep some acts of charity secret? I can see a couple of reasons which might be understandable. The main reason would be related to Christian organizations. Even in a very small Christian community, if members of that community are donating quite heavily to the work of the community, it seems reasonable that they should know where their money is going to protect against corruption, if nothing else. I find myself asking whether the apostles had any form of accountability to those thousands of Christians who sold their houses and their land and laid the proceeds at the feet of the apostles. Now there's reference to these apostles using some of that money to feed some Greek widows. So it was probably impossible for them to keep everything secret. Also, Paul makes reference to some churches helping out other churches in times of great need. He himself even couriered funds from one location to another when there was a famine in Jerusalem. Now, none of that can be classified as secret, because the whole world has heard about it ever since. Paul also complimented some churches for helping the others, which would indicate that they lost at least part of their eternal reward for what they did. So what I see here is a bit of a trade-off. You sacrifice some of your rewards for the sake of accountability to others. It may be worth missing out on personal rewards for the sake of being transparent about where your funds are going. Now the second legitimate reason I could see for letting other people know about your donations to the poor kind of overlaps a bit with the first one. That's the need to inspire others to give. Certainly in a Christian organization, it would be helpful to know that you can help someone in another country where you might not be able to go yourself just by giving to someone from the organization like happened with Paul who will then courier the money over for you and possibly bring back evidence of what their aid has been able to accomplish. Very inspiring. The absolute hard line might be that we say nothing, and we leave every individual to sort it out between themselves and God, how they're going to get their funds to the most needy people in the world. There always needs to be a certain amount of that, if people are going to grow spiritually anyway. But the money can often go much farther if we can band together and send funds over to be dispensed personally by a personal representative. And it's reassuring that if some of our charity gets discovered, the only punishment we're going to receive is just a reduction on our rewards in heaven. But I must finish as I started. None of this means anything if we simply boast as a way of getting recognition for ourselves. In fact, I find that when someone starts down that road, they often do more than boast. Pretty soon they're exaggerating what they're giving to the poor as well. Far from being something that God would reward you for, exaggeration seems like something he'd be more inclined to punish you for. Don't throw away your eternal reward. And especially, don't move yourself closer and closer to a zero balance or even a spiritual debt from not having helped anyone without others knowing about it. Remember, and keep remembering, that the only charitable acts that you will be rewarded for in heaven are the ones that no one discovers here on earth. Sobering words, aren't they? As the saying goes, your trumpet sounds best when someone else blows it for you. And that's a thousand times more true when your trumpet hangs collecting dust all through life until the Creator of the universe picks it up and blows it for you on Judgment Day. Let's look forward to that day together. Amen.