In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus assumed His followers would give to the needy. For the Lord, our motives are just as important as our actions.

June 26, 2009

Makarios Living – Loving the Poor

This is the age of YouTube and everything is open for public viewing, even dying. Push the play button and you’re in the streets of Tehran and there is a beautiful 27 year old woman, her eyes staring in terror. Millions have gone on YouTube to watch her die.
This is Haven Today. I’m Charles Morris sharing the great story that’s all about Jesus. The internet has given us access to the most private moments like the death of Nada Saltan, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the heart during the post election protests in Iran. So much that used to be private is now played out before the eyes of millions. We’ve almost lost the sense of what should be private. Reality TV shows us all the details, the ugliness, the deeply personal joys, the sorrows. Young people use their cell phones to send pictures of anything, everything, even the most intimate images are flashed around from phone to phone. I think we need to recover a sense of what should be private. The look of helplessness and fear in the eyes of Nada as she dies is terrible and you feel like a voyeur, like you shouldn’t be watching. I think that’s a decent instinct, don’t you? Death is so terribly serious, so deeply personal, we should die with our friends and family not for public viewing. This is Haven Today and a program called “Makarios Living, Blessed Living – Loving the Poor or the Needy” from Matthew 6 just before Jesus taught us to pray in what we call the Lord’s Prayer. We’ve spent many days in the last few weeks sharing the lives of Christians we should know. Some of those lives come from a brand new book by Warren Weirsbe called “50 People Every Christian Should Know”. You can read about this new book and even listen to some of our “Christians You Should Know” programs at haventoday.org. IF you want a copy of Warren’s new book “50 People Every Christian Should Know” we ask for your gift this summer to this listener supported ministry. You can just go online or you can give us a call at 1-800-654-2836. We open now with a song by Ginger Millerman, “Unto the Least” taken from Matthew 6.

Song: Unto the Least
Performed by: Ginger Millerman

Haven Today and a program called “Makarios Living – Loving the Poor” and that was Ginger Millerman opening our program with “Unto the Least”. Now Jesus taught that certain areas of our lives should be entirely personal and hidden from public view. When we give, when we make our offerings, when we sacrifice for others we should draw a curtain around us, go into a closet, shut the door, let no one see what we’re doing, no one except our Heavenly Father. Let me share with you the words of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount there in Matthew 6:1-4,
“Be careful not to do your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.
“So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
That’s the word of the Lord, the words of Jesus to us in Matthew 6. It’s natural to want to hide ourselves when we’re looking bad but Jesus is telling us to hide ourselves when we’re looking good and that’s not natural. When we’ve done something good somehow we find a way to work it into the conversation, don’t we? We want to put our good deeds on display and Jesus tells us why we do it. We do so because we want to be honored by others. Up to this point, Jesus was teaching in the Sermon on the Mount on how we should live, honoring our brothers and sisters, being deeply committed to our spouses, loving our enemies. He summarizes by telling us to “be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” But he’s telling us there’s a great danger in all of this. Martin Luther said that our righteousness is even more dangerous than our sin because it can be made into something that is entirely self-centered. All sin is self-centered but righteousness can serve the worst self-centered sin of all, the sin of wanting glory. It’s a sin that’s close to the heart of every one of us. We want approval. We want to look good in the eyes of others. The world has honors to bestow, praise to endow, importance to offer. It may be formal like your name on a plaque when you made a big donation or it may just be a look in the eyes, a look of approval but it still comes back to being the same. It’s glory. It makes us feel important. it makes us feel good about ourselves. Jesus describes the Pharisees and how they did their acts of righteousness for public glory. It’s a funny picture in fact I wonder if Jesus wasn’t painting a caricature to show how absurd it is to try to get glory for ourselves. Jesus often pointed out to the Pharisees that they were doing things for show, so they could look good in the eyes of others. He said they were whitewashed tombs, painted to look good on the outside but rotten to the core on the inside. He told them it was their biggest stumbling block to faith. They were so oriented to each other, seeking each other’s praise that it made it impossible for them to be oriented to God and to seek his praise. He told his disciples again and again that they should not be like the Pharisees, that they should be aware of the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. In this passage I just shared with you Jesus paints a caricature to show how ridiculous it is to make our good deeds into a public performance. On the one hand we have a gift for the poor and on the other hand we have a trumpet. The self-important religious leader is on his way to put money in a special offering box in the temple. It was like the deacons’ offering that many churches have. Money set aside to help those in need. So here we go, on our way to make our gift and in front of us there’s a little marching band blowing their trumpets, “Ta-da! Ta-da! Ta-da!” “Everyone please gather around! Please notice what I’m about to do. I’m about to make a generous gift to the poor!” Jesus’ funny picture is a perfect description of hypocrisy and that hypocrisy applies to me and I bet if you pause long enough to think about it, it applies to you as well. In the Greek world the word for actors was “hypocrite”. Hypocrisy means living like the world is a stage and you are an actor playing a part. You cover up who you are. You put on an outward appearance, a costume, in this case an appearance of righteousness. You play the part of someone who’s generous and you do it though, to get applause. You perform and the audience cheers. Well, that’s hypocrisy and the applause is your reward. It’s easy to laugh at the Pharisees but we are all Pharisees. I hate to say it but it’s true. I have a pastor friend who used to say he’s a recovering Pharisee like those folks in Alcoholics Anonymous who stand up and say that they are recovering alcoholics. My friend made a powerful point. We are all Pharisees at heart. We may have repented but the danger still lurks. Getting praise, getting applause, posturing so we look good, it’s like an addiction and we crave our fixes, don’t we? We’re thirsting for a drink. So what’s the cure? Jesus said it,
…when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
There it is. Jesus offers a very simple and wonderful cure. Play to a different audience. Play for your Father. Live for his praise. Listen for his applause. I love what Jesus is telling us. This God of ours, the Creator of the universe, the Holy, Infinite, Unapproachable God has become your Father who loves you. You can meet with him, just the two of you. It’s very private, very secret, this relationship, no YouTube, no prying eyes. You can get alone with your Father. And not only can you meet with your Father, you can live your entire life in the presence of your Father. You can come off the stage of the world and live for an audience of one, The One. Jesus is letting us in on the secret of his life. He lived for his Father all the time. He did everything for his Father. He knew his Father’s heart and his heart’s desire was to please his Father and so he was absolutely without hypocrisy. Jesus has brought us into his relationship with the Father and here in Matthew he’s telling us how to live with that relationship at the very heart of everything we do. He’s telling us that this is the cure for hypocrisy and glory seeking, to reorient ourselves away from the world and its applause and its approval and on to the Father and his pleasure. This cure that Jesus offers is the only one that works. How do you keep from walking out the door every morning and treating the world like a stage when you’re trying to get its approval? How do you keep your right hand from knowing what your left hand is doing? How do you keep even yourself from noticing your good deeds and patting yourself on the back? How do you make your offerings a sincere gift of love? Most religions recognize that the passion for glory is evil. I remember a while back when my wife Janet and I were in a restaurant in Southall, that’s an East Indian area outside London. We started visiting with a Hindu woman. She was telling us how on her birthday she took all her special treats, candies, whatever else she had in the house and she gave them to the poor instead of eating them herself. I think that’s a beautiful thing to do. We also shared with her that our tendency when we do good is to start congratulating ourselves. It’s so easy to go from carrying for the poor though, to start carrying for your own self-righteousness and wanting people to know what a good thing we’d done. She admitted that was true but what was the cure? In Hinduism this practice of being noticed is called Tanha and they offer techniques for rising above it but I don’t think they really work. Behind all the rigorous spiritual disciplines the Pharisee heart still keeps beating away no matter what your religion is. But Jesus, only Jesus offers us the cure. Human beings were created to be noticed, to please someone. The problem is not the desire. The problem is the poisonous redirection of our desire away from our Heavenly Father. The cure is to return to the Father and seek his pleasure alone. The reward we try to get from the world is applause. Jesus said when we act like Pharisees we already have our reward. We get human approval but that’s all we’re going to get and in the end it doesn’t amount to anything. But when we orient ourselves to our Heavenly Father there is our reward. His reward is the right pleasure. To have the Father be pleased with us, what a beautiful thing! And he is easily pleased. He takes great delight in us. He’s pleased when we love one another, when we forgive our enemies, when we give to the poor. He washes all the sin away from what we do and accepts our efforts to please him and not the world. He accepts them with great joy. Jesus said, “Your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” His reward is his pleasure, his delight, his smile. I’m calling this program “Loving the Poor”. Jesus has been teaching in the Sermon on the Mount about loving, loving our brothers, our spouses, our enemies, and here he just takes it for granted that we will love the poor, that we will show compassion and share what we have with the poor. I wonder if we realize how much there is in the Bible about giving to the poor. God cares deeply about this, that we show compassion on the suffering of others and share what we have. But as the Apostle Paul says, “Love must be sincere.” It’s so easy to be like that Hindu person we met in London some years ago, to act like we care when we’re really serving our own desire for glory. We’re really just wanting to feel that self-congratulation of thinking we’re a righteous person. But living in relationship with the Father is the cure. He loves the poor. He has a special concern for the poor and he’s called us to join him in this concern but to do it in secret. And when we do it in secret there is great reward. We can give up the reward of human approval because we have something better, the Father’s delight. What reward could be sweeter than to know that our Father is smiling, that we have brought him pleasure and that we can hear him whisper to us, “Well done my dear one. Well done!”

Song: He Will Provide
Performed by: Haven

From their “Coming Home” album the music of Haven and “He Will Provide”. This is Haven Today and a program called “Makarios Living – Loving the Poor”. Earlier on our weekday program we have introduced a brand new album by Steve Ragsdale who for many years was part of our music team here at Haven Ministries. His new album is called “Simply Timeless: Classic hymns and songs of the church. The music in it is all about Jesus. I was talking to Steve not too many days ago about this project and what I think is the most powerful spiritual ever written and he included this, “Were You There?” in a medley with the hymn, “Jesus, What a Friend of Sinners”.

Song: Were You There/Jesus, What a Friend of Sinners
Performed by: Steve Ragsdale

SR: This is another one of my favorite songs of the church, hymns, “Were You There?” Powerful picture. We shouldn’t get so calloused or used to the message that it doesn’t really make us tremble when we stop and think about what he really did, the sacrifice he really paid on that rugged cross. It really should make us tremble, tremble.

Song: (Con’t) Were You There Medley
Performed by: Steve Ragsdale

“Simply Timeless” brand new project by Steve Ragsdale, classic hymns and songs of the church. Many of the tracks on this new album are medleys like “Were You There/Jesus, What a Friend of Sinners” on a Haven Today called “Makarios Living – Loving the Poor”. If you appreciate the music of Steve Ragsdale you can hear audio samples of all the tracks on this brand new album there on our homepage, a link to get you started, haventoday.org. We also have this brand new album available as a thank you for your gift to the ministry. Just go online, let us know the station you’re listening to when you get in touch, or give us a call at 1-800-654-2836. Now I also mentioned when we began, and we’re still hearing from people about this and we’re hearing from people who’ve actually gotten their copy of the book by Warren Weirsbe, “50 People Every Christian Should Know: Learning from spiritual giants of the faith” and they’re wanting another copy to give away to somebody else. Well, we have plenty for you and we want to bless you and help you bless others with this brand new book by Warren Weirsbe who for many years was the speaker on the “Back to the Bible” broadcasts and also was the pastor of the famous Moody Memorial Church in Chicago, “50 People Every Christian Should Know”. Read about it there on our homepage, h.a.v.e.n.t.o.d.a.y, haventoday.org. And if we can pray for you, you’ll see a place on our homepage where you can also leave your prayer request and know that we will truly pray for you and your needs. You can call us of course and that telephone number, one more time toll free in North America is 1-800-654-2836, 1-800-65-HAVEN.
I’m Charles Morris and I want to thank you for being with me. I hope you’ll be back with us again next time when again we’re going to share the great story, the great story that’s all about Jesus and we’ll share this story together here on Haven Today.