The reward for giving
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2011 · 17 July 2011
Last Sunday we discussed eight principles that relate to our giving in the church. Let us quickly repeat them as an introduction. Number One, giving is investing with God. You will never be cheated; whatever you invest with Him will bring a great return. And the more you give the more blessings you will receive. Number Two, giving correlates with spiritual riches, when you grow spiritually your priority in giving changes also.
Thirdly, giving is to be sacrificial. Any giving has to cost you; you have to sacrifice to give to others. Look at Jesus who gave up everything for us. Fourthly, giving is not related to how much you have. God does not look at the amount, He looks if you are faithful with little, He looks at your heart and your commitment. Fifthly, you decide personally. This is based on what God lays on your heart to give when you pray to Him. What is your priority?
Sixth, we are to give in response to need. Are we sensitive to other peoples needs? Do we really care? We are to blessings to others. Seventh, giving demonstrates love not law. Love means thinking about the other person more than us. We give because we love, and giving is costly. And Number eight, giving is to be generous. Our God is a generous God; He gave us His only begotten Son on the cross, so that we might live. We too need to be generous.
All these principles above relate to giving at church. Tithing has been set up by God to remind us that it all is His money, and all His blessings and that He owns it all. And that we should not forget Him in everything that we do daily. It all relates to a changed heart and mind that God has given us when we believed in Him.
And how do we show that we have a renewed heart and mind? By doing what is right, by practicing our righteousness, by doing what God wants us to do based on the proper heart attitude. And what is a good example to test that condition of our heart? By for instance testing our heart in giving to people in need, to total strangers we have never knew, to people in accidents, to people that are victims of natural disasters.
And the text for tonight really focuses on giving to the needy. Jesus used how the Pharisees gave as a bad example. This is just the first example of how the Jews lowered the standard of God in their daily worship. Instead of doing everything in worship for the glory of God, they were hypocrites in doing it all for the praise of men.
Let us again listen to what Jesus teaches us in Matthew 6:2-4, “Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. 3But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”
The Old Testament made it clear that the people of God were to give to the poor. In fact, in Leviticus 25:35 it tells people to give to the poor whether they're a sojourner (a stranger, an illegal) or whether they're somebody who belongs in the land (a citizen).
In Deuteronomy 15, it says if you come across a poor person; make sure you meet his needs. If he needs a place to stay, give him your house. Make sure his supply of food is adequate. Make sure all of the necessities of his life are cared for, because that is how people are to act when they follow God.
You can read it in Psalm 41:1. You can read it in Proverbs 19, Proverbs 21 and Proverbs 29, again and again. It says when you give to the poor, you give to the Lord. Why? All giving is investing with God. And part of our giving is to be directed to those who cross our path who are in deep need.
And so the Lord Jesus approaches this matter of giving, because obviously the scribes and the Pharisees and the people following them were not living according to these principles. They weren't giving selflessly. They were giving to impress others of how pious they were.
Once a person has become a Christian, one thing that Satan loves to do is to lure them into hypocrisy so that they really negate their witness and they lose their heavenly reward. The peril of religion, and we all face it, is that we would play the hypocrite.
Now the peril of hypocrisy is illustrated in giving alms. It has to do with being charitable. Whatever funds you receive, a portion is for the giving to those in need. The Greek verb is eleato. It means to have mercy upon the afflicted to give help to the wretched, or to rescue the miserable.
It’s important to notice that ‘eleato’ is not a verb that speaks of an attitude. It is a verb that speaks of an act. So this describes not the feeling of longing to help the poor or compassion or empathy or sympathy but the very deed itself. And this is not some silent passive pious feeling that never acts in a tangible way.
What he's talking about is an actual act of giving. 1 John 3:17, "But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?” In other words, the claim that you are a Christian is questionable.
James 2:15-17 says, 15 If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, 16 and one of you says to them, "Go in peace, be warmed and filled," without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? 17So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” Believing something but not doing it or not practicing it is useless.
Ephesians 2:4 says, God is great in mercy. So we as followers of God should be merciful to others as well. And if God is living His life through me I should be merciful to one in need. The disciples of Jesus carried around with them a little bag. John 13:29 tells us that that little bag contained money. What for? It was to give money to the poor.
The Scribes the Jews had always done this from the time they were in the land. In fact, they had even twisted the significance of that to make it more important. The pharisees taught that they would purge away their sins by giving money to the needy. John MacArthur found several quotes out of the Talmud which state that alms giving will deliver one from the condemnation of hell and make one perfectly righteous.
That's why the Jews believed that the richer you were; the easier it was to get in the heavenly kingdom, because by giving alms you bought your way in. And so when Jesus said Matthew 19:24, “it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven,” it devastated that whole concept.
God says that your attitude is most important. Just examine your own heart. Often times we do something for somebody poor but inside we can't wait till somebody brings it up so we can brag about it, so this would ruin the whole thing. God says in Matthew 6:1 that if we do that we exchange the praise of men right now for the blessings of God in heaven later.
Now, can I give you a little caution? Make sure the one in need is really in need. Don't support healthy beggars. Read 2 Thessalonians 3:10 and make sure you understand that it says, "If a man can work and doesn't work he's worse than anything." Don't support somebody who can. If he doesn't work, he doesn't eat, right?
You can support the poor by giving them work. You can support the poor by giving them some self respect, by giving them a job to do. Now there are some who are so destitute and so sick that they can't work. That's different. Those need to be cared for. But be careful you make a distinction.
We go from the practice of righteousness to the peril of religion to now the promise from Jesus of a reward. How you do this area of giving is going to result in how you're rewarded. Some people get all hung up on rewards; they think that's kind of a crass motive. But this is something that God Himself instituted.
God has established this and God is an absolutely holy God and He must have a holy reason for it. There are some things that deserve a reward and that's in God's mind true and that's the way He set it and so that's fine. Allah telah menetapkan ini dan Allah adalah Allah yang benar-benar kudus dan Ia pasti memiliki alasan kudus untuk itu. Ada beberapa hal yang pantas dihargai dan itu benar di dalam pikiran Allah dan begitulah cara Dia telah mengatur hal ini, jadi kita setuju saja.
And I should seek a reward so that I might show Him my love and give Him all that I have. Would you notice the promise of reward in Matthew 6:1? It says, "If you do your righteousness before men to be seen, you have no reward of your Father who's in heaven."
Matthew 6:2, "Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward." The point is simple. You have a reward in verse 2, but it is not from your Father who is in heaven. Who's it from? Well, who were you doing your thing for, for men, right? They will praise you. That's it.
In other words, if you do it for men, you will get their applause and you are fully compensated right then and there. God owes you nothing. But there is a reward for those who give out of a right heart. Verse 3 says, "3But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing." That sounds funny doesn't it? People have wondered about that.
Some believe it was a proverb of the time. For doing things so spontaneously that you didn't really think about them. You're walking along the street and here's somebody with a need. And without a lot of thought and checking out your bank book or whatever, you just reach in and you give something and your left hand which is by your left hip doesn't even know what's happening. That's the idea.
It's based on the compassion and the mercy of the moment. The left hand isn't even aware of it. And that's the essence of what he's saying. The normally active right hand passes a needy person, stretches out, so quickly, so easily does the right hand meet the need, the left hand never even knows what's going on.
And you know what's nice about that? If the left hand doesn't know, the left hand can't get involved. The idea is the freedom and the spontaneity without calculating it. Just give it. You say, but what am I going to do to make sure? The Lord will bless. The greatest blessing to me is that right hand thing that the left hand never knows about, to just give and not even think about how much. You respond to the need.
It's kind of like give and forget. Don't even make it enough of an issue for half of you to be aware of it, just do it. Now some people give to the needy and then they wait to see if they are grateful. And if the needy aren't grateful, they'll never do that again.
Listen, if you give and somebody's ingratitude bothers you, you gave for the wrong reason. You gave for gratitude from men. If you didn't get that, you didn't even get that reward, and you'll for sure get nothing from God. And so giving is to be in secret.
Verse 4 says, "Your giving should be in secret." Not even your left hand knows. In other words, not only do not people know, but there's a part of you that doesn't even know. It shouldn't be a settled account in your subconscious. You ought not to even be able to remember the last time you did that for some one. You shouldn't even remember it. Give it and forget it. Wow, are we like that?
We remember our good deeds and we tend to forget our bad deeds. You need to forget your good deeds, and God will remember it and reward it. If you do good and always remember it, God will forget it and there will be no reward. Take your choice. You want praise here and now or you want it forever. Do you want the blessing of God or the applause of men?
Don't remember your giving. We don’t need to tell anyone, we just need to meet the needs that are there. And when you've done your best and when you've stretched yourself sacrificially, remember this in Luke 17:10, "So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, 'We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.'" That's the spirit of the humble heart.
And what happens at the end of verse 4? "When you do your giving in secret, your Father who sees in secret shall reward you." The word openly isn't in the manuscripts there because the contrast isn't between secretly and openly, but it's between the reward from men and the reward from God.
God sees your heart. He'll reward you. God sees everything. Hebrews 4:13 tells us, “And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” He knows your heart.
He knows if your religion is real or false. The Psalmist said in Psalm 139:7-10, “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? 8If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! 9If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, 10even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.” He sees deep in your heart.
And so as you live your Christian life, brother and sister, make sure you're real. As you give, give God's way. Give to those in need and give without a thought or a remembrance and don't be a hypocrite. And for some of you who don't even know the Lord Jesus Christ, but are faking it, that's the severest hypocrisy of all, because that is unforgivable.
Because unless you truly know Jesus Christ, the sin of hypocrisy is on you forever. And that those of us who are Christians would live as David did. David had a right heart in Psalm 57:7 for he said this, "My heart is steadfast, O God. My heart is steadfast!"
A steadfast heart. Is your heart that way? Do you give out of a pure heart? Do you pray out of a pure heart? Do you fast out of a pure heart? If you don't, then you should repeat the prayer of David in Psalm 51. "Create in me a clean heart O God." Let's pray together.