Giving God's Way

A little girl was given two dollars by her father. He told her that she could do anything she wanted with one, but that she was to put the other dollar in the offering at church on Sunday. The little girl nodded in agreement, and then she asked if she could go to the candy store. With visions of all that she could buy with her dollar, she happily skipped toward the candy store. She was grasping the two dollars tightly in her fist, when all of a sudden, she tripped and fell. One of the dollars tumbled out of her hand, and before she could catch it, the wind blew it down a storm sewer by the curb.

Picking herself up, the little girl looked at the dollar still in her hand and then at the storm sewer, and she said “Well, Lord, there goes your dollar.”

We come today to the subject of giving - a subject that is a vitally important part of the spiritual life. Jesus has been teaching us in the Sermon on the Mount that Christians are radically different. If you want to be a Christian, it will mean that you will adopt different priorities, different goals, a different agenda for your life. When you become a citizen of God’s kingdom, you’ll want to devote yourself to doing what pleases Him. You’ll want to give yourself to deeds of righteousness - to doing things that bring glory to God.

But having said that, Jesus warns us in the sixth chapter of Matthew that there is a particular danger lurking in all of this. He gives it to us in verse 1:

Matthew 6:1 “Be careful not to do your ‘acts of righteousness’ before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.

The problem is that we can easily shift our focus from what God thinks of us to what man thinks of us. We can find ourselves doing the right things for the wrong reasons. Our motive can drift from a desire to please God to a desire to gain the praise of men. And when we do that, we’ve become what Jesus calls a hypocrite.

The Lord gives us three concrete examples of how this can happen to us. He zeroes in on three key areas of the spiritual life - giving, praying, and fasting. He shows us how sin and selfishness can creep in the back door of our spiritual life and mess it up so that , even when we’re engaged in these beautiful spiritual disciplines, we’re caught in the trap of hypocrisy.

Let’s look at what he says about giving…

Matthew 6:2-4 “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.

I’d like you to notice several important points that Jesus makes here:

1. The Christian life includes giving

Jesus says “When you give…” not “If you give…”. The reason that I mention something so obvious is that many Christians do not practice the spiritual discipline of giving at all, or if they do, their giving is shamefully small. And we’re not talking here about absolute amounts, we’re talking about what they give in comparison to what they could give. The widow’s mite was small, but it was bigger than the rich man’s bags of money, because it was all she could give.

Someone has said “If you gave as little as some Christians do, you would not want your left hand to know what your right hand was doing either!” If your life does not include systematic, regular, and generous giving, then you are not living the Christian life. It’s as simple as that. Christians are people who give.

Back in the Dark Ages, when Christianity was spreading across the European continent, it was common for whole tribes of barbarians to convert to Christianity en masse. Christian missionaries would baptize whole armies at a time. But when the warriors went into the water to be baptized, they held their right hands up high, so that they didn’t get wet. Then they could say later “This hand has never been baptized” and they could swing their battle axes and swords just as freely as ever.

It seems to me today that the modern counterpart of that is the Christian who doesn’t give. It is almost as though, when he was baptized into the body of Christ, he held his wallet up out of the water with his right hand.

There’s much I could say about this subject, but let me say just one more thing since it is Children’s Day. When we give our children a quarter to put into the offering on Sunday, and then later give them five dollars to go see a movie, we are teaching our children a lesson about giving that they will remember for the rest of their lives.

The Christian life includes giving. There’s a second thing we learn here:

2. Our giving should be focused on the needs of others.

The highest priority in the Jewish catalog of good works was giving to the poor. The Hebrew word for almsgiving was the same word they used for righteousness. The two were considered one and same thing. The Rabbis said that the man who gives alms to the poor is greater than Moses.

The Bible is full of exhortations to give to the needs of others. You find this teaching not just in the books of the Law, but in the message of the prophets, and in the book of Proverbs as well. Giving to the needy is the kind of giving that really pleases God most. That’s where His heart is.

So when we think about giving, we’d better make sure that the giving we do is directly related to helping meet the real needs of real people. Let’s not give just to help some TV preacher build a personal empire. What do people need the most? They need the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They need to know that God loves them and that Jesus died to save them. So let’s give our money to help meet that need.

Giving is an integral part of the Christian life. A Christian should give in order to meet the needs of others. Now we come to the main point of this passage:

3. We should give, not for the praise of men, but for the smile of God.

Jesus said that it’s very easy for us to become spiritual show-offs in this matter of giving. And we can do this very subtly. Look at verse 2:

Matthew 6:2 “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.

At first glance, it looks like Jesus is talking about trumpets as a figure of speech. He’s saying, in effect, “Don’t blow your own horn when you give.” Well, maybe that is what he means. But, on the other hand, there is the possibility that Jesus is speaking literally here. Let me explain…

In 1969, there was a remarkable archaeological discovery made in Jerusalem. Archaeologists had been digging around the base of the site of the old Temple, which of course, isn’t there anymore. They uncovered a stone that was eight feet long and which had a Hebrew inscription on it. The inscription was incomplete because the stone had been broken, and they never found the other part. But the inscription said “To the place of trumpeting…”

Evidently that stone had originally been at the very top of the Temple wall, where the priest stood who blew the trumpet to announce the beginning of the Sabbath day. When the people of Jerusalem heard the trumpet, they would stop working, for the Sabbath had begun.

But the priests would blow the trumpet for other reasons as well. They would blow it to gather the people together for special meetings. If there was some crisis, if there was some urgent need, they would blow the trumpet to assemble the people together to contribute to that need.

Now imagine that you were a Jewish merchant back in those days. You hear the trumpet blow. It’s not the Sabbath, so you know that there must be a special meeting - perhaps a special need that needs to be met. You quickly close up your shop and make your way toward the Temple. As you hurry down the street, you think with satisfaction to yourself that everyone who sees you knows exactly where you are going. And the fact that you are hurrying shows everyone how zealous and sincere you are. As the trumpet sounds in the background, you have become a spiritual show-off, haven’t you? Your showy philanthropy is motivated by selfishness.

You have become a hypocrite. The Greek word hypocrite was originally used to describe an actor who wore a mask to portray a certain character. Jesus said when you give to impress others, you are nothing more than a pious play-actor. You are putting on a performance. You are trying to convey the impression of self-sacrificing spirituality, while all the time inside you are just a smug, self-satisfied egotist who cares mostly about himself.

If you go into the lobby of a certain well-known hospital here on Long Island, you’ll find a wall that is covered with the names of the people who gave money toward that hospital. Some of the floors and wings of that hospital are actually named after the donors of the money to build them. What a point of pride to be able to go into that hospital and be able to point to your name on that wall. What a glow you get when you think of the thousands and thousands of people who go through there and see your name, and think “My, what a wonderful person he is to give his money to such a worthy cause.” This is the trap that our pride springs on us when we give.

Several years ago, a well known TV preacher had a big building campaign. He said that anyone who gave $500 to his campaign would have his name inscribed with a laser on one of the bricks that would be in the lobby of that building. I’m sure that many Christians gave to that project for no other reason than to get their name written on one of those bricks. Jesus said “I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.”

Jesus said that there’s only one way to counteract this tendency of spiritual showing off, this pathological desire that we all have to be recognized and be praised and to be spoken well of. He said “Do your giving in secret.” Do it in secret to take away the temptation to make your giving a public relations stunt.

But even when we take these precautions, our pride is so devious, that we can become so elaborate about our secrecy in giving that it actually becomes noticeable. You and I know that it is very possible to “secretly” give behind the scenes in such a way as that everyone knows who’s doing it. Then you have the double pleasure of getting the praise of men, while obeying the Lord’s teaching on secrecy. They not only think you’re generous, but they think you’re humble as well!

Jesus says when you give, don’t even think pause to congratulate yourself about it. Don’t even let your left hand know what your right hand put in the offering plate! Don’t look for recognition, for your name in the bulletin, or a plaque on the wall. Just give, because the Lord wants you to, and because you want to please the Lord. Not others. Not yourself. Just the Lord.

In the world of military intelligence (and some people say that that’s an oxymoron!), when a classified document is distributed, it may have stamped on it the label “Eyes Only”. In other words, that label is a warning that the material you are about to read is so sensitive, and in some cases so potentially dangerous, that you are not to talk about it, you are not to write about it, you are not to let anyone else know about it in any way. It is for your eyes only.

Perhaps that’s the way we ought to think about giving. First of all, we ought to give. We ought not let the possible pitfalls keep us from this important spiritual duty. And in our giving, we ought to give to the real needs of real people. But when we give, it ought to be for God’s Eyes Only.