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Compassion For The Poor
Brian Mashburn
June 4, 2006
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Does Your Heart Ever Break?
An old roommate of mine named Chris made a decision. He decided he would go into his closet every day and pray this prayer until God accomplished it..."Father, let the things that break Your heart, break mine." I watched as he changed right before my eyes over the following months. Chris would "tear up" at the everyday suffering around him. News stories started hitting him harder as if they were personal. He started seeing people that were invisible to the rest of us. And he saw things in others that the rest of us couldn't see until he pointed it out (usually through his compassionate actions, not his finger). And it all made him do things that seemed downright stupid to us normal folk, specifically with his money and the poor.
Does your heart ever break for poor people in a way that you have to say, "this must be how God feels"?
As I try to get gut-level honest about what the Bible says about the poor, I am less and less able to separate our commitment to discipleship and how we "do money". Our care for the poor and our relationship with money is one of God's biggest deals in Scripture, yet it's treated like "extra credit" by us.
For example, most of us are in agreement with the whole "born again" thing being one of God's big deals. And we should be, since Jesus said to that guy in John 3, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again."
But he also said to another guy in Luke 18 who had all the doctrinal rules down pat, "You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven." Wow! As a preacher, if I go a week in our church and don't mention baptism, I usually hear about it. But if I miss a week (or month, or year) confronting those who "still lack" this "one thing", no one notices.
When it is all over, if I'm reading my Bible right, we may find out that He measures our rebirth not by how much we gave away, but by how much we have left (consider Mark 12:43-44).