Now there is one more point about how we are to give away our money that is not stated explicitly in Christ's teaching in the Sermon on the Mount and yet is involved, precisely because it is Christ's teaching and flows from His character. It is the principle of sacrificial giving. The Bible points to it in Christ's case when it says, "For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich...
The second great principle of Christ's teaching is that through his stewardship a Christian is to look for spiritual rewards. If he gives spiritually as God leads him to give, he will receive spiritual rewards from God. If he gives to please men, he will have rewards from men, but not from heaven. He said, "But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth, that thy alms may be in secret; and thy Father, who seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly" (Matt.6:3-4).
Sometime during the course of his long association with this church—presumably during his second missionary journey—Paul presented the need of the poor at Jerusalem....At any rate, the case of the poor was so bad that the church there practiced a form of voluntary communism in which the believers shared their possessions. And when the first council of the Church met in Jerusalem, a request was made through Paul for help from the Gentile churches. This request Paul honored. He wrote to the Galatians in his report about the council, "Only they would that we should remember the poor; the same which I also was diligent to do" (Gal. 2:10).
The first obvious principle of these verses is that true charity must come forth out of a life that has first been surrendered to God. For they teach clearly that we are to give for His approval and before Him.
In today's world, charity is practiced on a very wide scale and is thought to be the natural product of the innate benevolence of the human spirit. Actually, this is not so. For true charity came into the world solely through Christianity. Thus, the charity we see today—in the United Fund, in the Red Cross, in hospitals, in benevolent foundations, and in government—is purely a byproduct of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.
