Monday, May 9, 2011

Helping the Poor without Love is Dangerous.

When asked what is the most important commandment Jesus replied first with the answer that everyone expected to hear, "Love God", but he was not willing to leave it at that without mentioning "Love others". (Matthew 22:36-40)

Somehow we've changed this from loving God and loving others to loving God and "serving" others. This small change allows us to feel justified in using a secular government to feed the poor, care for the orphan and widow etc. However, all of this work, however noble, is nothing if it is done without love. In fact it's worse than nothing. It's destructive.

"If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God's secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn't love others, I would be nothing." (1 Corinthians 13:2)

Serving the poor without love perpetuates a mentality that tends toward the justification of war. I call it a "xenophobaholic superiority complex", which is the compulsion to feel superior to people that you fear because they are different than you. It's a necessary social complex to develop if your going to have a policy of incarceration and aggressive war. If people were to relate to each other based on their own humanity, and if Christians were to seek the love of Christ in order to expand their own ability to love the unlovable, then we would not tolerate the bombing of poor people in other countries or the jailing of them in our own.

Xenophobaholic Superiority Complex: The compulsion to feel superior to people that you fear because they are different than you.

Take for instance a food line. It generally consists of rich people on one side and poor people on the other. The poor people being humiliated in their poverty on one side and the rich people justified in their salvation and exalted in their wealth on the other. Then when one of these poor creatures get thrown in jail unjustly, or one of our bullets or bombs kill them, we can comfortably tell ourselves "Hey, we tried to help them." We say we do these acts of service out of a love for God, but that's not what Jesus said to do.

Loving God is the easy part. The more we come to know about God the more we love Him. The more we see His love for us, His mercy, when we consider the price He paid for our salvation we cannot help but to love Him more and more. This is why Jesus spend much of his time telling us: "This is my command: Love each other."(John 15:17)

Loving other people is hard, in fact Jesus said that if He is not within us it's impossible for us to do (John 15:5). What we tend to do when facing the problem of loving the unlovable is we resort to dutifully serving them without love. However, when we find ourselves dutifully doing "the right thing" without love we don't just need to be concerned for the success of our ministry, we need to be very concerned for our own salvation! (John 15:6) Serving without a desire for it promotes self-righteousness, division, and if promoted properly will lead a culture numb and even accepting of abusive practices toward the lowly and different.

The solution to all of this isn't to work harder at serving, or to develop better ministry tactics, or promote more social programs. The solution is to stop, go to Christ and ask for more love, and then serve out of nothing but that love. (John 15:4)

God prefers obedience over sacrifice (1 Samuel 15:22). Obedience is doing something because you want to do it. Sacrifice is doing something you don't want to do, but you do it anyway because know it's the right thing to do. As a Christian, to live a life of sacrifice is to not believe the promises of God. When we believe the promises of God, remain in Christ for his love, and press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called us heavenward in Christ Jesus, we live a life of obedience, our actions being fueled not by guilt or a quest for self-righteousness, but by the love of Christ for others that is within us.