A good example of Christian charity

We live in a time when a lot of religious people (or religulous, if you wanna use Bill Maher’s term) pay a lot of lip service to the Bible. Politicians of both major parties do it to cater to members of the Religious Right and even the ones who probably are not religious privately put on a show to appear so to constituents. There are also a lot of people out there who are preachy and moralizing and they are very quick to tell you that they are in church every time the doors are open. It’s like they have equated church attendance and bragging about religion as the gateway into Heaven. There are a lot of people who call themselves Christians who brag about how charitable and giving they are and how they do so much for the community. Yet when you look at how they behave, it’s anything but Christ-like. My experience in life has been that the more someone constructs a façade of holiness, the more they are hiding that’s not holy. But people who observe good values and ethics without parading it are usually the ones you look at and think, “Wow. That’s a good human being. That person actually does behave the way Jesus would if He were here.”

Jesus talked about how if you advertise your prayers and you advertise the charitable deeds you do, you have already received your reward for it because all you wanted was recognition from your fellow man. But if you pray privately and you give without advertising it, God sees what you have done and the reward you get will be from Him. (Bet you wouldn’t have guessed I know all this, huh? LOL.) This morning as I was watching the Tulsa news, I saw one of the best examples of Christian charity that I have seen in a long time. If you want to think about What Would Jesus Do, watch this story. A soldier fighting in Iraq was taken out of more than $6,000 as he attempted to buy a car for school from someone who turned out to be a crook. A couple in Tulsa who own a car lot heard about it and donated a car for him. Even paid the tax, tag and title on it and filled it up with gasoline. They asked that the news station not identify the name of their business or use any shots that would give the location away because they wanted the issue to be about the soldier and not about a promotion for their business. It really reminded me this morning: giving of yourself without asking for a reward but doing it because you can and you want to is what real, genuine Christian charity is about. Not parading around like hypocrite but actually displaying a sense of self-sacrificing love.

Check it out:

http://www.fox23.com/mediacenter/local.aspx?videoId=34628@video.fox23.com&navCatId=86