#152 Giving to the Poor
The Government is populated by people who serve their own self-interest, by spending other people’s money.  Churches are populated by people who have committed to serve the interest of others, with their own money.
 
Should we give to the poor, or help the poor?  That interesting question was posed by one of you, who listens to the Christian Economist podcast.  
 
When Helping Hurts
The first answer comes from the book When Helping Hurts by Corbett and Fikkert.  I was pleased to meet Brian Fikkert at a meeting of the Christian Economic Forum.  Partly to thank him for his very good book, but also, to discover there IS a Christian Economist taller than me: I’m about 6-foot-4, and Brian is about 6-foot-7.  Oh, the other source is a very good series of videos hosted by Michael Mathison Miller at the Acton Institute, called Poverty Cure.  
I could state numerous scriptures, here are just a couple. Proverbs 29:7 reads, The righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no such concern.   Matthew 25: 35: For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in.  
There’s pretty good agreement that Christians are supposed to care for the poor. The question is, “How”? 
 
God’s Sovereignty &Man’s Responsibility
When I posed this question in my Dallas Baptist University class last week, I asked students for a better theological term to describe what I was talking about.  I didn’t get very good answers.  So I will use this title, given to Ginger and I in a Sunday School class some ten years ago.  God is Sovereign and can do whatever He wants.  If he wants to help the poor, he can do it via His miraculous power.  But, for some reason, He chooses to do his work through humans, which means it is man’s responsibility.    So, he puts poor people in front of us, and expects us to care for them.  When do we turn away from the poor and say “God will take care of them,” and when do we jump in and help because it’s man's responsibility?
 
Too Much Freedom
OK, this one is difficult for me, because when Sergiy Saydometov and I wrote Biblical Economic Policy, the first of the Ten Commandments of Economics we found was People Should be Free.  And, as I have studied and learned more in the two years since we wrote the book, I have become even more convinced that the intersection of Christianity and Economics is freedom.
But, you can’t find any society where people are perfectly free.  I’m going to have more to say about this in a future podcast, where I will attempt to explain the term Expressive Individualism, from the best book I’ve read this year, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Trueman. 
But for now, let’s accept that you can’t have a perfectly free society.  And that’s where a recent article in the Wall Street Journal comes in.  Titled