Saturday 11th May
Read Matthew 6:2-4
“‘So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honoured by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 3 But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” (NIVUK)
Whilst altruism should be the goal we aim for in giving, Jesus makes it clear that it will be rewarded by God. If that is the case, can it even be called altruism? Is it not simply self-interested in another way?
John Stott quotes the great CS Lewis at length, and his essay on ‘The weight of glory’. “We must not be troubled by unbelievers when they say this promise of reward makes the Christian life a mercenary affair. There are different kinds of reward. There is the reward which has no natural connection with the things you do to earn it and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those things. Money is not the natural reward of love; that is why we call a man mercenary if he marries a woman for the sake of her money. But marriage is the proper reward for a real lover, and he is not a mercenary for desiring it… The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given but are the activity itself in consummation.”
The reward then may not be ‘stored up in heaven’ or received publicly before men but may in fact lie in the simplicity of relieving the need itself. The reward is a conscious echo of the divine motivation to restore fallen humanity. We ourselves are the ‘reward’ for which Jesus joyfully, and altruistically, gave Himself.
