Pastor Blogs - A Biblical Approach to Ministering to the Poor

Having been involved with various ministries throughout my life, I have encountered many people who have financial needs. I have been woken up in the middle of the night when I lived in a ministry building to find a man asking for money so he could get a hotel room for the night to get out of the cold. Most people have been approached in parking lots and asked for food or money. When situations like these arise, it always forces me to ask these questions to myself: Should I give this person money? If I give them money, am I being a good steward of my money? Am I enabling them to pursue sin or am I helping them? Should I try to witness to this person?

To help answer these questions, we must look to the Bible as our authority. Wellington offers a few books in our resource center that can help us approach this issue from a biblical standpoint including What is a Healthy Church Member by Thabiti Anyabwile and What is the Gospel by Greg Gilbert. Additionally, over the next five weeks we will provide blog posts dealing with ministering to the poor. Our primary resource for these blog posts can be found here. I hope these are encouraging to you as you seek to know how to best care for and evangelize the poor.

Who are the Poor?

Poor in Physical Resources

This broad category includes those who are poor in family such as widows and orphans(Ex. 22:22), poor in wealth, such as low-wage workers(Deut. 24:14), prisoners(Heb. 13:3) and poor in health(1 Tim 5:9, John 5:3, Matt 35:36).

Where we live there are needy people, and we must not be indifferent to them. Poverty will always exist, but we should not settle to do nothing. We should instead be driven to compassion and seek to abolish poverty(Lev. 25:35, Deut 26:12).

Poor in Spirit

Jesus did not come to earth to ultimately remove physical sickness. Instead, physical poverty is a parable of spiritual poverty.  Whenever Jesus healed, he taught about the kingdom of God or taught others to believe in him.

When Jesus fed the 5,000, he was showing them that they could be spiritually fed for eternity(John 6:25-59). After Jesus healed many people at Capernaum, he left saying he “must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to other towns also” (Luke 4:38-44). His primary purpose was to seek and save the lost(Luke 19:10).

Jesus cared for the physically poor as a means of sharing truth with them. We must work to relieve suffering with the same intent Jesus had – to declare the gospel.

Read part 2 - How do evangelism and relief of the poor relate?