Won’t the Poor and Needy Always Be With Us?

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I have a ministry montra that I repeat often: “It is God’s will for every church to be able to say, ‘There is not a needy person among us.'”

This morning, someone asked me on Facebook, “Won’t the Poor and Needy Always Be With Us?”

The short answer is, yes, the poor and needy will always be with us. Jesus made that prediction two thousand years ago and to date, no culture at any time in history has ever been able to eradicate poverty. Heroic attempts have been made (i.e., communism), but all they have succeeded in doing is make almost?everyone poor. Even in the U.S., poverty rates have remained maddeningly above 10%, and usually around 15% or higher.

But when Jesus made that sad prediction, he was talking about the poor in general: the poor in the public domain, a public that had rejected him as Messiah. Jesus was saying that one of the consequences of such disobedience was the certainty that poverty – and war and disease and misery in general – would continue.

But the church is a different matter. The church is a body of born again believers who are joined together in a New Covenant that is governed by a New Commandment. This New Covenant is found in Luke 22:20 (“This cup is the New Covenant”), and the New Commandment is found in John 13:34 (“A new commandment I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”)

As such, we as members of the church have submitted ourselves to God’s will and law of love. A primary evidence of this love is meeting the on-going, pressing needs of our fellow believers. Here’s how John states the mandate in 1 John 3:16-18:

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them,?how can the love of God be in that person?Dear children,?let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.

Note that John is not talking about the general population here. He’s talking about “a brother or sister,” i.e., fellow believers in Christ. When it comes to fellow believers in need, what is at stake is the efficacy of the love of Christ. If we are not meeting the needs of our fellow believers, the world (and God himself) has a right to say that our faith is vacuous.

Does this mean we should ignore the needs of unbelievers? Absolutely not. We are to do good to all, Paul exhorts us in Galatians 6:10. But we are to do so with this understanding: first, there will always be needs in the general population that we cannot meet. And second, we are to give preference to fellow believers with the attainable goal in mind of meeting every long term pressing need in our church. “Let us do good to all, especially to those who are of the household of faith.”

Unmet pressing needs in the early church was always taken very seriously, as Acts 6:1-6 illustrates. And Paul warns in Titus 3:14 that not meeting pressing needs will result in “unfruitfulness.”

Yes, the poor will always be with us. But the poor should not always be struggling with dire need while worshipping with us.

This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.

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