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Giving to People “Where they Stand”

If you’re ever looking for some good reading choices to strengthen your faith and encourage your Christian walk, picking up a good Christian biography is definitely a good bet. There are a host of good biographies out there on missionaries, preachers, Christian farmers – soldiers – and even Christian home-makers. John Piper even does a series of sermons that are Christian biographies that are absolutely amazing.

In a biography on the famous Christian writer and literary critic G.K. Chesterton, I found an awesome testimony on the kind of “givers” we should be for the Lord Jesus Christ. It ties in perfectly with the very thing our pastor is talking about this week on his blog. The author writes this about how Chesterton gives money to beggars:

“He seems so frivolous and so careless, but he gives money to beggars, not friviously or carelessly, but because he believes in giving money to beggars, and giving it to them “where they stand”. He says he knows perfectly well all the arguments against giving money to beggars. But he finds those to be precisely the arguments for giving money to them. If beggars are lazy or deceptive or wanting a drink, he knows only too well his own lack of motivation, his own dishonesty, his own thirst. He doesn’t believe in “scientific charity” because that is too easy, as easy as writing a check. He believes in “promiscuous charity” because that is really difficult. “It means the most dark and terrible of all human actions — talking to a man. In fact, I know of nothing more difficult than really talking to the poor men we meet.” He says that if we really believed in democracy, we would not be debating about what we should do with the poor; the poor would be debating about what to do with us.” – from Common Sense 101: Lessons from G.K. Chesterton, by Dale Ahlquist