Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Overcoming the Bystander Effect | Torah | Deuteronomy 14

Episode Date: October 10, 2022

When you see someone in need, what do you do? What if they don’t deserve your help? What holds you back from generosity? In today’s episode, Keith examines God’s heart toward generosity in Deuteronomy 14 and shares the importance of helping others. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Deuteronomy 14  Resources: When Helping Hurts Generous Justice

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. Why did God destroy Sodom and Gomorrah? Let's come back to that and answer it in just a few moments, but first I want to introduce you to Anhelle Torres. He's a retired forklift operator who is from Hartford, Connecticut. One day he was out running errands and he was walking across a busy street in order to buy

milk at the grocery store when he was struck by a car. The car drove off. And there he lay in the middle of the street. Now, we can see all this on video. People were walking on the sidewalk and they just kept walking. They had clearly seen him, but they didn't stop to help him. Cars came up and drove around Mr. Torres's body. Now, the good news is that he fully recovered from his injuries. But people were upset, rightly upset. I mean, they were saying, Has Hartford lost its heart? We get upset when we see someone in need and no one's stopping to help that person. And we like to think that we'd never do. that. But I wonder if what happened to Mr. Torres is a little bit of a metaphor of what plays out on a

larger scale in our culture. Specifically, have American Christians, the American church, done what the people on the sidewalk did. When the vulnerable, the oppressed, the marginalized, have been lying in the middle of the street, at least metaphorically speaking, have we as a church done the right thing? If we've stood by and watched, if we've been concerned, maybe clucked our tongue, but at a safe distance, then it's far worse than what happened in Hartford, because we should be motivated to help, not just because of our conscience, but because of God's word, because of the gospel that we believe. But instead of starting with our responsibility to help people, let's start with God's heart. At the end of Deuteronomy 14, Moses instructs the Israelites to be generous toward those in need.

Deuteronomy 14, 28, and 29. at the end of every three years bring all the tithes of that year's produce and store it in your towns so that the Levites and the foreigners, the fatherless, and the widows who live in your towns may come and eat and be satisfied and so that the Lord your God may bless you and all the work of your hands. God has always shown compassion toward the outsider. He's always cared about the hurting and the helpless. Here's Deuteronomy 10. God defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow and loves the foreigner

residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt. In order to motivate his people to be kind and gracious and helpful to those in need, God reminds them that they were in need when they lived in Egypt. You might remember that they were forced into slavery and absolutely miserable when they were in Egypt. They couldn't help themselves, so God sent Moses to deliver them out of slavery and take them into the promised land. So what God is saying to the Israelites is that because once you were slaves in Egypt, once you've been outsiders, because once you are lost, so you must be compassionate and gracious to people who are outsiders, people who are lost, people who are foreigners.

In the New Testament, Jesus says that anyone who sins is a slave to sin. Because we're all sinners, we're all in captivity to sin and subject to its miserable consequences. Just like the people of God in the Old Testament, we couldn't escape on our own. We couldn't help ourselves. So God sent Jesus, who through his death and resurrection, delivered us from sin and take us into the promised land of heaven. What we must do is put our faith in Jesus in what He has done for us. Because you were in Egypt, because you were slaves to sin, you can identify with lost hurting

people because you did nothing to free yourself but were rescued by Jesus. then you won't look down on others, but instead are eager to show them the same kind of grace that you receive from God. So why can't Christians stand by and watch when people are in need? Because God reached out to us when we were hurting. He didn't stand by. He intervened in a way that cost him dearly. It cost him his one and only son.

Of course, what we see then is that caring for others, serving, being generous, seeking justice for the oppressed. these are gospel issues. That's what Christians do. Christians help the needy. But of course, the opposite is also true. If you don't step out, even it costs to yourself, to help those in need, then maybe you don't really get the gospel. Because no heart that loves Christ can be cold to the vulnerable and the needy. Let's just take a second to acknowledge that terms like wealth and poverty are relative issues. In other words, if you consider yourself wealthy, it's always a lot of always in comparison to someone else. Same if you consider yourself poor. You're poor in relationship

or in comparison to someone else. Therefore, not many people think they are rich because they always knows someone in their friend group or their circle of family that is richer than them. And so since we know people who have more money than us, we think of ourselves as middle class, but we don't think of ourselves as rich. So sometimes we let ourselves off the hook by saying, The rich, those who are wealthy, they are the ones who should be generous toward those in need. Now, you don't have to be rich to be generous. In 2005, Thomas Cannon died of colon cancer in a hospital in Richmond, Virginia. He was 79 years old.

Thomas described himself as a poor man's philanthropist. When he was three years old, his father died. Once Thomas' mom got remarried, the family of six lived in a three-room wooden shack, without running water or electricity. As an adult, Thomas went to work with the Postal Service. He never made more than $25,000 a year. Upon retirement, he and his wife chose to live in poverty. Because over the course of 33 years,

Thomas Cannon gave away more than $156,000. Remember, he never made more than $25,000 a year in his own life. His gifts were mainly in the form of $1,000 checks given to people he read about in the newspaper who were going through hard times. One was a youth worker in a low-income apartment complex. Another was a volunteer faithfully serving in elementary school. A Vietnamese couple wanting to return home to visit.

A teenager abandoned as an infant. Those were just some of the recipients of Thomas' benevolence. Thomas Cannon's motivation came from an incident that happened as a young man when he was at Naval Signal School. When an explosion at Chicago's port took the lives of many of his shipmates, Thomas concluded that here's a quote, he had been spared to help others and be a role model. This led to his passion for giving. His biographer, a woman named Sandra Wagman, commented.

She said not many people would consider living in a house in a poor neighborhood without central heat, air conditioning, or a telephone, and working overtime so that they could save money to give away. But that's exactly what Thomas Cannon did. Because his life was spared, he was generous. because God has spared us, we should be generous toward those in need. But something keeps us from helping people who are poor. And I think part of it is that we don't really understand all the complexities behind poverty. We think it's just a personal issue, as if poor people are lazy. Now, the Bible, especially in the book of Proverbs, does say that there are personal behaviors

that lead to poverty. but it also says that there are systemic issues that lead to poverty. The systemic issues would be things like injustice or oppression or unjust wages. And again, all those are found in the book of proverbs. And of course, the personal issues are things like laziness or sinful choices, lack of self-control, lack of preparation. Sometimes we let ourselves off the hook of helping those in need because they're not the kind of poor people that we think deserve help.

Like all of us would be interested in helping poor people who are very responsible, who never overspend, who don't buy any junk food, they don't own a TV, they work endless hours at a minimum wage in order to support their family. If they don't have a job, they fill out job applications every day all day long. They don't have any vices like smoking or drinking. They don't try to buy nice things for their kids that they really can't afford. They value education. It turns out that we create this ideal person. this ideal poor person that we're happy to help. But the reality is that no one is like that. Rich, poor, middle class, it doesn't matter. No one can live up to that standard. And I think we say

that we'll help that kind of poor person, but we don't want to help a poor person who is lazy or who has some bad habits like we do, because that's a way of letting ourselves off the hook. I'll tell you this, I sure am glad God didn't wait until I was worthy to love me. I sure am that God didn't wait until I was worthy before he rescued me and blessed me, because I would be waiting a really long time, because you and I will never be worthy. So what if we took on God's heart and helped people who are unworthy, just like God helped us, because we are unworthy? Can we go back for a second to the question I started with? Why did God destroy Sodom and Gomorrah? Now, there are a lot of answers to that question. Perhaps you've heard it's because of sexual immorality.

Well, I think that is definitely true. But Ezekiel tells us it's more than that, not less than that, but more than that. Here's Ezekiel 1649. Now, this was the sin of your sister Sodom. She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned. They did not help the poor and needy. Isn't it interesting how we know that God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because of their sexual sin, but we're not aware that he also destroyed them because they didn't care.

They weren't not concerned. They did not intervene to help the poor and needy. I don't usually do this, but I want to recommend a couple books to you that will help you think about how we can truly help those in financial need. The first book is called When Helping Harts. The second book is called Generous Justice. I'd get both of those books and read them if you are concerned about how we as a church can wisely and compassionally help those in financial need. Hey, thanks for listening. If you want to go deeper, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talk newsletter.

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