Giving Without an Audience

Transcript

Auto-generated from the audio. Click a timestamp to jump to that part of the video.

[0:00] So, we live in a time where it seems that good deeds only count if they're public. And I know you've seen examples of this, right? At least unless you've been living under a rock, especially on social media. So we see someone donating to a fundraiser, but they also have to post a screenshot of it. Or a celebrity or a politician surprises a homeless veteran, but they have to do it on camera. Or a church builds wells in a foreign country for water, except that the entire mission trip was cleverly disguised as a content creation opportunity. GoFundMe drives come with carefully edited emotional videos, and And when disaster strikes, the publicly viewed posts about thoughts and prayers far outnumber the actual donations. We've invented an entirely new category for the visibility of our generosity. But Jesus raises an uncomfortable question in our passage today. What if the audience is the problem?

[1:22] It's not the generosity that's the problem. We saw two examples of scripture just now that says generosity is important, generosity is biblical, generosity is good. But what if the audience is the issue? We're about to set off on a journey in the next several weeks through one of the most practical, most culturally controversial and possibly one of the most convincing convicting passages the Sermon on the Mount and today we start in Matthew chapter 6 verses 1 through 4 and it's only four verses but inside those four verses is a complete diagnosis of why so much of our giving and so much of our spiritual life in general is simply missing the point. So with that, let's go ahead and turn to Matthew chapter 6 verses 1 through 4. Watch out! Don't do your good deeds publicly to be admired by others, for you will lose the reward from your Father in heaven. When you give to someone in need, don't do as the hypocrites do, blowing trumpets in the synagogues and streets to call attention to their acts of charity. I tell you the truth, they have received all the reward they will ever get. But when you give to someone in need, don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. Give your gifts in private, and your father,

[3:01] who sees everything, will reward you. Let's pray. Our good and gracious God, we thank you for your word, and we ask your blessing upon it this morning. These things we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. So to understand the weight of this teaching, we need to step into the time and culture of Jesus' original audience. This was not just some random abstract religious argument. This is Jesus standing in front of crowds who have lived and breathed a particular culture of living, of giving. At this time in Judaism, alms giving or tzedekah in Hebrew was not just charitable, it was actually a religious obligation that people understood as righteousness itself. So the word tzedekah comes from the root meaning justice or righteousness. To give to the poor actually meant that you were taking part in the covenant justice of God and this is good this was right there's nothing wrong with giving to the poor in fact it's part of God's it's part of of the justice of God and that's beyond good. We want to strive for that. But along the way, something changed, something mutated. Public almsgiving became a theater of righteousness. There's a written collection of Jewish law called the Mishnah, and it records how the poor would gather at the gates of the temple during certain festival

[4:51] days, and wealthy donors would make their gifts there, but they had to make sure it it was visible. In fact, they made sure it was flashy and almost painfully conspicuous, not just visible. They did it in front of crowds who could observe and admire them as they gave.

[5:13] Certain traditions tell us that in some contexts, trumpets or horns were even sounded to announce the distribution of alms to the poor. Whether this happened literally or was just a figure of speech for a public announcement, the cultural reality was unmistakable. Giving had become a performance. This is the world that Jesus is walking into. He does not condemn giving. He condemns performing.

[5:50] We're starting our sermon series in Matthew 6, which falls actually in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount. Chapter 5 just established the breathtaking standard of the kingdom, the beatitudes. You know, you've heard it said, but I tell you. So Jesus is taking the law of Moses and making it harder. the fulfillment of the law, the call to righteousness that actually exceeds the law of Moses and the scribes and the Pharisees. And now we move to chapter 6 and Jesus turns to three core practices of Jewish piety, giving, prayer, and fasting. And he issues the same warning for all three. Don't do it just to be seen by people in fact don't even do it to be seen by yourself Jesus says don't let your left hand know what your right hand is is doing and of course you yourself have to know what you're doing but you don't have to pat yourself on the back over it this is intentional Jesus is not throwing out practices he's He's purifying the motive.

[7:10] Let's slow down and look at what the Greek text is actually doing in these four verses, because the word choices here are important. First one, don't do your good deeds publicly. Dikaiosia, oh, no, sorry, I already messed that up.

[7:33] I don't have good Greek pronunciation, so we're just gonna put that out there. We're gonna try that again. Dikaiosinen, righteousness or justice, and it's the same root as tzedakah. So the NLT translates this as good deeds, but the Greek word is dikaiosinen, righteousness. This is the same word used in Matthew 5 20 your righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees Jesus is not talking about nice acts of charity he's talking about the whole posture of righteousness and righteous living before God the next word is faith in a to be seen or gazed upon we get that From this word, we get the word theater, and that's kind of the kicker here.

[8:33] The word translated publicly or to be seen from the same root as the Greek for theater. Jesus is saying, don't turn your righteousness into a performance. Don't make your spiritual life a stage show. There's room for being in theater. It's a good thing, performing for others sometimes. it gives entertainment, it's cathartic, but not for your spiritual life. There's an audience problem and Jesus is going to name it. In verse 2, don't do as the hypocrites, who pokrite, actors, stage performers, the word literally means someone who is playing a role. And this is kind of a misunderstood word in the New Testament because we use the word hypocrite today to mean someone who says one thing and does another. But in this first century Greek usage, a hypocrite was an actor, someone who wore a mask and played a a character on a stage. The Pharisees Jesus described are not necessarily bad people, but they have simply turned their devotion into a role. They perform righteousness so easily, so fluently, that they may have forgotten that they are performing at all. This is scarier than simple hypocrisy because you're fooling your own self. It's the slow drift from authenticity into performance until you yourself can no longer tell which one is which. The next word is apikusin. They

[10:31] have received in full a commercial term meaning the receipt has been stamped. stamped. They have received all the reward that they will ever get. It's actually an accounting term and it's used on commercial receipts to mean paid in full. So when your receipt is stamped, that's it. You're done. Nothing else is coming. There's no other reward. There's no other payment. You owe nothing else, but nothing else is given to you. When When you see people's admiring faces and bask in the praise, that feels good in the moment. It really does. We get this hit on social media when we post something and people comment and respond on it. And they say, oh, you're so good for doing that.

[11:24] That feels nice in the moment. It can even feel nice for a while. But that's it. The transaction is complete. You've been paid in full. there's nothing else coming our divine ledger shows paid verse 3 don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing this is a striking idiom in Jewish and Greek culture the right hand was the active hand the hand that gives Jesus is describing an act of giving so instinctive, so reflexive, and so natural that the other hand doesn't even understand or register it. There's no internal scoreboard, no running total of good deeds performed. So it's not even no no social media scoreboard, it's no internal scoreboard. You yourself do not stop and say I did a very good thing look at me go the giving flows naturally from who you are not from what others think of you not even from what you think of yourself and that's hard because we all have this internal monologue we all have this understanding of I want to be this person so let me show that I'm this person. All right, verse 4, your father who sees everything will reward you. The word here, apadose, will give back or will repay. A word of faithful return and completion. The promise is not vague. We saw in scripture

[13:20] earlier this is this is something repeated in Scripture God will give back God will reward those who give to others it suggests faithful compensation God sees what is hidden and he responds not as a mechanical transaction but as a father who is responding to his child's quiet faithfulness the one whose whose attention matters most and has not hidden a single act of love.

[13:56] This teaching from Jesus doesn't stand alone. The entire arc of scripture bends toward the posture of hidden faithfulness witnessed by God. First Samuel 16, seven says, "'People judge by outward appearance, "'but the Lord looks at the heart.'" Colossians 3 23 to 24 says work willingly at whatever you do as though you were working for the Lord rather than for people remember that the Lord will give you an inheritance as your reward and that the master you are serving is Christ now that sounds like you could do that publicly just as easily as you could do that privately. It sounds like it almost contradicts this teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, but Paul is writing to slaves in a first century household, people whose labor is invisible to those who are powerful in society. They are unseen and they are unthanked and they are working with all they have to give to the Lord because he's the only one that matters. He's the only one that truly sees them. His instruction is actually staggering in its dignity. Do your work for an audience of one. The most obscure unnoticed acts of faithfulness are fully witnessed by Christ. The inheritance is real, the reward is real, and it comes not from those who see you in the moment, but from the one who sees everything all the time.

[15:45] Even those parts of yourself you don't want him to see, he sees. Let's take an honest look at our current cultural context. We have built an entire digital economy around the performance of goodness social media machine platforms are at their base at their core their attention getters they're engineered to reward visibility and the logic of them is simple if it happened and you didn't post it did it really happen at all I my roommate and I have a Fitbit issue where like we we Fitbit challenge each other to see who can get more steps in a day but if I take a walk in the middle of the day and I forget to wear my Fitbit because it annoys me I'll come back at the F in the afternoon and I'll be like I just walked for an hour but it didn't count but it did count but it didn't count so if you do something and you don't post about it does it did it really happen or does it really matter? Does it count? Studies actually now confirm what Jesus said 2,000 years ago, that our external rewards change the nature of our behavior. And researchers call this the crowding out effect. When you introduced external rewards for something that's intrinsically motivated, you can actually lower the intrinsic motivation. So in other words, when giving becomes a performance,

[17:34] it actually stops being giving. We see this play out in real time. Disaster relief organizations have noticed something kind of disturbing, and that's that donation spikes in the first 48 hours of a crisis when the social visibility is the highest and it spikes again if the social visibility comes back it's followed by steep drop-offs as the crisis fades from the feeds and the views and even when the needs on the ground remain desperate if it's no longer visible people no longer give People gave when it seemed to matter to the public. The crowd's attention moved and the giving moved with it. That receipt has been stamped. They've received all the reward they will ever get. The likes, the shares, the admiring comments, and the long unglamorous unposted work of sustained generosity.

[18:45] Well, that's just not as compelling. I want to be careful here because Jesus is making a broader point. He uses giving as the first example, but he's diagnosing something that runs all the way through religious life, and we're going to see this in the next few weeks. Think about people who volunteer at every visible charity event, those with photo opportunities, but they quietly decline the behind-the-scenes work that no one will notice. Or think about a part-time prayer warrior who prays faithfully and beautifully in front of people, but their behind-the-scenes prayer is suffering. And think about a person who mentions their Bible reading on social media, but they they actually struggle to open Scripture at all, when no one is looking. Some of these questions are actually traps, because we may have an inkling if this applies to other people, but we only truly know if it applies to ourselves. We only truly know that what we're doing in public doesn't match what we're doing in private. We don't really know that about other people. And we all have this capacity. the question that Jesus asks is not do you give but who are you giving for it's the question of audience and it's one of the most spiritual revealing questions

[20:20] you can ask about yourself who are you giving for if the answer is for my friends or my family or for a way to look that's the wrong answer and if the the question if the answer is for myself that's the wrong answer too here's where this passage becomes not just convicting but really actually beautiful Jesus doesn't say give in secret and expect nothing he says give in secret and your father who sees in secret will reward you this is spiritual encouragement it's It's the word apodosai, he will give back faithfully and completely. But what is the reward? Scripture deliberately goes gentle with these specifics, not because the reward is small, but because spelling it out would immediately become another incentive to perform.

[21:23] The reward is described actually in relational terms. The Father sees. The Father knows. The Father responds. Hebrews 6.10 says, For God is not unjust. He will not forget how hard you have worked for him and how you have shown your love to him by caring for other believers as you still do. God's memory is perfect and his justice is complete. Not a single cup of water given in his name and not a single hidden act of mercy or not an unwitnessed sacrifice is lost. The widow's two coins still resonate through the universe. The quiet donor who never posted or never told anyone or never received the social reward, that act is still seen by God and it's held perfectly by him. Dallas Willard wrote that spiritual disciplines are not about earning God's favor, they are about transforming the kind of person you are. You're transforming your spiritual life and that's what God wants for you. You are learning to be more Christ-like when you stop performing for an audience. Secret generosity is not a rule to follow. It's a character test and a character builder. When you give secretly with no audience, you discover what actually compels you. When no one is watching, do you still give? When the moment is unfilmable and unremarkable

[23:14] and no one will ever know, do you still stop? Do you still share? Do you still sacrifice? There's a story that circulated for years in a number of various forms. A man volunteered every week for years at a soup kitchen every single Thursday for over a decade and he never told anyone he never mentioned it to his church not his small group even his children didn't know until they were adults when someone finally found out and asked him why didn't you ever say anything this is great and he said I didn't want to ruin it yeah he didn't want to ruin it something about that answer is worth sitting with he had tasted the purity of giving with no applause and no credit and no return. Only the certainty that God saw and he knew that the moment public attention entered the equation something would be different. Something would not be the same and he wouldn't feel the same about it and he didn't want to ruin it. We're living in a world that is offering us endless opportunities to ruin it and telling us that the ruin it that the ruining of it is the glorious part the technology exists to broadcast everything we do and the temptation exists even stronger the cultural pressure to perform is virtue is enormous and the technology is actually designed to reward the most

[24:57] visible version of every act. But into all that noise and all that chaos, Jesus whispers in our ear, don't perform, just be. Don't make your giving a show, let it be a truth. Let it be so natural, so much a part of who you are and who Christ is growing you to be, that your left hand doesn't even notice what your right hand is doing. Let your righteousness be real justice, real covenant love, not just a stage performance for the wrong audience. Because here's the promise that makes this not just a normal command, but actually a freeing, liberating invitation. The Father sees in secret. He has not missed a single hidden act of love. He's not forgotten a single hidden act of love. And he has not overlooked a single hidden act of love. Our God, whose opinion of you actually matters and matters forever, who knew you before you were formed, before you had the capacity to perform these good deeds, who loved you before you could perform for anyone, he's the one watching, not the crowd or the timeline or the comment section, just him. Give to that audience and live for that audience and let everything else be the the noisy clanging extra. Let's pray.

[26:47] God, we thank you for your attention, that you are our audience. You're our audience when we mess up. You're our audience when we rise to your challenge. God, we pray that you would let all the rest be unwanted noise in our ears that we would learn to live beyond.