Charity Without Conviction

Conviction is another word for heart-led living.

Conviction is always consistent with God’s character and with His revelation. Our grasp of what it requires of us will surely vary over time, but conviction itself is eternal. Conscience is our mental awareness of conviction, and the content of conscience will change as we strive to obey. What it demands today will surely change tomorrow, but the grasp we have tomorrow is unlikely to improve much if we don’t obey what it means to us now. Conviction is the imprint of God’s divine Presence in your soul.

In John 3 Jesus tried to pull Nicodemas back into the ancient Hebrew mystical mindset, away from the rationalist frame of reference that rabbis had embraced after Alexander the Great made his charismatic sales pitch for Hellenism. Nicodemas couldn’t understand how Jesus could exercise the obvious miracle power of the Creator while operating outside the legalistic boundaries of Judaism. In his darkened mind, it was a curiosity that could someone exercise the privileges of the Covenant without the Covenant as he imagined it. Already, Nicodemas reflected the mindset that God was bound under the rabbinical definitions of what had been revealed in the Law. God was no longer a Person in the ancient sense of His revelation, but had been reshaped into someone who must bow the knee to some higher authority that they imagined as “The Law.” They completely lost the proper image of Law as arising from the character of the Lawgiver. Today’s Talmud in part reflects this comical mental image of God, but it was already inherent in the corrupted rabbinical teaching back before Jesus was born.

So Jesus, as the ultimate living expression of God’s moral character, took precedence over the written expression of the Covenant. You could mistake what Moses wrote and argue about what it could mean because Moses wasn’t there to correct a corrupted imagination more than a thousand years after his death. However, the rabbis could not argue with the living God when He chose to walk in human flesh. The miracles Jesus performed were promised in the Law; His miracles aimed to establish His credentials as the Law of God in the flesh. It was contrasted against their lack of miracles. It was the proof that He could use His Father’s Creator authority to remake Creation at His whim, but He did so in accordance with the revealed Law of God, because His actions and words manifested the heart of God, the moral character of God.

In Matthew 13 Jesus taught in parables and told the story of a man sowing his fields — a parable about parables. It was a parable about how His teaching was planting seeds of moral conviction. There are plenty of things in human existence that can keep us from absorbing the truth on any level. But seeds don’t stay seeds forever; they are meant to grow and take root and produce the Fruit of the Spirit.

When Jesus fed the 5000 they were ready to make Him their Messianic King (John 6). To them it looked and tasted just like the bogus Messianic Expectations that arose from corrupted rabbinical teachings after the Return from Exile. So this crowd figured tactical and practical considerations didn’t matter; here was someone who could change reality to suit His whims. That was true as far as it went. Jesus could have called twelve legions of angels and no army could have withstood even one angel. But Jesus wasn’t in the business of fixing Israel’s political discomfort. He was there to announce that Israel had rejected the Covenant so completely that the inherent promise was going to be offered to all humanity and on a different level. It never was a matter of DNA, but the Covenant had always been a matter of commitment to the Father’s moral character. Anyone in the entire world who embraced the provisions of the Covenant could become an Israelite. But because the people who claimed the name of Israel and were in the best position to exercise the Covenant refused to obey it, and refused to let anyone else obey the Covenant, it called for drastic action.

Jesus instituted the same basic mission with a different charter. So there was no use in trying to fix the current “Israel” but to create a wholly different kind of Israel. But Jesus gave them a chance to figure it out before the final end to that Old Covenant. Their rejection manifested in attempts to make Him a worldly king. Eventually He had to drive away everyone who was unable to get it. Later in John 6 we see where He used parabolic language to polarize the crowd. Too many of them considered the bread of bellies as the best that God could offer. Jesus wanted to winnow out those who would prefer the Bread of Heaven.

Since when does Christian charity have to obey human reckoning? I can’t count how often I’ve read or heard “Christian” teaching on charity that insisted we cannot share the gospel message until we have filled empty bellies. If that’s what it takes to get a hearing, then it’s not the gospel they are hearing. The gospel is seeds of conviction. Let those who are tied to this world do charity their way; we aren’t offering food, but food as a symbol of compassion. If we don’t have food, we offer compassion any way we can. But if they don’t respond to compassion itself, then they cannot hear the gospel. The genuine power of conviction works all the way through human death, so hunger is no impediment to the truth. And if we aren’t sharing the gospel, we have no reason to build our own separate charity works. An orthodox message does not make relief work somehow “holy.”

What makes it holy is ensuring that compassion isn’t just a word that becomes the excuse for milking people who lack conviction to resist emotional manipulation. We don’t build some “respectable” organization that makes a comfortable living for those running things. If the figurehead for a charity dresses better than you, keep God’s money in your pocket. Don’t donate your time because they’ll simply despise you and abuse you.

Sow the seeds of conviction.