Join us this Sunday for one 10:30am service at Southeast Raleigh Magnet High School. We will be streaming live on our Youtube as well.

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Compassion for the Poor

Philosophy

One of the goals of Treasuring Christ Church is to reach across all boundaries for the sake of the gospel and for the glory of God. One of these cultural boundaries that gets a lot of biblical attention is poverty. Often, the Bible speaks about caring for the poor. While one category of the poor is referring to the “poor in spirit” (ex. Matt. 5:3), another and more common usage is of the financially or physically poor. Yet, these two categories should not be seen as mutually exclusive, as the gospel should permeate any attempt to help both the spiritually broken as well as the financially or physically bankrupt. Indeed, those who are physically poor graphically illustrate our own impoverished spiritual condition. Seeing the importance of caring for the poor in Jesus’ earthly ministry, the church must see its responsibility to prioritize the believing poor. But as we follow Jesus’ example, we cannot stop there. It was Jesus who called his followers to extend mercy to the battered man because of the injustice done to him in the story of the “good Samaritan” (Luke 10) and to invite to the dinner table not those who can pay you back but the poor who can’t pay you back (Luke 14:13) and who described his coming as being anointed to “proclaim good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18). Therefore, as we follow the example of Jesus’ mission and try to keep biblical priorities with proper emphases, we have taken biblical categories in describing the poor and developed a brochure (first link below) as a visual tool to help us practically wade through caring for the poor. The brochure includes a chart where you will see 4 quadrants. The numbers in each quadrant loosely represent biblical priorities while the crosshairs communicate categories.

Finding Help in the City brochure