Matthew 6:1-4 — Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: that thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.

A week or so ago, I talked about rethinking our giving as one of our year end / New Year’s activities. I said I might share about what we had decided to do.
Well, yes and no. I’ve decided the text above suggests that sharing any details about what we have and haven’t decided to do might not be right. But I do want to talk about the thought process, and what it led to.
The first thing that was clear to us was that we must do as much as we felt able, and maybe a little more. This chapter starts with Jesus’s instructions on how to carry out three duties that He clearly assumes we will undertake. “When you give alms … When you pray … When you fast …”.
Jesus was reminding His hearers of one of the four cardinal Jewish virtues, of which the Talmud says “The merit of charitable works is in proportion to the love with which they are practised.” And “Blessed is he who gives from his substance to the poor, twice blessed he who accompanies his gift with kind, comforting words.” “The noblest of all charities is enabling the poor to earn a livelihood.”
The second thing that became clear to us as we prayed was that we should be more focused in our giving — and that as we give, we should pray. In the coming year, our prayers will follow our gifts. If you say they always should, of course you’re right.
As part of that greater focus, we landed on four major areas to concentrate on — the Christian family, Christian education, Christians in need, and Christians yet to be (that is evangelism!).
There is nothing more important to a healthy nation than a healthy family culture. There is a direct link between the decline of family life, and the rise of all kinds of social evil.
I believe that my life has, in some ways, been saved by education. There is one thing, though, that my education failed to do for me. It did not help me to build a living faith, nor a sound ethical framework. For me (I hope) that came much later.
We have discovered that even in the affluent area in which we live there are people with no safe roofs over their heads, no certainty of where their next meals will come from, no more clothes than they stand up in.
No Christian can need reminding of the priority of evangelism. We can all witness — but we cannot all “go” to be evangelists. Yet “The harvest truly is great, but the laborers are few:”
So there you have it — it seemed to us that, for now, we are directed to give, and pray, in those four areas. It left us with a pile of requests we couldn’t respond to. There were probably another four just as worthwhile, and another four … We’ll pray for them, but we have to follow where we were led.