By Nita Wilkinson

Faith Editor

We can argue all day about budgets, taxes and social programs. But before we answer those questions, perhaps we should answer another one.

Who does God tell to care for the poor?

Most Americans believe people in need should receive help. The disagreement is usually over who should provide that help.

Pew Research has found that religious organizations rank very high in public trust for providing social services, ahead of both government agencies and community organizations. The conversation is rarely about compassion. More often, it's about responsibility.

For Christians, however, Scripture asks a different question before it ever asks about public policy. What has God already asked His people to do?

We can start in Deuteronomy. It paints a beautiful picture of a community that opens its hands and hearts to those in need. Rather than treating generosity as a burden, it calls God's people to make compassion a way of life.

Debts were canceled every seven years. Workers were paid before sunset.

Landowners were instructed to leave part of their harvest for widows, orphans and foreigners. God knew hardship would always exist, but He also expected His people to make sure no one carried those burdens alone.

Isaiah 58 echoes that same heartbeat. It reminds us that authentic worship is measured not simply by what happens in worship services, but by our willingness to enter the brokenness around us.

It calls us to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, care for the oppressed and loosen the burdens of those weighed down by life. Caring for the vulnerable isn't presented as an optional act of charity. It is presented as evidence of a living faith.

Years ago, while preparing a sermon on stewardship, I read Passing the Plate. The statistics weren't what changed me. The realization did. If Christians embraced biblical generosity, the Church possesses incredible capacity to meet needs.

That realization changed the way my husband and I approached giving. We began tithing, not because of a statistic, but because we became convinced it was an act of obedience.

After that sermon, a young man came up to me.

"But Jesus never commanded us to tithe," he said.

He was right. In Acts, believers didn't stop at 10 percent. They shared whatever was needed so that no one among them lacked for anything.

Does that mean government has no role? Christians have answered that question differently for generations.

The question itself isn't new. During the Great Depression and the New Deal, the federal government assumed a much larger role in providing economic relief.

Since then, Americans, and Christians, have continued to wrestle with where the balance should lie between government responsibility, local communities and the Church.

Some Christians believe government should play the primary role in caring for society's most vulnerable. Others believe churches, families and local communities should bear most of that responsibility. Still others see it as a partnership between all three.

While they often disagree about the method, most agree on the principle: people who are poor, homeless, sick, disabled, elderly or struggling deserve compassion and care.

Christians will likely continue to disagree about tax policy, social programs and the role of government. Thoughtful believers can arrive at different conclusions about those questions.

Scripture leaves very little room for debate about one thing, God’s people are called to love their neighbors in tangible ways.

James writes, “Pure and undefiled religion before God the Father is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” (James 1:27).

Before we ask what government should do, perhaps we should first ask whether we are faithfully doing what God has already asked of us. The Church has never been called to outsource the command to love its neighbor. ■