“. . he asked for charity. .  And Peter said, I have no silver or gold; but what I have I give you: in the name of Jesus Christ, walk.”

Acts 3:3,6 NEB

The lame man’s friends brought him to the Temple every day because it was a wonderful place for a beggar to beg.  Charitable people came there to worship.  The Temple service, its music, its prophetic pronouncements, its liturgical recital of the humanitarian law, its fellowship of kindred souls, all touched the hearts of people and made them loosen their purse strings.  The beggar came to the Temple every day because it was a good place to beg.

But the day came when the begging beggar at the Temple got something better than charity.  Along came a man who said to him: “Silver and gold I don’t have, but what I have, I give you.  In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk.”

The Acts story tells us that the crippled beggar got up and leaped about praising God.  Halford Luccock in commenting on the story gave it this title: From Begging to Praising, and then ventured the suggestion that the beggar’s experience at the Temple parallels many a person’s religious pilgrimage, or should.

How many people come, or are brought, to the church only to beg.  After all, the church is a charitable institution.  It takes care of distress cases.  It always has.  The church is one place where hard luck stories will always be listened to and help given.

Even the advent of the Welfare State has not cancelled out this function of the church as a dispenser of charity.  There are always cases not covered by the fine print in the guidelines for the operation of governmental social agencies.  And there are always those cases, too, where pride, or courage, or industry rule out the possibility of asking for a welfare handout, but where real suffering would take place if the church did not bring its emergency relief quietly and respectfully.

Nowadays many church causes take care of needy cases which formerly got relief only through begging, such as our special offering on last Sunday for orphaned and disturbed children at Monroe Harding Home, and our offering on Easter Sunday for sufferers in World Wide disasters.

Yes, the church is a charitable institution and people have every reason to come asking and expecting a charitable handout.

Furthermore, the begging that goes on around churches is not confined to asking for cash handouts.  No.  Some people who come knocking on church doors are interested only in getting from their religion what one church Father called “the medicine of immortality”.  They want a ticket and a passport into the life beyond the grave.  Others seek the handout that religion affords of peace of mind, or the resources for confident living, or comfort in sorrow, or counseling in strained family relationships, or comradely encouragement in disappointment and defeat.  And the church keeps on giving these handouts.

But the real thing, better than charity or any other handout, the Church has to dispense is that transforming relationship with the living God which comes through faith in Jesus Christ.  This is what the church exists for fundamentally and which, when a person receives it, sends that blessed person leaping and praising God.

To get the best the church has to offer, “God must be sought for His own sake, not merely as a purveyor of moral power, or of an endless life, or of charity handouts.  At the heart of religion lies this significant paradox, that it is only by coming to care more for God than about either our own character, or our own destiny, that either our character can be transformed or our destiny in any wise foretokened. . . The transference of attention from self to God is the secret both of self-conquest and of hope.  Religion can be said to have a real place in a person’s life when the Eternal reveals Himself as trustworthy, and when the individual in response to this revelation puts supreme trust in the Eternal.  Trust is but another word for faith which becomes the name for the typical religious response to reality.”  (John Baillie – And the Life Everlasting)

A young woman grew tired of life in New York City.  The pressures, distractions, and intrusions of the city upon her life became unbearable.  She retreated to the mountains of Vermont and took up her abode in a lonely cabin at the end of a stony trail where even her groceries had to be carried upon her back in a knapsack up the mountainside.  When friends expressed amazement at her courage and satisfaction in such a lonely life, she confounded them even further by stating: “There wasn’t even a lock on my door.  And we had six feet of snow that winter.  But it was wonderful.  After all those hectic years in New York it was just what I needed.  You might say I was living in a state of Absolute Trust.”

Another woman, recuperating from a serious illness, was told by her physician: “Your rapid and satisfactory recovery is due in no small part to your remarkable ability to accept without impatience or bitterness this sudden inactivity and mysterious malady that has struck you down.”  Her response to the physician was: “I don’t know why I feel as I do, unless it is because I keep remembering those words of St. Paul to the Philippians (4:11-13): ‘I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.  I know both how to be abased, and how to abound; everywhere and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry; both to abound and to suffer need.  I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.”

There is something better, far better, than charity or any other handout, which the Church as the Body of Christ has to offer all; namely, the New Life, the transformed existence that comes only by the power of His Spirit to lift up those whom life has crippled or imprisoned, or embittered, or impoverished.

I know that I don’t have to tell you that it is always open season for criticizing the church for all its failings.  Some people who used to come to the church for a handout are there now simply to register a complaint.  William Sloan Coffin, a highly controversial minister, leveled some heavy salvos of criticism at the contemporary church when he was in Memphis a few years ago for a Rhodes College Dilemma Series.  But a criticism that came from the audience to the effect that the church was just a crutch for most people, drew from Coffin this counter question, “Who told you that you’re not limping?”

All the questions that are raised over the failure of the church — its tepid involvement in human misery, poverty, suffering and sin; its preoccupation with spinning the wheels of organization rather than grappling with the God-question, and the salvation question, and the human situation question – all are questions deserving searching analysis.  So are the questions concerning the nature and mission of the church – about whether the church is failing in its evangelistic task, or failing in its mission to minister to the physical, economic, and social needs of human beings.  These are always vital and relevant.

But the real question – the most important question for every Christian is: “What am I coming to church for?  To ask God for a handout?  To register a complaint or a criticism? Or, am I coming in the expectation of receiving that best gift the church as the Body of Christ has to impart – worship and knowledge and fellowship with Eternal God?

The church needs no defense from all her critics.  I am tired of having Christian people come to me and level their criticisms of the contemporary church at me, as if it were my chief business as a Christian minister to serve as Public Defender of the Church, to explain why it is too liberal to some, or too conservative to others; or why too involved socially and racially and politically, or too little involved.  This is no more my business than it is your business, or the business of any professing Christian.

Since the days of the early Apostles, since Christ Himself began to call men to be His disciples and to become the nucleus of His redemptive work in the world, the church has been acknowledged as a society of sinners; a band of men and women whose only claim for consideration in its membership is their frank confession: “We have done those things we ought not to have done; we have left undone those things that we ought to have done, and there is no health in us.  We are cripples, confessed and congenital cripples morally and spiritually.  We despair of our frail and twisted powers.  We know we are limping.  We claim the sacrifice of Christ in our behalf for the forgiveness of our sins.  We plead for His redeeming love to take us over and remake us in His image and, relying entirely upon Him, we want to be used for His purposes from now on.”

The point of the Peter and John story of the crippled beggar they found at the Temple is just that they had something to give that they couldn’t keep.  “Some things will keep – like stones and diamonds.  Some things can be preserved or pickled.  But the real things in life cannot be kept.  Try to keep love and watch it turn into lust.  Try to keep peace to yourself and watch it degenerate into passivity.  Try to keep money and watch it change into mammon.  Keep a vision and you become a visionary.  Try to keep Christ and you become a bigot.  Peter could not keep the precious gift of life in Christ.  He could only give it away.”  (Interpreters Bible on text.)

When the lame beggar asked for charity Peter gave him that better gift, which he couldn’t keep, because he was Christ’s man and what he had to give was not of himself but Christ’s.

Have you heard this parabolic version of the meaning of the gospel?  It goes something like this: “There was once a time when God saw the world lying like a cripple on the doorstep of heaven.  God had something that He could not keep.  That was His own life and love.  The beggar asked only for alms and a cooling drink, but God gave that beggar world a baby to love, a Life to adore, a Spirit to dwell in his own wretched crippled body and make that beggar walk, and leap, and praise.” (Ibid.)

The Great God still has something He cannot and will not keep, His overflowing love for everyone.  What have we come to Church to ask Him for?