Welcome to Tim Minut Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Keith Simon.

And I'm Patrick Miller. Right now we're learning how to follow Jesus

by working our way through the Gospel of Luke. My guess is that you consider yourself

a person who wants to help those in financial need, those who find themselves in poverty.

Let me ask you this, what kind of person, what kind of poor person do you like to help?

And what kind of poor person do you prefer not to help?

Maybe you're offended at that question or you haven't quite thought of it that way before and

you might be saying to yourself, oh I would be willing to help any poor person if I just knew that they had need.

But are you sure?

See, I think the kind of poor person we want to help and the kind of poor person we don't

want to help says more about us than it says about them and what it says about us

is whether we really understand and grasp the gospel, God's grace, how God works in our life.

But before we wrestle more with that issue, I want to go to Luke Chapter 16 and look at a parable of Lazarus and the rich man. It starts in

verse 19. Jesus introduces the people to us. He said there was a rich man who is dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day.

At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man's

table.

Even the dogs came and licked his sores.

So here we have two people, one extremely rich.

In fact, in Jesus' day, only a handful of people would have had

this kind of wealth that lived in luxury every day. And we have a poor person, a man named

Lazarus, in which people would be much more able to identify with

...