A week or so ago at the grocery store, a scraggily man asked me for a dollar as I got into my car.

I had a few dollars in my pocket but I ignored him and drove off. Then on the way home I began to feel seriously convicted, and it just wouldn't go away. I kept thinking about the parable of the Good Samaritan and the question, "Who is my neighbor?"

Even though I lead a ministry that helps the homeless, I had decided there were some poor people I wasn't going to help. I was keeping hustlers and panhandlers at arm's length.

I guess it started several years ago. Scruffy people with "Will Work for Food" signs were at every intersection. I drove around Dallas and met with 24 of these sign folks, mostly men, some in wheelchairs, some with a child or a cute dog. Instead of giving them money, I offered each one a place to stay, food and a (low paying) job with no strings attached.

In every case they told me that they were not interested. I found out from one of them that they all worked for one individual who provided them with room, board and transportation. Each one was pulling in several hundred dollars a week, many times more than we make at Trinity Foundation.

Now I realized I was using my little test with the "sign men" to excuse my not giving money to the grocery store beggar.

In that Good Samaritan parable, the priest and Levite who passed by the half-dead man knew the dangers of the road and also the stories, ruses and schemes that thieves employed to entrap travelers. Guided by prudence, fear, custom and a sense of the importance of their own agendas, they both "passed by on the other side" and into infamy.

Suddenly, I found myself one with them.

In that parable, Jesus redefined neighbor to mean the person you come across in need. In the Sermon on the Mount He hinted at this when He told them to love their enemies (Matt 5:43, 44). Christians today are still confused about the definition of neighbor.

To love our neighbor as ourselves is not a suggestion; it is a command and the only way we are tested to see if we love God "with all our heart, soul and mind." All the Law and Prophets hang on this, Jesus said.

That's why He said the poor would always be with us—to test whether our professed love of God is real.

The word "poor" in Greek is ptochos. It means destitute of money, influence, position or honor—someone powerless to accomplish an end.

In the common Greek language at the time of Christ it was always used in a bad sense. In the Gospels, the meaning was ennobled and elevated because those of this class most readily gave themselves up to the faith of Christ and proved able to lay hold of the heavenly treasures.

That is still true today. At the time of Christ, the Jews were very good at meeting the needs of other Jews because in the Law that's how they defined neighbor (Lev 19:18); but in their interpretation, mercy did not extend to other peoples and it certainly did not extend to enemies of Israel.

During the Katrina disaster we had a great example of this misunderstanding of "neighbor."

I received a call from a man who owned an apartment house. He wanted to make seven units available for Katrina victims. He and his church would completely furnish the apartments, buy food and clothing for the victims and provide free rent and utilities. We were excited about this and were planning to place seven families there.

The next day he called me with one provision: the victims we placed must sign a statement that they were Christians and actively involved in a church in New Orleans. He added that he wanted to make sure that Christians "help our own."

Suffice it to say, I turned down his offer. We found other places for the families to stay.

Conservative political commentator Michael Medved recently warned that liberals exhibit a "a gospel of indiscriminate compassion."

I don't know about liberals, but Jesus certainly did. There has always been a "social gospel," a gospel of "indiscriminate compassion."

Even historian Edward Gibbon, no lover of the church, admitted that the Christians' open hand to the poor "very materially conduced to the progress of Christianity" in the Roman world.

The Barbarian Conversion by Richard Fletcher describes Christianity's expansion into Europe in the centuries after the Roman Empire.

"It was customary," Fletcher says, "to set aside a fourth part, and in some parts of the church a third part, of ecclesiastical revenues for the relief of the poor. It was a wide category, including all those who fell through the supportive networks of kinfolk, neighbors or patrons—widows, orphans, refugees and travelers, the underemployed and the unlucky, the incapacitated and the captive."

In other words, the faithful embraced the human detritus that ringed their towns and villages, those who, as one ninth-century poem described, were "shut out at the gates, laying their cold limbs in the rubbish to warm them."

The Hebrew word that describes the tendency to separate and define—to discriminate—is parash, which is the root for Pharisee, the Jewish sect that Jesus criticized most.

When the church forgets the poor, it grows defensive, selfish, paranoid, pharisaical, brittle and quick to accuse and condemn. When it rediscovers the poor, it escapes from itself, giving itself away in love.

Let's open our hands to the poor... indiscriminately.

Ole's morning bible study is available here.