I’m memorizing verses from Hide This in Your Heart, a book written as a follow-up to Michael Frost’s Surprise the World, which recommends five missional activities for believers under the acronym BELLS:

• Blessing people, both inside and outside the church
• Eating together, by sharing meals with believers and nonbelievers alike
• Listening to the guidance and direction of the Holy Spirit as we engage with those around us
• Learning Christ as our leader and model for making disciples
• Seeing ourselves as Sent by God to anywhere life takes us

Hide This In Your Heart has a list of 40 verses supporting the BELLS topics. It’s been a good exercise, and I’m beginning the second set. I found this verse intriguing. It’s under the heading Eat: sub-topic, Welcome Refugees and Immigrants:

He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. (Deuteronomy 10.18, 19, ESV)

My question was, How does God love the sojourner, giving him food and clothing?

I may have found a partial answer in my reading of Leviticus. In the middle of chapter 23, a list of the annual feasts with detailed instructions on how to keep them, we have this directive which has nothing to do with the feasts:

“And when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, nor shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the LORD your God.” (Leviticus 23.22, ESV)

For a culture like ours that values efficiency, this is provocative. Be deliberately sloppy so that the poor and the sojourner can eat. God gives the sojourner food (Deuteronomy 10.18) through this command to his people.

How do we live out Leviticus 23.22 since most of us aren’t farmers? Maybe a practical application is giving money to the poor. I don’t need to argue, “I must steward my money carefully. Every dollar counts!” No, it doesn’t. Be a little wasteful. I don’t think we need to give to known scammers, but when we see someone in need, maybe we should give and not claim, as the Pharisees did, that the money was earmarked for something else. (See Matthew 15.1 – 9)

By contrast a pastor friend of mine, when encouraging people to give to the church, used to say, “And we won’t waste one red cent.” Yes, we will! But a little waste is OK.

For there will never cease to be poor in the land. Therefore I command you, “You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.” (Deuteronomy 15.11, ESV)

But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth. (1 John 3.17, 18, ESV – another verse from the BELLS collection!)