I believe in social justice with all my heart. God reprimanded Israel for their mistreatment of the poor and underprivileged more than for any other sin.

When Jesus was on earth, He served people's physical and spiritual needs. Of course, spiritual needs matter more because they are eternal while physical needs are only temporary. But people are whole people, both physical and spiritual, and to only love people through one and not the other is an insult to their humanity.

If I only share the gospel with my neighobr while his house is falling apart, and I have the means to fix it, I am telling him that his physical needs don't matter, needs that God cares about. I am treating him like a half-human. I fit the charater depicted in 1 John 3:18 who loves with his words but not his hands. But if I just meet my neighbor's physical needs but run from opportunities to tell him the gospel, I am demeaning his identity, treating him as if he were only material matter and not an eternal being made in the image of God.

More often than not, the lost will see you meeting their physical needs as genuine love, but may not see you talking to them about Jeus as genuine love. And obviously we can't always do both. We may not have the means or the time. But as much as we can and whenever we can, we should be loving people. And if we love them, we'll do all we can to meet both their spiritual and physical needs. In fact, meeting one's physical needs creates a very natural bridge into talking about their spiritual needs. If the unbeliever sees meeting their physical needs merely as a means to get to the spiritual, then that may be the end of that relationship. But by seeking to serve both, people will see that Christianity is real and often find it very attractive.

Did Christ heal people to prove His deity? Yes! But some theologians have crossed the edge of balance when they say that the only reason Jesus raised the dead, made the blind to see, and the lame to walk was to prove that He is God "Sorry guys, it really makes no difference to Me whether you walk around blind for the rest of your life or can see with 20-20 vision, but I need to use you to prove that I'm the Messiah." Absurd. Matthew proves otherwise:

When evening came, they brought to Him many who were demon-possessed; and He cast out the spirits with a word, and healed all who were ill. This was to fulfill what was spoken through Isaiah the prophet: "He Himself took our infirmities and carried away our diseases" (Mat 8:16-17).

Christ loved people, saved or not, rich or poor. And He proved that by dying on the cross not only for our sins but for the consequence of our sinfulness which is disease, sickness, and death. Jesus' death not only reconciled man to God spiritually, but made it possible to reconcile the cursed earth to God physically (Col 3:20; Rom 8:18-25). God is not just about saving individual sinners from sin, He's on a mission to remanufacture this sin-diseased universe into a new heavens and earth in which righteousness dwells (2 Pet 3:13).

We must be careful lest we isolate this conversation to just physcial or spiritual. The two may be distinguished, but not separted.