On rewards and gifts

"The gifts of God: 

vitality, love, forgiveness, courage against evil, joy at our depths, and everything else 

that flows from the terrible work 

of Christ may be found 

only in the company of God. 

And we keep company with God 

only by adopting God’s purposes for us and following through on them even when it is difficult or initially painful to do so."

-Plantinga ("A Breviary of Sin")

The pain is worth the reward!  

Are the rewards the gifts?  Love, vitality, forgiveness, courage, joy, and just in case you preferred some other better good thing he throws in everything else from Jesus.  

Yes.  The reward is EVERYTHING.  

The reward is life the way God created it to be before sin came in and disordered His order of things.  The reward is to flourish and live, but also to live well.  To experience the highest and unending levels of love, deeper and deeper.  To experience courage over the most frightening threats, and to win.  

The reward is life.  This life and the one in eternity.  The way in which we have this gift now will look and feel a little different than the way we will have it in heaven because there will be no sin to fight against, but overall the difficulty is not in the reward being "too hard" to have, but it is in thinking too little of the reward that is easily yours in this life.  We focus so much on the pleasures of sin, and that's all we see.  But we need to focus on the pleasures of life (love, vitality, joy, courage, everything!) in order to more clearly see, by comparison, how larger the pleasures of sin are.  We struggle with sin because we turn our eyes from seeing the rewards we have in Christ.  We would rather refuse to see how good life is in Christ, in order to try and content ourselves with the many desires we have for the world.  

Yes, the world is appealing.  Beauty, riches, achievements, and the adoring and admiring eyes of the people around us.  We want their approval, but more than that we want their praise.  We want their awe and fascination.  We want to sit on the throne of glory and be God. 

That is ultimately sin: Attempts to dethrone God.  

Satan fell because he thought he could do it, and now he spends the rest of eternity infiltrating and poisoning the minds of thinking human creatures that they can too.  

No one would admit to saying they think they can dethrone God, but what we say and what we do expose us as satan's pawns in creation where good vs. evil is about God being God versus everyone else attempting to dethrone Him.  This war is futile, we can all see that when we look at the big picture.  But why are so many of us still on the losing side?  Why are saying we worship God in one setting, and then when we crawl into our hiding places we begin making plans to dethrone Him as if He couldn't see us in the dark.  We judge others inwardly and secretly put ourselves above them in value and "rightness", we condemn ourselves as being no good or "not enough", we envy people we see on Instagram with their perfect jobs and cute lifestyles, we get jealous of our friends who have what we want, we gossip about people with other people, and we lust as if nobody knows it, not even our own conscience.   We think being in the dark is justified ignorance while our thoughts and bodies subtly scheme and act against God's authority, against His words, against His decree, against His plans, we think He will not see us in the dark.  

"even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you." 

-Ps. 139:12 

Yet as His saints, His redeemed sons and daughters we are not yet out of sin's realm.  So we are stewards managing what the King gives us, and sometimes the King gives us an order or a task that seems impossible or not right.  He might give us an order to love those in hiding, to give our lives to them provisionally or emotionally.  He might ask us to become like them for a while in order to gently lead them out.  His plans always lead to more of those in hiding being brought into the winning side.  

Yet, as redeemed people we might wonder "but what about me?"  Because we forget in that small moment of being given a task that the job is the reward.  The job is not our sacrifice.  But many of us want to think so.....why?  Perhaps we think that the sacrifice will be equivalent to the reward?  So if the sacrifice is great then the reward will be great too!  It makes sense to us, until we consider the implications of a failed task.  If we fail we take that as a loss of our reward.  So the pressure to do our task and do it well rises.  If you're like me, you don't particularly enjoy doing things under pressure.  If we don't enjoy doing what we do for God, we lose the very joy He has rewarded us with by grace of going to Him and making His plans our plans, which of course CANNOT FAIL.  In other words, we find that we come back to where we were when we said one thing, yet in secrecy did another.  We think we can botch up God's plans.  We dethrone God in this self-righteous way.  

Rather...

God works in each person's life to hand us love, courage, joy, while simultaneously using our rewards to also save the lost.  It's all connected.  His plan is perfect.  His perfect and good will.  We work willingly through the toil because God occupies our hearts with joy. 

“Here is what I have seen to be good: it is appropriate to eat, drink, and experience good in all the labor one does under the sun during the few days of his life God has given him, because that is his reward. God has also given riches and wealth to every man, and He has allowed him to enjoy them, take his reward, and rejoice in his labor. This is a gift of God, for he does not often consider the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with the joy of his heart.”

Ecclesiastes 5:18-20

The labor is the reward, not the sacrifice!

We stumble friends.  We all fail in the tasks in one sense, because we expect the outcome to be according to our self wishes.  But remember God can't fail, so in our failures the only failure is our expectation of the outcome....our god of self has failed.  But the true God never fails. 

"I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”

-John 16:23 

Jmegrey 

Take today in good cheer.  Your labor is your reward.  Your joy hinges on the toil.  So take heart, you are on the winning side!