Giving To Get - Philippians 4:15-19 Series

It doesn’t honor God if you snub his offers of reward. Like if a woman said to her husband, “If you do such and such, I will make you the happiest man in the world tonight” and he says, “I’m not motivated by that. I’ll do it, but only because I’m such a loving man – I’m not interested in your promises of reward.” That would not honor her. If God offers a reward, and it doesn’t have a strong draw on your heart, that just proves one thing: you don’t trust God. You don’t trust him to be good. You don’t trust him to be creative. You don’t trust him to be capable of giving you something that will fill you with delight.

Now, suppose someone says, “I want to be motivated by promises of rewards. I know I should, but the truth is, I just don’t. For some reason, the promise of rewards in heaven just doesn’t really motivate me.”

Go back to the monopoly illustration from last week. I asked if you would give up $50,000 of play money in a Monopoly game for a real $50K car. But what if it’s not a car? Suppose it’s just some rich friend who says, “If you give me your monopoly money, I will give you something really, really great.”

“What is it?”

“I’m not going to say.

But trust me – you’ll love it!” Will you do it? It depends on whether or not you trust your friend. If you trust that friend, you’ll hand over the money and will be all excited. If you don’t trust him, you’ll be reluctant.

And if you have a hard time with that, let the illustrations Jesus gave help you. People enjoy daydreaming about winning the lottery. That’s one of the worst and most sinful things you can ever do if it causes you to love money. But if you want to daydream about that, daydream about it on the new earth. Then instead of making you love money in this world, it will make you eager for the new heavens and the new earth, and that’s a good thing. I think one reason we have such a hard time getting excited about reward is that we turn it into such an ethereal, abstract thing, that it has no meaning. Jesus gave us illustrations that were concrete – like the delightful things in this life. So think along those lines.

And secondly, think a lot about the character of God. I’ve often used the illustration of a kid with two uncles that always come for Christmas, one who is great at picking out the best gifts ever, and the other who always gives lame gifts. After a while, you get so you get excited when that first uncle gives you a gift, even though you can’t even imagine what could be in the box (because he always gets you things that weren’t on your list, but that you like even more than anything you thought of). If you don’t know what’s in the box, how could you be excited about it? You’re truly excited, because you know what that uncle is like. You know his character. That’s the key to being excited about eternal rewards. Focus on what God is like. Focus on his nature and character. How kind is he? How generous is he? How rich is he? How loving is he? How creative is he? So what kind of things do you think God would give as a reward for things that greatly please him?