Matthew 6:1-18 "Be careful not to do your 'acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. 2 "So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. 3 But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. 5 "And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
…16 "When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show men they are fasting. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. 17 But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, 18 so that it will not be obvious to men that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
Introduction: No fire on the altar
It has to be one of the most gripping and dramatic scenes in all of Scripture. The place: Mt. Carmel. On one side, four hundred fifty prophets of Baal – trying to prove Baal is God. On the other, the Prophet Elijah – claiming Yahweh is supreme. The contest: both sides will arrange a sacrifice on an altar and call upon their God to send down fire from heaven to consume the sacrifice. The prophets of Baal cried out from morning till night – no response. Elijah called out to Yahweh and fire came down and consumed the sacrifice and the altar and everything around it. A.W. Tozer contrasts modern evangelicalism with Elijah:
“Current evangelicalism has … laid the altar and divided the sacrifice into parts, but now seems satisfied to count the stones and rearrange the pieces with never a care that there is not a sign of fire upon the top of lofty Carmel. But God be thanked that there are a few who care. They are those who, while they love the altar and delight in the sacrifice, are yet unable to reconcile themselves to the continued absence of fire. They desire God above all. They are athirst to taste for themselves the "piercing sweetness" of the love of Christ about Whom all the holy prophets did write and the psalmists did sing.”
What he is saying is the fire represents the nearness of God. And the altar represents the forms of religion. And the moment we get to the point where we are content to busy ourselves with all the external forms of religion, and we become so enamored with the programs and processes that we become oblivious to whether God is even at work in those forms – that is a sad and tragic day. There is a place for the forms, without question. And we will explore that in the weeks to come. But for this morning I would like to fix our attention on the fire. What does Jesus teach us to do about the problem of empty religion – an altar with no fire?
Context
We are in the midst of a verse-by-verse study of the Sermon on the Mount, which is a sermon about righteousness. The King has arrived, He has inaugurated His kingdom, and now He is telling us what righteousness looks like in His kingdom. Chapter 5 was about righteousness in relationships. He talked about anger, unfaithfulness, dishonesty, retaliation – all the various areas where we struggle with unrighteousness in our relationships with people. Today, as we arrive at chapter 6 we start a new section of the sermon. This part is about righteousness in religion or worship. Chapter 5 showed us what righteousness looks like in our interactions with people; this section shows us what righteousness looks like in our direct interactions with God.
Another difference in these two sections is that chapter 5 teaches about the “thou shalt not’s” in the Law and in this section Jesus teaches about the “thou shalt’s.” Chapter 5 – Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not divorce, do not break your oaths, do not take revenge – all the bad things we are not supposed to do. This section focuses more on the good things we are supposed to do – giving, prayer, and fasting. We need instruction on that because if we do the good things in the wrong way they become evil things. They become an altar with no fire, which is a very bad thing. Jesus’ word for it is hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy
Matthew 6:2 "So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do
5 "And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites,
16 "When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do
The word “hypocrite” means actor, or pretender. When they had a play the normal word to refer to the actors was hypocrites. It is simply the Greek word for actor or actress. So Jesus is saying, “When you carry out your acts of righteousness, don’t be like the actors – the religious pretenders.”
I heard about a holy man who used to sit out on the street corner every day covered in dust and ashes to show his humility. One day a tourist came by and asked if he could take his picture, and the man responded, “Just a second. Let me rearrange my ashes.” There is a whole lot of re-arranging of ashes that goes on in the church. Our humility is for public consumption. Our piousity is for the cameras. We are walking PR firms, out to impress everyone with our image.
That is why hypocrites behave differently when they are around different people. At church they act real spiritual. At school they act real cool. At work they act real professional. Their prayers in their small group are amazing – they deserve an Academy Award. They can really play the part.
So while chapter 5 talked about inadequate righteousness; this section is about imitation righteousness. Inadequate righteousness does not go far enough. It avoids murder but not hatred. It avoids adultery but not lust, etc. Imitation righteousness does not go deep enough. It looks spiritual enough from a human perspective, but it is only external and not internal.
The Purpose of Reward – to fight hypocrisy
And in this section of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus gives us the solution to the problem of hypocrisy. And the solution He gives might come as a shock. The solution to the problem of hypocrisy is…living for reward.
Matthew 6:1 "Be careful not to do your 'acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.
The reason to avoid hypocrisy is the fact that it will not be rewarded by God.
The focus of the chapter
This chapter is all about living for reward. You do not have to be much of an exegete to see that. Just highlight every time you see the word “reward” in the chapter and it becomes very obvious.
Why such an emphasis on reward? I think the main reason is because the Christian life is a life of faith. And one of the greatest and most important expressions of true faith is living for reward.
Do you believe?
If God promises a reward and that has no impact on you, it proves you do not believe Him. If God promises reward and that motivates you – that proves you believe His promise.
We need to be very clear on that point because many today – even within the church – are teaching that living for reward is a bad thing. They say it is crass and shallow and selfish. They say, “You should do good for good’s sake alone, and not for personal gain.” A lot of Bible teachers teach that. But it is an idea that comes from not from the Bible, but from philosophers like Kant. He taught that the highest moral virtue is when you do something good and you get nothing out of it.
What Kant and the people who follow him fail to understand is that the morality of an act is not related to whether there is a reward, or whether getting that reward is part of your motive – the issue is what kind of reward motivates you. And that is the point Jesus is making in this chapter. He does not say, “Don’t seek reward.” He says, “Don’t seek the wrong kind of reward. Instead, seek the good kind of reward.”
And if Jesus commands something, then that thing is good and holy and righteous and virtuous and not in any sense tainted. Living for reward is not only acceptable; it is essential. If one person does a good deed just for virtue’s sake and does not care about reward from heaven, and a second person does the same deed because he wants the reward from heaven, the first person is sinning and the second person is doing what is right. It is more virtuous to be motivated by reward from God than to be motivated by virtue for its own sake.
Reward has always been one of the chief motives God wants us to have. Psalm 19 tells us to obey God’s word because it- revives the soul, - makes you wise, - gives joy to your heart, - gives light to your eyes, - is sweeter than honey, and - in keeping it is great reward. Those are benefits that are worthy of our desire. In fact we would be wrong not to desire them. And if God promises them, whether or not that motivates us is a sure-fire test of our faith.
Kant could not have been more wrong. He said it is less virtuous to be motivated by reward, but Jesus taught that it is sin not to be motivated by God’s promises of reward. In fact, if you do not think of God as a rewarder, you cannot even come to Him at all. You cannot even be a Christian.
Hebrews 11:6 And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that … he is a rewarder those who earnestly seek him.
Being motivated by a promise of a reward that you have never seen and you cannot even imagine is faith. We have no pictures of this reward, nothing to go on except God saying to us, “Trust Me, it will be good.” If just that is enough to motivate you, that proves you trust God. Living for reward is a mark of faith, and that is why it is the solution to hypocrisy, because hypocrisy is a symptom of unbelief.
Practical atheism
Living for man’s approval is a kind of practical atheism. We are behaving as though God is not even there. Imagine you were a crook and you wanted to impersonate a police officer. So you buy a uniform, and you get a badge, and you get yourself right into the police station and you have everyone fooled. You even start driving one of the police cars around. And one day you are at the station talking on the phone to a friend. And you tell him about this whole scam you are doing. And sitting right there in the room while you are talking is the police chief. He cannot believe his ears. You are saying all this to your friend and the police chief is sitting right there! Before you have a chance to hang up the phone you are being taken away in handcuffs. That is what it is like when we do our religious phoniness. We are pulling off this Oscar-winning performance impersonating a spiritual person and pretending to be devoted to God, and all the time God is saying, “Hello – I’m right here! I can see what you’re doing.” It is impossible to do that unless you either do not even believe God exists, or you completely forget about Him. The guy impersonating a police officer would never expose himself if he were aware that the chief is right there in the room. And we would never carry on as religious phonies if we had an awareness of the presence of God.
The Occasion for reward: ALL righteousness
Nothing is worth doing if God will not reward it
So living for reward is a mark of faith – it is not a small issue in the Christian life. Think about it - of all the reasons Jesus could have mentioned for why we should avoid seeking personal glory for our righteousness, the one He brings up is the fact that if we do that God will not reward us. Think of the logic of that. Jesus used that same logic a few verses earlier when he said we should not love like the tax collectors and pagans because God will not reward that. The force of what Jesus is saying here is that anything that will not be rewarded by God must be avoided. If it were sometimes OK to do things God will not reward then Jesus’ logic would not stand. Non-reward would not be a valid reason to avoid something if sometimes it is OK to do things God does not reward. Therefore we must never do anything that God will not reward. In other words, everything that will not be rewarded by God is sin.
And that means anything that is not sin will be rewarded. Anything you ever do that is not sin – God will reward you for it. If you drink a glass of water in a sinful way you will not be rewarded; but if you drink a glass of water in a non-sinful way then it is righteousness and it will be rewarded. Any moment when you are doing what God wants you to be doing, you are doing righteousness and it will be rewarded.
God is eager to reward you
Do you realize how high Jesus elevates the importance of our deeds? Everything you ever do will be either punished or rewarded. The negative side of that is terrifying, but the positive side is, for some Christians, absolutely revolutionary. There are many Christians who cannot conceive of God being pleased with them at all. They think God is one of those fathers who scolds his child for everything he does wrong, but when he does something right he shrugs it off as something that is to be expected – or fails to even notice it at all, or finds some little fault with it. God is just the opposite. He is up in heaven watching you all day long saying, “Reward! Reward! Oh – there’s another one – reward. Oh, there’s a BIG reward. Pile it on Michael. Reward, reward…reward...” God is a rewarder, and you must believe that in order to become a Christian because if you believe in a god who is not a rewarder then you are believing in a false god.
God’s pleasure (rewards) are connected to your righteousness
So this is an important doctrine, even though it is a foreign concept to those who think God is always unhappy with them. And it is also a foreign concept to those people on the other end of the spectrum who think of God as a giant Santa Claus who just loves everybody and everything exactly the same all the time and He is nothing but a big, jolly bunch of “ho, ho, ho’s.” Those people redefine grace to mean God is happy with everything we do and displeased with nothing we do. Those people think of God as loving them and pleased with them, but their conception of God’s love and pleasure is almost meaningless.
Now, there is a sense in which God is always pleased with His children and delights in us regardless of our actions because we are in Christ. But there is also another sense in which God’s pleasure in us is tied to our behavior. Scripture speaks very often of grieving God, angering God, and pleasing God.
2 Corinthians 5:9 So we make it our goal to please him
That would be meaningless if God’s pleasure in us never increased or decreased in any way. I always love my kids. And even when they disobey me in some terrible way they are still my kids and I still love them. But that does not mean our relationship is always exactly the same at every moment. I love them all the time, but sometimes I am upset with them, sometimes I am disappointed, sometimes I am especially thrilled with them, and sometimes (most of the time) I am particularly proud of them. Positionally our status with God is always the same. But relationally it is possible to grieve Him or please Him. And people who fail to realize that cannot appreciate those times when God is particularly pleased with them.
There are those times when God is especially happy with you. That is why He rewards you. Nobody rewards things they do not care about. God rewards the things He likes. So anytime He is rewarding you it is because He is especially happy with what you are doing.
That is why I titled this sermon “Living for the Pleasure of God.” I could have just as well titled it “Living for Reward,” because living for reward and living for the pleasure of God are exactly the same thing. He rewards what pleases Him. Do not think of reward as stuff. Think of it as the smile of God. God rewards you whenever you do something He especially likes.
Rewards for all non-sin
And anything you ever do that is not sin is one of those times because God rewards everything that is not sin. That should revolutionize the way we do absolutely everything we do. Everything you know God wants you to do – from getting out of bed in the morning, to taking a shower, doing a chore, eating a meal – everything we do we do for the pleasure of God. If your alarm is going off and you are debating about the snooze button, again, the issue is not, “What will be the consequences if I sleep a little longer?” The issue is, “I know God wants me to get up, which means He will richly reward me if I do. The question is, do I believe that?” When you know you should make a hard phone call, or exercise, or put the bag of potato chips away, or do your homework, once you are sure that is the thing you should be doing at this moment, the question is, “God has promised to make it worth my while if I do this, do I believe Him?” If you put the chips away just because you want to lose a few pounds, that glorifies you. But if you put them away because you believe God’s promises, that glorifies Him.
Wage vs. Reward
And if all this feels to you like a violation of your understanding of grace, then it might help to understand the difference between a reward and a wage. A wage is payment for services rendered. A reward is a gift that is connected to some action. If someone says, “I’ll give you $10 to dig that ditch,” that is a wage. You dig the ditch; he owes you the money. But suppose you find someone’s lost wallet and return it to him. He owes you nothing. You have just given him what belongs to him. But if he is so glad to get it back that he responds by giving you a gift, that is a reward, not a wage.
In both cases you get something as a result of what you do, but a wage is something you have a right to – you deserve it. A reward is given graciously. A wage is something that is equal to the value of the work. A reward is unrelated to the value of work. Someone does $100 worth of work on my car and I give him $100 – that is a wage. But if you tell your son, “I’ll give you $5 if you make seven of ten free throws,” that is a reward, not a wage.
Rewards from God are like the treasure buried in the field in Matthew 13. Getting that treasure costs the guy everything he has, but it is not an even trade. The treasure is worth far more than the guy’s whole net worth, which is why he is so thrilled about the transaction. So the fact that God attaches some of His gracious gifts to our deeds does not make them any less gifts of grace. If you have been taught that grace cannot involve any actions on our part, you have been misled. And if you are not convinced by all that reasoning, be convinced by the words of the Lord Jesus Christ. If the Lord offers reward as a motive then not only is it OK to seek reward from God, but it is absolutely mandatory. If you are not seeking reward, and reward is not motivating to you, then you are disobeying the Lord Jesus Christ.
The Abuse of Reward: using God instead of desiring Him
The difference between desiring a person and using a person
Now, I should also hasten to say that there is a right way and a wrong way to seek reward from God. It can be done in a way that dishonors God and it can be done in a way that honors God. If a person uses God – that is wrong. If I turn God into a vending machine, so that He will give me a higher paying job, or an easier marriage, or whatever it is that I think I need to be happy – then I am not seeking God as my greatest treasure; I am using God to get some other thing that I regard as my great treasure. If I use God to get a new car that glorifies the car as being desirable, not God.
However, not all seeking of reward is in that category. There is a way to seek reward that honors God. If the reward I seek is a desire for God Himself, that points to God as the great treasure. And if you have trouble understanding the difference between desiring God and using God, just think about it in terms of relationship. I think very often we stumble in understanding rewards because we forget about the relational aspect. Just think about this principle in terms of an earthly relationship. I think we can all understand the difference between someone desiring the natural rewards that go along with loving you on the one hand, versus someone using you to get some other thing they desire. Imagine a man who comes to his girlfriend and gets down on a knee and says, “Will you marry me? I need you. I need my laundry done and someone to cook for me and do the dishes and to mow the yard. I do not have time for that kind of stuff, and so I’ll do whatever it takes to make you happy if you’ll marry me so I can have a maid and a cook.” Any woman in her right mind would tell a guy like that to get lost.
But what if the man says, “Marry me,” and she says, “Why do you want me to marry you?” and he says, “Because, I want to wake up in the morning and see your beautiful face. I want to come home from work every day and hear your lovely voice. The things you say, the way you act, the things you do – I love it all and I want to spend the rest of my life experiencing those things. Your companionship strengthens me. When I’m around you I feel like the whole world could fall apart and I’d still be happy.” That is a lot of reward he is looking for. Is that selfish? Is she going to say, “All you care about is your self – I want to be happy, I want to hear your voice, I want to see your face – I, I, I – all you care about is yourself!”? No. Both men are seeking a kind of reward. Both are trying to get something they want – the difference is in what it is they want. The first guy dishonors her because he wants something besides her, and is just using her to get it. The second guy honors her because what he wants is her – and the natural benefits that come from being with her.
Principles for desiring and not using God
1) Desiring the natural benefits of His presence
So, how do you know if you are desiring God Himself or just using God? Let me suggest three principles for discerning that. First, if what you are desiring has a natural, essential connection with the presence of a person then you are desiring that person. A million different women could cook and clean. But the guy who wanted to wake up to that particular woman’s face and hear her voice when he got home – those are things that have an essential connected to that particular woman. So in desiring those benefits he was desiring her.
If I try to use God to get a better job or get money or a job or spouse or whatever – none of those things have any essential connection with the presence of God. But if I desire something that the Bible connects to His presence, such as joy, peace, strength, courage, safety, enlightenment, spiritual life – if I say, “God I want to draw near to you so I can have those things” that honors God.
People ask all the time, “Is it wrong to give to get?” The answer is it depends on what you want to get. If you give to God in order to get some other treasure, that is wrong. But if you draw near to God and express your love to Him and hope to get the natural benefits of nearness to Him – that is good.
2) Trust Him to Pick the Reward
“But what about if God decides to reward me with money, or a new car, or something like that?” Again, let’s put that in a human context. What if my wife wants to express her love for me by cooking and cleaning and doing housework for me? Am I guilty of using her if I enjoy those gifts? It depends on what is in my heart. And I can tell what is in my heart by what happens if she does not give that particular gift. If my wife wants to express her love for me by cooking me a special meal, and I am not demanding that meal or expecting it or requiring it, but I am thrilled to get it because I receive it as an expression of her love, that is perfectly fine. But if I get angry if she does not do it, that probably means that I wanted the meal not because of my love for her but because of my love for the meal. Then I am using her rather than loving her. If God is pleased to give me a new car, and I receive that as an expression of His love – my enjoyment of the car is pleasing worship to God. But if I demand a car, and I get upset if I don’t get it, that shows that my desire is really not for God, but for the car.
So the second principle is to trust God to be the one to pick the reward. When it comes to rewards that are not essential parts of God’s presence (like money or possessions or circumstances in life), then the question to ask is, “Am I dictating to God what the reward has to be, or do I trust Him to decide?” If I tell God, “I will be happy only if you give me this particular thing that I need to be happy” then I am pointing to that thing as my great treasure. But if I just trust Him and say, “God, I do desire that thing, but whatever You are pleased to give me is what I want the most – whether it is that thing or something else. Whatever you choose to give me and whenever You choose to give it – that is what I want because You know better than me what is good.” – then I am desiring God and not using Him. When you say that to God you are honoring Him because you are showing His will to be the most desirable thing. But if you say, “God, I am claiming this certain thing, and that is what I want regardless of what Your will is or what You think would be best” – that is the health/wealth, prosperity heresy that uses God and points to earthly treasures as more desirable than God’s will.
3) Understand the relative value of various rewards
A third principle is to make sure we understand the relative value of rewards that are a natural part of God’s character compared to the earthly blessings. Compare the value of things like awe, joy, comfort, courage, strength, insight, security – compare the value of those things with the value of earthly treasures, like money or houses or cars or relationships. If that second category is more valuable to your heart then there is a problem. The Old Testament emphasizes physical, material blessings. The New Testament emphasizes spiritual blessings and rewards. It is not that we have switched from one to the other so that material blessings in this life are no longer part of how God blesses us. Rather, God has expanded our view so that we can now see the relative insignificance of material things in this life. Compared to the heavenly rewards, earthly pleasures are trivial. It is like a child who gets all excited at age 3 about getting a piece of candy as a reward. Fifteen years later you tell him if he gets straight A’s in his senior year you will buy him a brand new car. Does he still enjoy a good piece of candy at age 18? Sure. But it does not have anywhere near the impact on him as the car has. And if it does, then that means he is not understanding about the car. If you say, “I’ll buy you a brand new Ford Mustang or whatever car you want” and he says, “Well, will I also get a piece of gum?” – you begin to suspect he is not comprehending what you are offering. That is what we are doing when God promises every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies and riches in heaven and we say, “Do those promises include physical healing in this life? Will I get a good job? Or a wife or children or a house?” Will God give you all that in this life? Maybe, maybe not, depending on what is best for you at this time but the important thing is not whether God is going to give you those things; the important thing is why you are so worried about a piece of gum when He is talking about a brand new car.
We tend to be such children in what we desire. A huge percentage of what is wrong in our lives is simply that our appetites are way, way too small. Our desires are too small. We are so fixated on a piece of gum we cannot comprehend a new car.
And that is dangerous because the enemy can offer you a piece of gum, but not the car. If you can be led around by the nose for a piece of gum, the world will be able to draw you away. But only your Father can afford the brand new Mustang. It is only when our appetites become large enough so that only God’s rewards can satisfy them that we will be able to resist the cheesy little allurements of this world. We must increase our desires!
So those are some basic principles for discriminating between using God and desiring God. And if you want it in a nutshell, try this: It is wrong to use God as a means to gaining earthly pleasures. But it is a good thing to use earthly pleasures as a means of enjoying God.
The Enjoyment of Reward: Take it personally
If this is an area where you struggle just ask yourself this: “Is my enjoyment of God’s gifts in competition with my love for God, or does it increase my love for God? I want to come back to the personal aspect of this again because I think that is so crucial to understanding all this. Part of the reason we tend to turn God’s gifts into idols is because we are so quick to forget that God is a person.
The people of God have always rejoiced in being seen by God – the fact that God always sees them. Does that strike you as odd? For many people being seen by God feels like a curse. They cannot imagine enjoying that or rejoicing in it – and I think it is very often because they have depersonalized Him. Every Christian understands that God sees everything and knows everything, but sometimes I think we reduce His all-seeing eye to an impersonal, non-relational kind of surveillance. God’s omnipresence is like a giant security camera that follows you around. If you set up a video camera in my living room to keep tabs on me that would have some effect on me, but nowhere near the same effect as if you were actually standing there in my living room. There is a difference between you being aware of what I am doing and you actually being there. God is not just aware – He is there. He is personally present, taking personal interest – paying attention.
Everyone who has raised children has many times heard the words, “Watch me!” Every kid says that at some point. “Watch me, Daddy!” And very often those words are followed by, “Hey, you weren’t watching!!!” Before they are even done with their death-defying trick they are looking to make sure you are one hundred percent focused. Just turn your attention away from them the slightest bit and they start to feel alone and they are intent on recapturing your attention. “Watch me, Daddy.” Frederick Dale Bruner:
“Theatrical righteousness (giving and praying and fasting for show) is a righteousness that is concerned to do good in a way that is dramatically noticeable. … We are made to want notice. … The child’s verbal “watch me” becomes the adult’s more unspoken (but just as deep) “notice me.” From the cradle to the grave there is something deep within us that says, “notice me.”
And it takes different forms. Some go all out in their actions to impress people. Others just sit back and secretly wish someone would be impressed with them. But there is something in all of us that wants to be recognized and honored. And when you are in church circles the tendency is to act in ways that will bring honor from church people. And Jesus says, “If that’s your motive – if you’re doing things to be noticed by people, your deeds will not be noticed by God.” You cannot have both. If you say, “Watch me” to men, God will look away. You have to choose – live for God’s approval or man’s.
And as always the goal is not to just forgo man’s approval. The goal is to forgo it because you actually prefer God’s approval. The reason a little child says, “Watch me, Daddy” is because being watched, and having your dad be impressed with you feels good. We need to get so being noticed by God and having God be pleased with what we are doing feels really good.
God’s pleasure in you
And so once again it comes back to faith – believing that God really is pleased with you. It seems unfathomable when we think about our sin and our relative insignificance that God could possibly be interested in our little situation or enjoy watching what we are doing. God can have anything He wants at any time – how could He possibly gain any pleasure or enjoyment from watching me do something? Here is how: the same way I had zero interest in any little league baseball game for forty-two years but then when my son was playing I was riveted. The same way I could have zero care in the world about whether some kid playing third base makes a tag, or some runner slides in safe – unless my son is the one tagging or sliding. When Josiah is in the play then it is pretty much the only thing I care about at that moment. You see love generates interest. God enjoys watching you do the work He has given you because you are His son or daughter. We get so excited when our children take their first steps. Is taking two steps and then falling down really that amazing a feat? People walk far better than that all around us every day and we are not impressed at all. But we love our own children and so we love watching them make progress. God loves us more than we love our own children, and that is why He can gain enjoyment from watching me take two halting steps in the path of sanctification and then fall flat on my face – especially if the next time I make it to three steps.
Oh, that we might learn to love pleasing our Father in heaven. To live for His smile. To live for His pleasure. To live for His reward.
God wants you to enjoy His gifts
Maybe the reason so many people think it is a bad thing to live for reward is because they have disconnected the rewards with their meaning. If a man gives a woman an engagement ring, nobody thinks of her as being crass or shallow or greedy for being excited about the ring. (Unless all she cares about is the gold and the diamond and thinks nothing of the meaning of that ring.) But if she is excited because of what the ring means – that it is a token of the man’s love for her – then there is nothing shallow at all about her being moved to tears by that ring.
Does God want us to be enamored with His gifts and forget about Him? Of course not. But nor does He want us to be indifferent about His gifts – any more than the man wants the woman to be indifferent about the engagement ring. It makes God happy if we see His gifts for what they are, gestures of His love, and take great delight in that. He does not want us to be indifferent about them. If my daughter does something wonderful and I say, “Oh, I’m so proud of you!” and she thinks, “I’m so glad my dad is proud of me!” and then I go to give her a big hug she doesn’t hold me off and say, “Oh, no – don’t hug me. Don’t give me any gesture or token of your love. I’m not greedy. I’m not in this for selfish gain. I don’t want to get anything out of it.” No. The gestures of love are part of a love relationship and should be thoroughly enjoyed by both parties.
Conclusion: The lavishness of the reward you expect reflects on God (run to win!)
So let’s strive to become more and more motivated by God’s lavish promises of reward. Live your life as though every single time you do something you are supposed to do, no matter how mundane, that thought or action brings pleasure to a very, very rich, very, very generous king. That is what we claim to believe – let it be seen in the way we live. We owe it to God to live that way. If we don’t, it makes Him look bad to the world. What does it say to the world about God when we go through life constantly depressed, complaining, pessimistic, down in the dumps…? The day before you go to Disneyland your kids are bouncing off the walls with excited anticipation. If we had any concept at all of the rewards of heaven, we would live every day like that – what a witness that would be!
And what zeal we would have in serving God. Ever notice that in Olympic sprints, nobody jogs? Why? Because they are motivated by a prize.
1 Corinthians 9:24-25 Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. 25 Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever.
Rewards are supposed to motivate. Nowadays when little kids have a sports event, often they all get a ribbon. We want to give kids a ribbon for coming in eleventh in a race of nearly a dozen. But at the higher levels we do not do that, because the whole point of the prize is to serve as a motivation.
This is why coasting is not consistent with the Christian life. Whenever we find ourselves settling into a passionless Christianity, where we are not growing, we are not even really trying to grow – someone in prayer group asks us what spiritual needs we have and it is the farthest thing from our mind that we even need anything, no consciousness of needing to overcome any sin or grow in any particular virtue, no real anxiety over sin or the lost, no urgency, no passion for advancing the kingdom of God – your whole Christian life has just become one, big yawn; you are just out for a leisurely stroll in the middle of the Olympic one hundred meter – when that happens it is unbelief.
Have you taken a few steps and stumbled? And the enemy is telling you you might as well give up, because God is hopelessly exasperated with you? Do not believe that lie. Get back up and try again – not because of some oppressive, burdensome religious duty, and not to impress anyone around you, but because your Father in heaven is just waiting for you to take another step so He can gather you up in His great arms and say, “Well done, My precious child!”
Benediction: 1 Corinthians 15:58 Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.
