Mat 6:1-18; From Here to Eternity: The Joy of Rewards.

Thursday July 25, 2024

Idea: God’s reward of the conditioned heart in time is a guarantee of rewards in eternity and the Lord wants us to seek them. 

Mat 6:1-18 Worshiping God in proper spiritual disciplines will be rewarded in time and eternity. 

Jesus wants us to seek rewards for time and eternity. Self-enforced asceticism is alien to the Word of God. 

If we don’t receive rewards in time then we should not expect them in eternity. Rewards can be lost (2Jo 1:8). 

Rewards in eternity (One of our eschatological significances). 

Rewards for service of God are depicted as crowns (1Co 9:25; Phi 4:1; 1Th 2:19; 2Ti 4:8; Jam 1:12; 1Pe 5:4; Rev 2:10; Rev 3:11). 

Judgment seat of Christ, Rom 14:12; 2Co 5:10. 

If you worship God in the manner He tells you and you love others in the manner He tells you, then you will have many good works which God will reward in eternity. In time, the reward is the works themselves, which glorify God and bring great joy. 

Sample passage: Phi 2:12-18. Paul combines the rewards of time and eternity:

Context: Phi 1:9-11

Agape love that is exceptional and deepening more and more in full knowledge of God and discernment of all things, so that you can test and approve the different things that are superior, so that you will be pure and without fault. 

Paul then shares how his imprisonment had only promoted the gospel (Phi 1:12-14). 

He then gives one of his most amazing examples of Christ. The Son of God fasted His deity, somehow, as a man, setting aside the expression of His deity (Phi 2:5-8).

Paul combines the rewards in time and eternity which are grounded in our obedience and God’s power (Phi 2:12-13).

“Work out” (katergazomai) - to cause a state of condition, to bring about or produce.

That condition (obedience mixed with the work of God) is what Paul was praying for in Phi 1:9-11, the abounding love of God that increases in the full knowledge of God and discerns the superior things so that his or her life is a garden of righteousness (before men and before God). 

Phi 2:14-18, the joy of rewards in time and eternity.

Rewards in time are the works you do as a servant of the Lord (steward) and the rewards of eternity are crowns depicting the names of God’s will for you. 

There is great joy in both, the lesser here and the greater there. 

If you seek the face of the Lord, losing self and self’s rule to the proper rulership of the Lord, they will be yours and your joy will be made full.