Luke 14:12-14

Children aren’t the only ones who like to get rewards. Our Creator knows that adults are also motivated by incentives. His Word makes exciting promises for those who walk in His way.

Some of these benefits are available here on earth–like fulfillment, joy, and good favor–and other blessings will be bestowed in heaven. As believers, we need never fear the judgment (Rom. 8:1); we are clothed in righteousness through the blood of Jesus and will not face divine wrath. But the Lord will weigh the substance of our works and decide upon the reward we deserve.

To help us understand this, Scripture describes four crowns. The first, which is called incorruptible, is given to those whose great desire is to walk obediently before God. Through struggles and even failures, they continue to die to the flesh and follow the Spirit. Second, the crown of life is granted to believers who stand firm, enduring trials without giving up or losing heart. Third, the crown of righteousness is bestowed upon those who long for Christ’s appearing and walk godly lives through Him. Fourth, God will give the crown of glory to those who share His Word with others. And as the Bible tells us, we will be awed by Jesus’ glory and honored just to lay our crowns at His feet.

The supreme reward is for us to manifest God’s glory throughout eternity. We will experience ultimate joy in His presence forever, but we don’t have to wait: we can invest today by serving Him obediently and humbly. Done with the right motive, service blesses us now and in our life to come.

 Lifting weights once seemed to me very unnecessary—a curious activity for people who wanted to feel like athletes, while the real exercisers were off somewhere running. But as it turns out, I was wrong. Incorporating weight training into your exercise routine is beneficial on many levels: raising metabolism, increasing strength, reducing the risk of injury, heart disease, and other illness. I even read recently that lifting weights can help lift depression. Far from my initial theory, I have no doubt that using weights properly is a necessary part of building both muscle and health. I have also found it a helpful illustration even as I am discovering it physically true.

 Counting to ten with a weight in my hand recently, I found myself worrying about upcoming events, things I needed to do, things didn’t do well enough, and so forth. To be honest I can’t remember exactly what I was worrying about that day. But I remember thinking about the weight I was physically lifting and the weight I was mentally carrying—and connecting with illustration in my hand.

 What if it’s possible to use life’s resistances to build character, hope, and even faith? I believe it’s quite possible. Yet even so, as it is in weight lifting, a weight is only beneficial to the body when it is lifted and released. Muscles grow during times of rest; to never release a weight would forfeit the benefits of weight lifting and only make way for serious injury. When it comes to worrying, it might resemble a person lugging around a barbell, stubbornly refusing to set it down for whatever reason or benefit they think they hold by perpetually carrying it.  

 F.W. Boreham tells a story about a woman who spent her entire life as a worrier. As a small child she would sit in her father’s lap and momentarily lay aside the weight of worry as he took his thumb and smoothed out the wrinkles on her forehead. “Now keep it smooth,” he would say. “Don’t let it pucker again.” But it was of little help. Now a grown woman facing the final days of her life, she sat confessing to pastor Boreham—without seeing anything ironic in her words—that it worried her that she had been such a worrier all her life. I suspect in some way we can all be something like this poor woman, failing to see the absurdity of many of our worries.        

 I can find many places in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount where reacting with a sense of worry seems almost appropriate, and I would guess in this assessment I am not alone: You have heard that it was said, “Do not murder.” But I tell you that anyone who is even angry with his brotheris subject to judgment. Or, You have heard that it was said, “Do not commit adultery.” But I tell you that anyone who even looks at someone lustfully has already done so.(1)

 Can anyone stand in the kingdom Jesus describes in this sermon? Is it worth even trying? For worriers, there seems a great deal of material. But this is exactly what is so startling about Jesus’s words about worrying, which come as almost a hiatus in the middle of his sermon. In between an exhortation to be perfect and a description of the narrow gate, he proclaims gently but confidently, “Do not worry!”  To those trembling with the fear of certain failure, it is an impossible, strange command. Yet it is one over which he seems to proclaim: It is my life that makes all things possible. He says: 

 Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear.  Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?(2)

 Worrying is something like picking up the weight that Jesus has removed and deciding to carry it around again anyway, causing injury with your refusal to set it down. If it is truly “for freedom that Christ has set us free,” we can truly stand firm, not letting ourselves be burdened again by the slavery of worry. What if we can approach life’s worries with the thought of building hope and even faith, growing closer to the God who lifts the burden? What if it is a matter of letting go, setting the weight we would carry again and again before the Cross? What if the only benefit of worry comes in lifting it up and setting it before the God who will hold it?

 Of course, I realize this is easier to say than it is to do. But perhaps it is a reminder akin to Jesus pausing in the middle of his weighty sermon and smoothing out the wrinkles on our foreheads. Over each weight and worry, he repeats the resounding benefit: I will give you rest.   

 Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

 (1) Matthew 5:21-22; Matthew 5:28-29. 
(2) Matthew 6:25-27.

Morning  “Ephraim is a cake not turned.”   Hosea 7:8

 A cake not turned is uncooked on one side; and so Ephraim was, in many respects,

untouched by divine grace: though there was some partial obedience, there was

very much rebellion left. My soul, I charge thee, see whether this be thy case.

Art thou thorough in the things of God? Has grace gone through the very centre

of thy being so as to be felt in its divine operations in all thy powers, thy

actions, thy words, and thy thoughts? To be sanctified, spirit, soul, and body,

should be thine aim and prayer; and although sanctification may not be perfect

in thee anywhere in degree, yet it must be universal in its action; there must

not be the appearance of holiness in one place and reigning sin

 in another, else thou, too, wilt be a cake not turned.

 A cake not turned is soon burnt on the side nearest the fire, and although no

man can have too much religion, there are some who seem burnt black with bigoted

zeal for that part of truth which they have received, or are charred to a cinder

with a vainglorious Pharisaic ostentation of those religious performances which

suit their humour. The assumed appearance of superior sanctity frequently

accompanies a total absence of all vital godliness. The saint in public is a

devil in private. He deals in flour by day and in soot by night. The cake which

is burned on one side, is dough on the other.

If it be so with me, O Lord, turn me! Turn my unsanctified nature to the fire of

thy love and let it feel the sacred glow, and let my burnt side cool a little

while I learn my own weakness and want of heat when I am removed from thy

heavenly flame. Let me not be found a double-minded man, but one entirely under

the powerful influence of reigning grace; for well I know if I am left like a

cake unturned, and am not on both sides the subject of thy grace, I must be

consumed forever amid everlasting burnings.

 

Evening “Waiting for the adoption.” Romans 8:23

 Even in this world saints are God’s children, but men cannot discover them to be

so, except by certain moral characteristics. The adoption is not manifested, the

children are not yet openly declared. Among the Romans a man might adopt a

child, and keep it private for a long time: but there was a second adoption in

public; when the child was brought before the constituted authorities its former

garments were taken off, and the father who took it to be his child gave it

raiment suitable to its new condition of life. “Beloved, now are we the sons of

God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be.” We are not yet arrayed in the

apparel which befits the royal family of heaven; we are wearing

 in this flesh and blood just what we wore as the sons of Adam; but we know that

“when he shall appear” who is the “first-born among many brethren,” we shall be

like him, we shall see him as he is. Cannot you imagine that a child taken from

the lowest ranks of society, and adopted by a Roman senator, would say to

himself, “I long for the day when I shall be publicly adopted. Then I shall

leave off these plebeian garments, and be robed as becomes my senatorial rank”?

Happy in what he has received, for that very reason he groans to get the fulness

of what is promised him. So it is with us today. We are waiting till we shall

put on our proper garments, and shall be manifested as the children

 of God. We are young nobles, and have not yet worn our coronets. We are young

brides, and the marriage day is not yet come, and by the love our Spouse bears

us, we are led to long and sigh for the bridal morning. Our very happiness makes

us groan after more; our joy, like a swollen spring, longs to well up like an

Iceland geyser, leaping to the skies, and it heaves and groans within our spirit

for want of space and room by which to manifest itself to men.

 

Why do I go mourning?   Hebrews 12:27 

We have many things in our possession at the present moment that can be shaken, and it is not good for a Christian to rely upon them, for there is nothing stable beneath these rolling skies; change is written upon all things. Yet we have certain “things that cannot be shaken,” and I invite you this evening to think of them—that if the things that can be shaken should all be taken away, you may derive real comfort from the things that cannot be shaken and that will remain. Whatever your losses have been, or may be, you enjoy present salvation.

You are standing at the foot of Christ’s cross, trusting alone in the merit of His precious blood, and no rise or fall of the markets can interfere with your salvation in Him; no breaking of banks, no failures and bankruptcies can touch that. Then you are a child of God this evening. God is your Father. No change of circumstances can ever rob you of that. Even if by loss you are brought to poverty and stripped bare, you can still say, “He is still my Father. In my Father’s house are many rooms; therefore I will not be troubled.” You have another permanent blessing, namely, the love of Jesus Christ. He who is God and man loves you with all the strength of His affectionate nature—nothing can affect that. The fig tree may not blossom, and the flocks may dwindle and wander from the field, but it does not matter to the man who can sing, “My Beloved is mine, and I am His.” Our best portion and richest heritage we cannot lose.

Whatever troubles come, let us play the man; let us show that we are not like little children cast down by what happens to us in this poor fleeting state of time. Our country is Immanuel’s land, our hope is fixed in heaven, and therefore, calm as the summer’s ocean, we will see the wreck of everything earthborn and yet rejoice in the God of our salvation.

Family Reading Plan   Isaiah 54  Matthew 2