Description
Jesus’ Return and the Promise of Rewards
In today’s meditation, we explore Jesus’ prediction about his return in divine… (visit YouTube for more)
Transcript
In today’s meditation, Jesus starts off by completely blowing our minds and then answering a bit of a vexed question amongst Christians. It’s Matthew chapter 16, verse 27. For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done.
So first of all, Jesus is predicting his return with angels in the glory of God. And that will be something utterly spectacular to witness. It will blow us away. We will be amazed, astonished, and delighted.
And then Jesus says he’s going to repay each person according to what he’s done. What will those rewards look like? I have no idea.
God truly loves us, extraordinarily loves us, and if he’s going to give us gifts, he is going to give us singularly special gifts. When God decides, when Jesus decides to repay us according to what he’s done, we know that that payment will be generous indeed.
We also shouldn’t then feel under any compulsion to suddenly start doing lots of good deeds because God doesn’t expect good deeds of us. He expects obedience of us. That’s very different. It’s the difference between living a life of works of self-righteousness versus living a life of relationship with God where we’re looking to please our Father because we love him, not because we’re looking for the reward.
So if we live that life, that should be almost effortless because God gifts us to work for him and he works through us and in us, and he gives us the power to live each day.
So we shouldn’t get too worked up about this too concerned or anxious. Absolutely not. We should instead look to Jesus and say, thank you. Thank you that you are going to reward us. We don’t deserve that any more than we deserve salvation. This is a glorious promise for us to treasure until the day we go to see him in glory.
