September 23, 2014
Lost Rewards
Recently I attended a church
that was in the midst of a pledge drive and the preacher made an impassioned
plea for the audience to put their faith in action with their giving. However,
I think he went a little too far when he told the congregation the weekly dollar
amount that he and his wife had pledged to give. It became even more awkward when
he went on to say that he didn’t expect anyone else to match his contribution. Jesus
said, “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” (Matt 6:1
NIV).
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2 comments:
Gail;
-----“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink…Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? …Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin…But if God so clothes the grass of the field…will He not much more clothe you…But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well…Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.” (Mat 6:25-33) At least that’s what I’ve been taught.
-----I’ve troubled my affairs and perplexed my mind most of my life about how I am going to survive the upcoming years. And every year I keep a close eye on how much work I have logged in to do, and whether what I’ll earn from it will get me through the remainder of the year. But I never wonder these things out loud, because I know everybody, especially the preachers and such, will point me to that Matthew 6 thing and then do no more than that to relieve my fretting. It’s like maybe they don’t know how it works either.
-----Or if it works. I honestly think if they knew that it works they would not go around asking people how much they were planning to give the remainder of the year. Now, I’m not meaning to badly criticize these people, and please don’t take this that way. But it seems to me that if we are to let the present day’s trouble be sufficient for today, we are not going to be spending today trying to know what we will have two, four, six months or a year from now. I know it is useful knowledge to have, but maybe there is other knowledge even more important we would have if we spent more time understanding that we will have rather than trying to figure out how much. I've never gone around to my clients asking them if they plan on being my clients past the present job. Yet preachers and church leaders are asking me that same thing every year. And I begin to wonder who the faithless really are.
-----Yah. That last comment was over the top. Sorry. The Lord’s church leaders are not faithless overall. But they don’t have this Matthew 6 thing tied down in their minds very tight, or they would have it applied to their little church budgets, too. They have it tied down tight enough to apply to their fretting parishioners, but the fact that the church must make a budget loosens the knot for them to fret some, too.
-----I am sure a lot of people find their stated pledges help them budget at home, muster discipline, and give what they probably would not have otherwise given by the end of the year. My own observations about life say that nothing of this temporal life is totally bad or totally good, but everything is a mix of both. So there is some good mindset made in the Lord’s people by this faith promise stuff. But I wonder what better, more sound mindsets might have developed if church leaders would historically have instead taught the mental philosophies and emotional attitudes and mutual encouragements of sincere generosity. I do know one thing though, doing this is a lot more demanding of spiritual sincerity from the Word than it is to just do a few good faith promise rallies. And we all know human nature takes the path of least resistance, or maybe the slightly harder one if hotly inspired enough by the Holy Spirit.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
-----Seek the kingdom of heaven first and all these things will be added unto you. How much of this should we really understand? I think it is enough for us to just understand the Lord does what He says, and this is what He said. Being able to just slip it into our pockets and use it makes us stronger than it makes us wordy.
-----But I am not very strong. That’s probably why I am so wordy. I've always tried to do what I thought was seeking the kingdom of heaven, not so all this stuff would be added unto me, but because the seeking must be the point, not the getting needs. That forces decisions. The first being what I want enough to subjugate the shape of all my life to its getting, and what I will allow myself to miss to have it. This simple decision turns one onto the ever asked question: what is the kingdom of heaven? Is it the church? Is it something in my heart? Paul says it is righteousness, peace, and joy.
-----Think about righteousness. Acting in accord with God’s laws and precepts and principles and ways. Righteousness is just simply thinking, doing, and being right. And don’t get caught up in the “who’s to say what’s right” obfuscation. Right is right. Right is good. So seek to do what is right and what is good so far as you know what is right and good. Then further, seek to know more about right and good so you can do even more right and good. And we have a clue for such searching: peace.
-----If everything that exists did right and good by everything else which also exists, there would be peace. In fact, this concept is involved in the nature of God. Right is always the thing which produces peace. Now, the world says the winner makes peace. But not usually. “The winner” presumes a battle. Man battles for “I want” cloaked as “what’s right and good”. So the victor will have what he wants and the loser gets silent squat called “good“ by the winner. That’s not peace. It’s destruction. Peace is a construction. Peace is the winner taking proper count of what is good for both himself and the loser, and using their gained power to make it so (for peace makes both the winners and losers to be winners.) Peace is not each doing for himself what he desires, it is each doing what the situation needs for good to fall upon all parties effected by that particular doing. And where there is peace there is joy. This is not like joy is merely the outcome of righteousness. It is a strength unto doing right. For when joy is had it is not sought. When joy is not sought, strength is not spent upon that quest. Therefore strength is focused upon the quest for doing right, that is, seeking His kingdom. Joy even pushes that direction, for the intellectual part of joy is constructed of what is known about good and right. The emotional part is attachment to that. So you can see which way joy will drive.
-----“A man’s mind plans his way, but the LORD directs his steps.” (Prov 16:9). It is when we turn loose of visualizing exactly the way things must be in the future for upcoming conditions to be considered joyful that we are better able to see the shape of what is right to do now. It is when we willingly do what is right now while fully knowing it will reshape what we had desired for the future that truly indicates how sincerely we seek His kingdom. And the less we define the details of what we desire for tomorrow, the faster we are able to carefully move into the joy and peace of doing right. The benefits of our doing right going out also to everyone and everything involved in our situations will be potent seeds, sprouting and quickly growing into opportunities for right doing in turn to supply the things we will need when we need them (even unto death, when it’s needed.) I feel secure thinking of God as righteousness - the matrix of right and good for us to live well nourished within.
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