Restore Rebuild Revive - Week Twelve : 13 Apr 2011

The thought of rewards-particularly the idea of being motivated to do good in order to gain rewards may trouble us, but it’s not only biblical, it pleases God. Eternal rewards are the crowning piece of our salvation by grace. Freely forgiven, God empowers us for good works, then rewards us for the good works that he has brought about in us. In of themselves our righteous acts are like filthy rags but God chooses to purify them in his own sight and honor them with reward.

 Derek Kidner, “To Hear God’s ‘Well done’ is the most innocent and most cleansing of ambitions.”

Wrap up Neh. Neh is marked by a great understanding that God remembers (not about forgetting)- marks, accounts, thinks-on what we do, why we do it, in order to reward us. Neh’s desire for God to remember, to reward was God-given to him and to us. 

C.S.Lewis, Mere Christianity, “If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this one.

Neh was effective in this world because he was convinced that he would receive a reward for refusing to be far too easily pleased by this world. God would be his judge and would reward him for the good he has done, not man.

 What is crucial to understanding that “well done” is the most innocent of motivations is to see what “good deeds” Neh counts on God to remember-what Neh has done for God’s people to glorify God’s name. First is deeds of compassion.