"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. So when you
give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the
synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they
have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not
let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving
may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward
you”
Matthew 6:1-4 (NIV)
Matthew 6:1-4 (NIV)
Why
do you give? Why do you give
financially to your church? Why do
you give to the needy?
In
his “discourse on the hill” Jesus asks us to examine our motives.
Jesus knows us and our temptation to look good to others.
Yet, wonderfully, He tells us that generous giving reaps a tremendous
reward that has nothing to do with looking good to others.
It’s just that each of us needs to learn where the rewards
lie, which actually both satisfy and last.
Take a moment to read one of the most quoted passages ever from C.S.
Lewis. It is from The Weight of
Glory.
“Indeed,
if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of
the 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 around 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. . . .
“We
must not be troubled by unbelievers when they say that this promise of
(heavenly) reward makes the Christian life a mercenary affair.
There are different kinds of rewards.
There is the reward that has no natural connection with the things you do
to earn it and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those
things. Money is not the natural
reward of love; that is why we call a man mercenary if he marries a woman for
the sake of her money. But marriage
is the proper reward for a real lover, and he is not mercenary for desiring
it”. . . . The proper rewards are
not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the
activity itself in consummation . . . . . An enjoyment of Greek poetry is
certainly a proper . . . . reward for learning Greek; but only those who have
reached the stage of enjoying Greek poetry can tell from their own experience
that this is so.
.
. . . enjoyment creeps in upon the mere
drudgery, and nobody could point to a day or an hour when the one ceased and the
other began. But it is just in so far as he approaches the reward that he
becomes able to desire it for its own sake; indeed, the power of so desiring it
is itself a preliminary reward . . . .
Now,
if we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in
us”
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