To the Church in America:by The Elijah Challenge “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded” In the Scriptures we will cite here, Jesus is teaching his disciples to be ready for His Return in the last days. Many believe that we are now in the last days before the Second Coming of the Messiah. Luke 12:35 “Be dressed ready for service and keep your lamps burning, 36 like servants waiting for their master to return from a wedding banquet, so that when he comes and knocks they can immediately open the door for him. 37 It will be good for those servants whose master finds them watching when he comes. Truly I tell you, he will dress himself to serve, will have them recline at the table and will come and wait on them. 38 It will be good for those servants whose master finds them ready, even if he comes in the middle of the night or toward daybreak. 48…From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked. Believers in the West, especially in the United States, have generally been given much. We enjoy freedom to worship and to serve the Lord. Teachings relevant for believers on every important subject found in Scripture are readily available to us for spiritual growth and discipleship. The level of material prosperity and comfort we enjoy are the envy of the rest of the world. Many would like to come to the United States to pursue and enjoy the “American Dream.” The flip side to God’s material blessings in this life Yes, we in America have been given much, and we sincerely thank God for that. But there is a flip side to this. Jesus teaches us that the unprecedented blessings are actually a trust to us from God. In the legal sense, a trust is “property or interest held by one person for the benefit of another.” Therefore the earthly blessings have actually been entrusted to us for the benefit of the Lord. And Jesus warns us that when much has been entrusted to us, much more will be demanded. It would therefore be unwise to conclude that we in the West enjoy God’s blessings to such an abundant degree simply because God loves us so much. Rather we should view His blessings not so much as things to enjoy in this life, but rather as things entrusted to servants which we are use to produce good fruit for Him before His Return. We servants will each appear before the judgment seat of Christ where we will each receive our eternal reward from Him according to what we have done with what He has entrusted to us. (This reward is in addition to salvation—which is by grace through faith and not by our works.) 2 Corinthians 5:10 For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad. We can now better understand the flip side of God’s blessings in this life. The more blessing we have in this life, the more accountable we are to God in terms of producing good fruit for Him—upon which the determination of our eternal reward at the judgment seat of Christ will be based.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 20:28:00 +0000
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