Waiting for Your Reward

 

“Look, I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to each person according to what they have done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.”  Revelation 22:12-13

 Time is not a constant. While seconds and minutes and hours may be measurable, they feel different at different times and in different circumstances. Disney has made an artform of having time pass quickly as you’ll have experienced if you ever waited in one of their ride queues. It’s a totally different experience from standing in line at the grocery store or sitting in gridlocked traffic. When I’m waiting in bed in the morning, half awake, for my alarm to go off, time seems to fly. When I was nine and a half months pregnant and the baby hadn’t come yet, time seemed to stand still.

 The season of Advent is, in itself, a season of waiting. We are waiting in anticipation of the celebration of Jesus’ birth as well as waiting for His impending return. In today’s verses, Jesus said He is returning soon. That was over 2,000 years ago and He hasn’t come back yet. To me, that doesn’t seem very soon, but that’s because I’m here waiting. Just like when I was pregnant the time seemed to take forever to pass, but now when I look back on my pregnancies they feel so short, I bet that when we’ve been in heaven for 10,000 years, we’ll look back at our time on earth, and it will seem like a short little blip. 2,000 years seems like a long time when you factor in that the average life expectancy in our country is 79 years. That’s more than 25 lifetimes! Perspective matters. But God is eternal, Jesus is eternal. He was there in the beginning. Today we read that He Is the Beginning. He is also the End. He doesn’t say that He was at the beginning or He remembers the beginning. The tense here is present. He IS the Beginning. He is equally present here today, at the beginning, and at the end, all at the same time. He is not constrained or limited by time.

 Jesus’ reward is what He has in store for each of us. Most of the time we think of a reward as being a good thing, but if we’ve behaved badly, the reward is not as pleasant. A life in prison is the reward for murder in some cases. The thing is, we’ve all sinned. We’ve all done bad things, things we shouldn’t have. The reward that Jesus has for us is not based on the measure of good or bad things we have done in our lives, as some might imagine, but on what we’ve done with His wonderful gift for us. If you poured your heart and soul, your time and money, your work and love into a gift for someone, and they snubbed it, not even willing to open it up and and look at it, how would you respond? Would you continue to work on more and better gifts for them? Not likely. But if they opened your gift and exclaimed in admiration over it, if they truly appreciated all that had gone into it and treasured it dearly, then would you be more inclined to work hard on another gift for them in the future?

Here's the Thing: God planned and put together for us the perfect Christmas gift for millennia. He literally put His blood, sweat and tears into it. He gave up everything for us, and gave everything to us. How we respond to that gift will determine our reward when Jesus returns. Are you looking forward to your reward?

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