"Therefore, do not throw away your
confidence, which has a great reward. For you have need of endurance, so
that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised." Hebrews 10:35-36
We have
all spent time hoping or dreaming of some great thing happening to us;
especially when we feel we have suffered or been deprived in some way. That
great thing will, in our mind, make up for all we have had to suffer. When we
become famous, when we become wealthy, when we become powerful, when we become
popular, everything will finally be right and just, all the suffering and deprivation will finally make sense.
So we
daydream about those things happening. The problem is that for the vast
majority of us that moment never arrives. So we have no good emotional response
to our losses, our sacrifices, our struggles, our serious problems. No great
event is going to occur in our earthly life that will make up for all that we
went through. And so we are left with nothing but disappointment and regret.
But the Christian should be different. We know, unlike so many of our
unbelieving friends, that such a moment will occur.
We have been promised it. In
fact, God continually tells us to use that information to help us get through
the hard times of life. A great thing, a thing so great that no experience on
earth could ever compare with it is going to happen to every Christian. Every
Christian has a great, a cataclysmic, an earth shattering moment waiting for
them when their Lord and Savior will usher in a new heavens and a new earth,
and they will be raised into life eternal in a new and glorified body to live
forever with Him.
Hebrews takes us back to the words of the prophet Habakkuk (Hab. 2:3-4) who had been complaining
to God about the oppression all around him and wondered out loud how the Lord was
going to deal with it. When would God’s righteous will be done on earth? The
answer was that judgment will come, and so will the promised reward.
For
yet in a very little while, He who is coming will come, and will not delay. But
My righteous one shall live by faith; And if he shrinks back, My soul has no
pleasure in him. But we are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but of
those who have faith to the preserving of the soul. (Hebrews 10:37-38).
Let go of the daydreams, but don't throw away your confidence...the reward is just too great at the end!
