As I approach my final fundraising deadline of $16,252 on December 31st, I will be writing one blog a week for the month of December. As you read, please prayerfully consider partnering with me by contributing any funds or time in spreading the word to help me meet my goal, move on to Mozambique in January, and finish out my World Race. $4,600 to go. I am confident this will be met, but I need some help. With that being said, here’s where I’m at this week…
I listened to a podcast a couple weeks ago in which the pastor who was teaching made an awesome analogy. In the movie Saving Private Ryan, Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) travels through WWII Europe with his company trying to locate and remove Private Ryan (Matt Damon). Along the way, several of his men are killed before finally reaching Private Ryan, and at the movie’s climax, as he is dying, Captain Miller pulls Ryan close and says to him, “Earn this… earn this.” The end of the movie shows an elderly Private Ryan at the grave of Captain Miller as he begins to tear up. He then proceeds to ask his wife, “Am I a good man? Have I lived a good life?”
Often times Christians live their lives with this mentality. Instead of Christ saying “It is finished” on the cross, many live as if his last words were “Earn this.” But they weren’t. You can’t earn Jesus dying on the cross for your salvation. You can’t earn God’s grace. You can’t earn God’s blessings. If you try, what you will burden yourself with an impossible task that God never asked you to try and achieve. This is an increasingly less popular belief in America, and as I have now come to learn, throughout other parts of the world.
Last month my team and I were hosted by a pastor and his family, a family each of us grew to love in different ways. They welcomed us well, and in many ways we became a part of their family. This family was and their church was really our primary ministry, but the more we attended this church, the more we noticed the “Earn this” mentality dominating. This was true not only for this congregation, but also the churches of the other pastors who came to speak at their end of the month conference.
The theme of this conference was, “the violent shall take it by force,” and the primary message of each sermon had to do with taking the blessings we want in our lives violently or by force. They made sure to say they weren’t trying to espouse physical violence, but they kept using these phrases over and over nonetheless. For example, you want a car… take it by force! You want a job… take it by force. You want a house… take it by force. You want a spouse… take it by force (yes, multiple preachers actually said that). Each said the reason these “blessings” were missing in our lives was they were locked away or stolen, and we needed to take hold of them by either increasing our faith, in that God wants to give you anything you desire, or sacrifice tangibly what you have to the church to earn something materially greater. The irony is that if someone is trying to take material blessings by force, it shows just how little faith they have in God to provide.
Everything preached was focused around “your blessings” or “the blessing God has for you,” but not actually God. As believers in Christ and His work on the cross, our focus, our worship, should be on God, not on the stuff God can give us. God indeed desires to bless us, not because we earn it or deserve it in any way, but rather because he loves us unconditionally and knows what we need far better than we think we need. Jesus speaks to this in the Parable of the Vineyard Workers in Matthew 20:
“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard.
“About nine in the morning he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. He told them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went.
“He went out again about noon and about three in the afternoon and did the same thing. About five in the afternoon he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, ‘Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?’
“‘Because no one has hired us,’ they answered.
“He said to them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard.’
“When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.’
“The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius. So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. ‘These who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’
“But he answered one of them, ‘I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius?Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’
“So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”
This is hard for us to understand because human nature makes us want to feel as if we are in control of everything in our lives, even the blessings of God. What is so dangerous about thinking we can earn blessings, or earn our salvation, is that we lose our freedom as a result. When we genuinely trust the Lord with everything in our lives, we are freed from trying to earn anything from God. This is because we realize we can’t. We can’t earn anything because He is sovereign and perfect and gives us everything we need, not everything we want. He blesses us with the desires of our heart if they are for our benefit, and withholds blessing vain desires that will harm us. When we understand this, we realize that we are blessed even if we don’t have a spouse, a car, a house, a job or any other material want. We already have the greatest blessing we could ever ask for or imagine: our salvation.
When our trust or faith in God is conditional on what He can give us, it is neither faith nor trust. The saddest part of the “earn this” mentality to me is that it chokes out the good fruit in the church, which no one is able to see as a result. Personally, I am so grateful to have been freed from this mentality; I am so thankful for grace. It has transformed my life. I have tried to earn my salvation. I have tried to earn blessings. When I inevitably failed, it left me at rock bottom, but Christ rescued me through His grace. This grace has already given me everything, and more than I could ever ask for. My prayer is that Christians who are still trying to “earn this” are freed from this self-given burden, and start to live in the freedom that comes from God’s grace and the love displayed on the cross when Jesus declared, “It is finished.”
I will leave you with Galatians 5:1 to think about, pray about, and meditate upon:
It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
