Faith Baptist Church
4258 Botetourt Road
Fincastle, Virginia 24090
(540) 473-2325
Hebrews 4:12
One might ask, “Why is the pastor spending so much time on the believer’s preparation for the judgment seat of Christ?”
This is a good question, especially in a day and age when people want instant answers and immediate results. Today it seems that we do not have time for the details; we just want the results. We want to know things without understanding them. Trust me, when it comes to heaven and our eternal rewards we had better have an understanding now.
Let me explain it this way. None of us wants to walk away from the Bema Seat of Christ, leaving rewards we could have had left at the throne. But we have to earn those rewards now. We cannot go to heaven with a credit card in hand and make monthly payments on our heavenly rewards. The Lord is not going to give them to us, and then say, “Go out and earn them.” We must make our lay away payments in the form of faithfulness now, by the power and influence of the Holy Spirit and the word of the Lord, because we will only have that divine capital to spend on that day. Everything we pick up at the judgment seat of Christ as an eternal reward has to be earned before we get there. We are not paying for our salvation; Jesus Christ has already paid this in full. However, the Bible is very clear that eternal rewards must be worked for, and that they also can be won or lost, I Cor.3:11-15, Heb.13:17.
When we stand before our Lord we will be standing before The One who knows our every thought and our every motive.
Jer.17:10 “I the Lord, search the heart, I test the conscience, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.”
Jer.12:1-3 read... Many believers speak easily of God, and perhaps even very favorable of God, but their lives tell a different tale; God is far from their hearts.
Rev.2:23
The Lord knows our mental attitude toward him at all times. He knows every thought including the invalid thoughts we have for declining to learn his word. The Lord knows when we are confused so he makes his word available to us to clear up our confusion, but the question is did we seek out his word when we were confused in life or did we seek out our own answers. The Lord is full of compassion, and he is full of mercy and pity upon those who seek to please him, but the Lord is full of wrath upon those who turn from him to the world.
When the child of God rebels to God’s rightful authority to direct their life, God does not wrap his loving arms around them and say, “That’s O.K., it’ll be all right; you go ahead and find your own way.”
Heb.12:5-6 tells us the Lord turns up the heat of divine discipline and scourges his child. The word scourge means to whip. The Father whips the arrogance out of rebellious believers first through their own miserable conscience, and then through his divine merciful chastening, Ps.38 and Ps.51. You see, we want God to show us his love and his favor regardless of how we are living.
We adore God only if are getting what we want, and only if we can live according to our own terms; which too often is in defiance to his divine will.
Saints I am afraid that for some time the body of Christ has developed an unbalanced and biased approach in its understanding of the person of God. God it seems has become our clay, and we have sought to mold him into the image of God we want, not the kind of God found in scriptures. We like to corner God with the scriptures and we like and hold him to those selected scriptures. We have selected the portions of scripture that define God as we would like him to be, and we have purposely left out portions of the Bible that we personally don’t like about God, such as his severe justice; his fierceness, his vengeance, his wrath, his intolerance for sin and disobedience, his judgments, and for some his right to always be right.
There has never been, nor there ever true repentance unto salvation in Jesus Christ, nor a true revival in churches in our community, and across America until believers get a good hold on the holiness and justice of God. Until saints gain a respectful fear of God there will continue to be an exodus from Bible expository churches where the word of God is preached from cover to cover.
Believers will continue to leave Bible teaching churches for entertaining churches and feel good churches or no church at all. They are seeking to identity with a God that is being created purely out of their own imagination; their emotions and selected scriptures. When you leave the whole counsel of the word of God to gain an understanding of God, Satan enters the picture and gives to you a substitute god; a god that winks at sin and rewards selfishness; a god that is entertaining rather than edifying; a god that would have you to be at ease in Zion, rather than preparing to fight a merciless unrelenting cosmic enemy.
We will be standing in front of the One person who has seen it all and has provided everything we needed to overcome every adversity in life, even the adversities that could make a good argument for us failing his grace. Maybe for the first time in our lives we will be objective enough to say, “No excuse Lord, I take full responsibility for the person I was and for all of the decisions I made as a believer.”
The Lord will lay bare our souls like dough in his hands. He will examine every motive and every nuance of our inner most being. He will expose the areas where we held on to our secret sins, the area where we used I Jn.1:9 over and over in our lives, and he will expose the areas where we let him conform us; where we bowed our will to his and he will wring out all the gold he can from our lives, and the quality and quantity of gold he wrings out of our lives will determine the rewards he is just in giving us on that day. We must not fool ourselves into thinking that if we do a lot of works in the Lord’s name that we will automatically get a bigger portion of rewards. If our hearts were not pure, because we had unconfessed sin in our lives, then neither were our works, no matter how magnanimous they appeared to us and others. Again let me repeat what you have heard here for many years; that God is more concerned with what you are in essence, than any thing that you can do for him.
If we are ignorant of the plan of God as revealed in the Bible, no matter how sincere we are, our ignorance will not be an acceptable excuse; it will be the problem.
At the Bema Seat of Christ our privacy, which we have today, which includes our right to reject Bible doctrine; to reject the purpose of the local church; to reject the Lord’s correction; this privacy will be over.
But also on the flip side of this evaluation of our lives, the Lord will see those who put forth much effort to succeed in his eyes. He will know those victories you let him win in your thoughts and your actions. You were responsible in...“Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.” II Cor.10:5. Each time we lasso in loose thoughts that are alien to the word of God, and we subject those thoughts to obedience to Jesus Christ then He is glorified because you chose to stay under the authority of the word of God. Folks, that kind of obedience will not go unmentioned and unrewarded at the Bema Seat of Christ.
He will know how much glory you could have earned for him if others would have received your gospel witness or your biblical counsel, II Cor.2:14-16. He can extrapolate blessings to you that you would have otherwise earned if positive saints would have shown up for your Bible class. He will know how many times you held your peace when you otherwise could have been very critical. He will know how often you prayed for others to be blessed. He will know just how much you and I loved him in time.