Of Wages and Rewards - 1

Already he who reaps is receiving wages and is gathering fruit for life eternal; so that he who sows and he who reaps may rejoice together. (John 4:36)

This is a very exciting text for me. It used to not be so compelling but now with my knowledge of the true nature of heavenly rewards and how our brains are designed by God, I now find it full of rich meaning and potential.

Something I find that grabs my attention in this verse is the word wages. Many teachers have made an emphatic note that one of the main differences between God's kingdom and Satan's is that God offers eternal life as a gift while sin pays people wages. That is definitely something I do not want to discount in the slightest. But given that context it could be somewhat confusing to come across a verse like this and begin to wonder if we understand it correctly or not.

One thing that helped to un-confuse this for me some years ago was when I realized that the gift of eternal life given us by God and the rewards promised for the faithful are completely separate and distinct things. If we ever have any notion that eternal life in any way whatsoever is part of our rewards we are immediately caught in a caustic deception of Satan. That is the basis of legalism which is a terrible trap in which many people are caught and deceived without knowing it.

On the other side of the problem, thinking that our assurance of eternal life leaves nothing to our responsibility is equally dangerous and lethal thinking. There will be no one in heaven who does not have some rewards. And it is very clear in the Bible that there really is such a thing as rewards as well as different kinds or quantities of rewards. I have written more extensively on this topic which in itself is a very exciting breakthrough for me personally. It is very helpful and maybe even necessary to view this verse in the context of that understanding.

In fact, this text for me is actually a confirmation of the some of the insights I received about the nature of rewards in God's system of government. Our ideas about rewards and punishments are so completely infected with selfishness, pride and our distorted perspective from living in a sinful world all of our lives that it is very difficult for us to grasp the true nature of heaven's reward system. But if we do not begin to see rewards from that perspective then this verse will only serve to confuse us or we will be tempted to twist the meaning from its original intent.

The use of the word wages here is very intentional I believe because it really is referring to God's reward system. Wages are something you earn; a gift is something you receive totally without any merit whatsoever. When the word wages is used then it alerts you to the fact that something must be going on in the life that will create a benefit, a reward that would not have occurred otherwise. Jesus' gift of salvation for us has absolutely nothing to do with anything we can do or achieve or earn; it is strictly a gift and a gift only. That means that the wages mentioned here is referring to something else that we receive from heaven, the rewards promised to those who cooperate with God in attracting others into accepting the free gift of life in Jesus Christ.

The word that really bends our mind in this verse is already. It is the one word intended to get the attention of both the disciples and anyone from there on who might hear about this event. Jesus wanted to make a point that would be plainly different than the assumptions we have about how and when things happen. The disciples, like us, think we understand the pattern or cycle of things in life; we think we can predict how God does things and we tend to plan too much based on our own assumptions instead of turning to Him on a continual basis to know His mind on any matter.

People all through history have gotten caught in the trap of this kind of thinking. Joshua thought he had God's ways figured out after Jericho and so failed to check with Him before launching an attack on the next city. Elijah thought He was familiar enough with God's methods to take things into his own hands and help God out when he killed the prophets of Baal. When James and John saw how a city of Samaritan's reacted to Jesus and His desire to stay overnight with them, they thought they knew how God does things and wanted to get revenge against these people using vengeful fire. All of these people and many more including most of us have assumed that we have figured out to some extent the patterns or formulas that God uses to accomplish His will. But that is not a very wise thing to assume.

Jesus is challenging that kind of assumption-based thinking in this case by declaring that when we think it is time to be sowing seeds God may actually be wanting us to perceive ripe fields instead all around us waiting to be harvested. We have a much more difficult time discerning the seasons than we think we do. God must not be put into a narrow box of our fabrication by assuming that He has to follow rules and formulas and methods that we think we have figured out about how or when He does things.

God is not nearly so much interested in our figuring out His ways as He wants for us to live in close relationship with Him. That means that if we live in more of a dependent kind of relationship we will be more keen to communicate with Him anytime we are faced with something and will learn to know His voice. Yes, we will need to be familiar with His Word to use as a check for what we think we are hearing; but if we do not become intimately familiar with the voice of God speaking to us frequently, we will find ourselves swirling around in confusion or amazement or consternation because God is doing something that we think violates what we insist is the way things are supposed to happen.

But this is only scratching the surface of this text. I want to get much deeper into it next time.

Eye Problems

Do you not say, 'Four months more, then comes the harvest'? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. (John 4:35 NRSV)

Perception. Assumptions. Experience. Factual determinations.

I am facing a major problem that is being exposed here. I know I am not alone in this, but the resolution of this problem, as far as where I am, must first begin to happen within myself in cooperation with God's convicting Spirit.

Jesus' disciples had a serious perception problem. They, just like me and so many around me, were in the habit of interpreting the circumstances and information of their lives from the traditional way of viewing things, the traditional values and priorities, the familiar and the accepted. Because of these severe limitations they found themselves incapable of perceiving very significant things taking place right in front of them. They were unaware of vital elements of reality like food and water and timing of harvest and other things that come up in this story.

Jesus was clearly living in relation to a very different way of seeing things. When He came into contact with people He did not see them the way the disciples perceived them. But that is not acceptable. It was what was happening, but it was still not acceptable. Jesus was mentoring them, was demonstrating radically new ways of seeing reality that He wanted them to live in and relate from. The disciples took a long time to begin catching on to how Jesus thought and felt and viewed the world around Him. In fact, it was not until Pentecost that they began to finally comprehend many of the things that Jesus was plainly presenting to them from very early on in His ministry.

But I really don't think it is completely necessary for everyone to take that long to learn how to view the world through heaven's eyes. Many of us take much longer than the disciples, but it seems reasonable that some of us ought to be able to learn from the mistakes of others and be open-minded enough to come up to speed a little quicker. If not, then what is the use of recording all of these stories in the first place? And it seems that these Samaritan's were waking up quicker than the disciples.

In this verse I see Jesus openly challenging common assumptions. Yes, He chose to do it using an analogy, but analogies are used for a very significant purpose and can be quite effective in helping us understand important spiritual dimensions if we are willing. In very literal terms, Jesus was not trying to say that a literal harvest of wheat or barley was actually already ripe in some field nearby and the disciples had failed to notice it. No one reads this and comes to that conclusion.

But is the real point as clear as we assume that Jesus was trying to make? Of course it is easy to point critical fingers at the disciples and wonder at how dense they were about what was really taking place. It is also very easy to condemn the actions and attitudes of the Children of Israel wandering around in the desert for 40 years with Moses. But it is a very different thing to take what seems so obvious in all of these stories and admit that we may have the exact same problems and blind spots. But if I do not allow the Spirit to convict me fully of my own tendency to blind spots that seem so evident in others, then my blindness remains in place and I am blissfully ignorant of my own ignorance and faults.

Jesus in this verse is emphatically insisting that it is not safe to rest on our assumptions or our familiar formulas for figuring out what God may be doing. While God has set up the seasons and cycles of life that are so familiar to us, God is not bound to work within those restraints like we too often assume. Just as surly as Jesus did not have to plant seeds, wait for months for grain to mature and then grind grain into flour to make bread to feed thousands of people on a hillside, neither is He restricted by the methods and formulas we have figured out from our own past experiences about how God goes about bringing more children into His family.

So long as we cling to our ways of seeing other people and our methods of evangelism and our traditions of how to do church properly, we will remain just as clueless as these disciples as to what is really going on all around us. I am saddened and frustrated as well at the intransigence of so many so-called believers who refuse to believe that God can do what He claims He can do in human hearts. We are so deeply infected with unbelief and prejudices from the culture around us and traditions that we cling to as if they were commands of God that we cannot see through all the clutter of religion to perceive the real harvest that is so ripe all around us that it is falling off the stalks.

One aspect of this problem comes to mind. What is the first reaction you get from most people, Christian or non-Christian alike, whenever you start talking about Muslims? If I am not completely off the wall, I suspect and have observed many times that the first reaction is one of suspicion, mistrust, fear and deeply ingrained prejudice that is intensified by the slanted and constant propaganda of American media and government. It is popular to forward slanderous and insinuating emails to each other incriminating anything to do with Islam or Muslims. It is simply assumed that if a person even looks a little like a Middle-eastern person that they must be under suspicion and watched carefully.

Our whole attitude toward Muslims is commonly that of fear and underlying hatred that we help to pass along and reinforce in various ways. We either actively promote such messages in our discussions and writings or at best we fail to stand up and protest against the unfairness of such profiling activities. But ironically in a day when it is no longer in style and is even legal to promote prejudices against blacks or other ethnic groups, it is now becoming wildly popular to fan hatred and suspicion against Muslims or gays or other such groups that we decide are a threat to the world or to morality.

But this attitude is exactly the opposite of that which Jesus displayed when He came to this earth to reveal how God feels about us. Jesus never once exhibited a shred of prejudice against anyone. And that lack of conformity to the popular prejudices of His time earned Him the ire and fire of those who promoted these prejudices in the name of national protection and religious purity. Things really have not changed much at all, have they?

We like to glibly quote texts about God's equality and complete freedom from discrimination, but at the same time we are unwilling to allow Him to convict us of the many words and practices that seem so comfortable for us to use when it comes to people we don't particularly like or that we view as a threat to our lifestyle or preferences. We justify many of our prejudices with proof texts or popular one-liners that we believe support our views, but God sees things very differently than we see them.

God refuses to evaluate any person based on the labels that we have artificially created and force people to live under. We say that we believe in freedom and equality, but our actions and attitudes and treatment of others betray our hypocrisy and lies. We are unwilling most of the time to admit that our prejudices are just sinful and are pockets in our lives that we refuse to surrender to the control of God's Spirit within us. We justify ourselves by using patriotism and religious fervor which only further confuses the issue. But in heaven's eyes we are refusing to love those whom God has created in His image and whom He sees many times as more honest in heart than we may be.

I suspect that many of us will never give up our prejudices. We are going to cling to them like the false gods that they are in our lives and ultimately die with them in the end. But some of us are going to allow Jesus to expose our pride and selfishness and prejudices for what they are and allow Him to cleanse us from all of this unrighteousness. If we allow God to do this – and it needs to be done very soon – then we are going to be shocked at what our opened eyes will be able to see and what our opened hearts will be able to experience.

But when that begins to happen another intense reaction is also going to take place among those who refuse to surrender to the convicting Spirit of God. These people are going to feel threatened by the love and openness and acceptance that will be seen among those who have put away their differences and have come together in love. All those who resist the true working of God among everyone who responds to that love are going to be filled with intense resentment and hatred of Jesus' followers and are going to accuse them of all sorts of things that are false and will to label them as terrorists, extremists and dangerous people that need to be put away or exterminated. Just read the book of Acts.

This is how the controversy between Jesus and Satan is going to come to a climax. It is not a battle over doctrines, although that will be part of the external arguments; it is going to revolve around the credibility of the authenticity of the spiritual connection with God held by those who dare to think differently than the popular assumptions and prejudices of society around them, no matter what country or culture they may find themselves in.

I foresee a time coming very soon when God's true children, those who are listening to the voice of the true Spirit, are going to quickly gravitate toward each other as the Spirit leads them to link hearts with each other. These true followers are going to be very different than what most people expect them to look like. There are going to be millions of Muslims among them, millions of Jews and millions of Christians as well as people from all other religions and non-religions alike. Jesus said very plainly that there were many sheep that were not yet in His fold but they would hear His voice and would follow Him.

The sad thing is that the majority of people who assume that they are Christian – which by definition means a follower of Christ – are not really listening to the voice of Jesus at all. They are following leaders that claim to know God's will and that lead them in ways that seem right, that feels right and that is based on Biblical passages. But they have not taken the time to learn how to study for themselves and have not invested the time and effort and emotional vulnerability to listen to the voice of the Spirit sent by Jesus. The spirit that they are listening to sounds so religious and convincing that they assume it is God's Spirit but they have failed to discern between the true and the counterfeit.

This can happen in any church, in any denomination, in any group of people anywhere. Jesus said that the wheat and the tares are going to grow together until the harvest. Then the differences will be much easier to see when the full maturity of their choices becomes plain to all who can see with heaven's eyes. The fruit that is matured for harvest is the attitudes and the spirit of each person and is determined by the character that has been developed through the many choices they have made day by day.

Jesus says that harvest is ripe and ready. We look around and can't see anything but opposition and enemies. If we can't see what Jesus sees, then it is time to go and have some serious eye work done with an Expert who knows how to heal the eyes of the blind and repair the hearts of the hurting.

Learning to See

"Do you not say, 'There are yet four months, and then comes the harvest'? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look on the fields, that they are white for harvest." (John 4:35)

This verse contains a number of things that caused me to want to research them more closely. I wanted to know the time of year mentioned here relative to the harvest Jesus spoke about and I also sense deep significance in the instructions of Jesus to lift up the eyes and look on the fields.

With a little checking on the internet I found that the wheat harvest generally occurs during the month of May and the barley harvest about a month before that. So depending on which one of these He was thinking of here it would likely mean that this event occurred somewhere around January or February. Given the position of Israel in the Northern hemisphere that would also imply that it is highly unlikely that it was very hot as we have often assumed even though this story took place in the middle of the day. It might have been warm but not blazing hot like it could have been in the summertime.

The more important things that I am seeing in this text are along the line of the vision problems that I share with the disciples in this story. Already it has been made clear that they were very slow of heart to perceive the reality of the kind of food that was most important to Jesus. Now Jesus has to try to get them to realize that they also have eye problems as well. Their spiritual eyes do not yet seem to be connected to their brain and their heart; they are far too used to only perceiving life using the physical senses and interpreting everything through earthly logic instead of living relative to the spirit realm.

But the whole purpose of being a disciple of Jesus is to live in a training process where one learns from a mentor how to live and perceive and relate in ways that are not seemingly natural to other people. The word disciple itself is closely associated with the word discipline. Unfortunately the word discipline has too often been mistaken for punishment because of misuse of the word in many homes, so it creates a negative connotation in the minds of many people. But true discipline in its original form is really the teaching and training of a person's mind and heart to develop habits of self-control and good interpersonal relationship skills. And part of that training is to raise a person's awareness of how to properly engage and use their own spirit in connection with the spirits of others around them as well as with God's Spirit.

When we use the term spiritual, it is unfortunate that this word carries with it so much false baggage in our minds. Many people think of things that are spiritual as having to do with the external exercises or doctrines of religion. Spiritual and religious are often assumed to mean the very same thing, but in my own mind the differences between these two terms is growing farther and farther apart. To me, religion is much more descriptive of the counterfeit of true spirituality; religion involves primarily the external trappings and routines and enforcements and rules created by men and inspired by the deceiver to keep the mind and heart distracted from having a vital connection spiritually with the heart of our Creator and Redeemer and Father.

Jesus came to this earth to unmask these deceptions about God, to expose the emptiness of religion and to reinvigorate true spirituality to humanity so that we could begin to see. If we choose to see properly we can then begin to cooperate with heaven in restoring the unity that was lost when sin blinded our sight. We have been so damaged by the assumptions and effects of sin in our thinking that we often do not even appreciate the immense importance of using spiritual aspects of our makeup that parallel the physical organs of our body. But these spiritual organs are far more important, albeit much under-utilized, than the physical organs that we value so much.

So Jesus patiently works with His disciples through situation after situation to begin to raise their awareness of other capacities within them that they may have been oblivious to up to this point in their life. He is introducing them to the reality that there is food that is far more important to their welfare than the food they are used to thinking about. Now in this verse He is telling them – and us – that there are eyes available for our use that we may never have been aware of before but that are far more important to look with than the physical eyes that we are used to thinking about.

The act of looking is much more than simply staring through the eyes to see what may be in front of them. When I looked up these words in the Greek I found that Jesus was saying to look intently, to perceive, to closely examine something. It implies that one is failing to engage the mind or heart sufficiently to become aware of what is transpiring right in front of you. It is a wake-up call to shift gears in our head and to look at something very differently than we are used to doing. It is learning to use our heart and to see things from heaven's perspective instead of our perspective.

I also wonder about the significance of the fact that Jesus used two expressions here. First we are supposed to lift up our eyes and then we are to engage our mind much more carefully to analyze and process properly what is coming in through those eyes.

If I am supposed to lift up my eyes in order to perceive something, then by implication my eyes must be looking down to start with. What does this really mean? What do I need to become aware of that is preventing me from being able to see what Jesus seems to see so easily? Why is it that I feel nearly as blind and confused as these disciples at times when Jesus says there are things in plain sight that I feel confused about? What is it that is keeping my spiritual eyes distracted that is lower than what God wants me to focus on? The direction that my eyes need to travel – up – implies that presently they are used to looking too low. Maybe if I could get a better sense of orientation then I might better understand which direction is up according to heaven's way of viewing things.

Jesus told His disciples to lift up their eyes before they could see what He was feeding on, what He was so thrilled about, what was bringing Him so much satisfaction and joy and what was really happening. And while the disciples were mulling that over, possibly staring at the ground or each other and wondering just how to process these words, the text says that people were pouring out of the town on their way to encounter a man like no one had ever seen before. While they were standing around grasping for clues as to what Jesus was talking about, off on the horizon the literal picture was taking shape that Jesus was trying to draw their attention to.

Here were grown men who had been tagging around with Jesus for some time now already, standing in a state of confusion and largely oblivious to the stupendous reality of who Jesus really was while a whole city full of people were energized with excitement to meet a man who could read hearts and provide something that they were all craving deep in their souls.

It is sad that it often seems that those who have the most difficult time perceiving and appreciating the incredible power of Jesus to energize and bring life to the soul are those who appear to be closest to Him externally. People who have been brought up from infancy in a religious, pious environment, who have been trained all their lives in schools to amass many facts about God and religion, who have memorized Scriptures for years and can produce answers to nearly any question put to them – it is the people who have the longest history and background in religion that often have the hardest time opening their hearts to embrace what Jesus longs to give them the most.

I am one of those people.

Given that, one of the most exciting parts about this story is the fact that Jesus never rebuked His disciples in this story for their inability to use their eyes very well but He kept mentoring them patiently, loving them unconditionally and living before them the kind of prioritized life that would show them how to live a life that measures with the life of God. According to this story it may appear that the Samaritans in some respects were able to enter into a fuller spiritual response far more easily and quickly than were the Jewish disciples of Jesus. But Jesus kept His disciples close to Him anyway and in the end they finally began to get it. And John especially, the one who wrote this story himself, was one who seemed to finally begin to grasp the real intents and desires of Jesus for him even more than most of the others, which is exactly why he included the stories and teachings that he chose to compile this gospel.

Father, I confess that I am very inept at using my spiritual eyes, and even when I think I do I may not do very well at appreciating what they are seeing. Teach me too, to lift up my eyes from the low level things that preoccupy my imagination and attention. Teach me to discern between what should be beneath my notice and what is truly important to dwell on. And when I finally begin to actually see what You want me to look at, help me to know how to value and appreciate and appropriate what I am seeing, to perceive with my heart and not just my intellect. Train me and mentor me as You did with John who finally begin to deeply know Your love for him and then reflected it so well in his letters and relationships. I want to know Your love and Your presence in my own life personally and intensely. I want Your presence in me to attract others to want to know You because of how they see Your love transforming my life. Use me to glorify and amplify Your reputation.