We always pray for you, and we give thanks to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. For we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and your love for all of God's people, which come from your confident hope of what God has reserved for you in heaven. You have had this expectation ever since you first heard the truth of the Good News. This same Good News that came to you is going out all over the world. It is bearing fruit everywhere by changing lives, just as it changed your lives from the day you first heard and understood the truth about God's wonderful grace. Colossians 1:4-6 NLT
I love it when I read scripture and the Holy Spirit asks me a question to something that I can’t answer right away. If I have been following Jesus for 30 years, I think I should have a pretty good handle on what it means to follow after Him. The Holy Spirit has a wonderful way of humbling me without crushing me. This passage is a good case in point.
Paul is writing to the Colossians and commends them for their faith and love. Would that Paul could write a letter to us and do the same thing. But here’s the humbling part. Their faith in Christ and love for God’s people came from something. It was based on something. Paul alludes to it but never really names, at least in this part of the letter, what it is. “For we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and your love for all of God's people, which come from your confident hope of what God has reserved for you in heaven.” They where bound together by faith, love and hope. A confident hope at that. Of what? Of what God had reserved for them in heaven.
So here’s my question. What is it God has reserved for you in heaven? Do you know? How hard do you have to think about it? For me I had to pause and think. How humbling. I think that after 30 years I should be able to recount what God has reserved for me in heaven. But I had to pause and think about it. What is it God has reserved for me? Not having this answer in the forefront of my mind leads me to ask the next one. Is this confident hope of what Goad has reserved for me in heaven the reason I follow Jesus? It would seem that if I fully understand what is reserved for me in heaven, then following Jesus in my day to day life might be put into a different perspective. Challenges would take on a different meaning. Those difficult people in my life might look a little different through the lens of what is reserved for me in heaven.
And the REALLY humbling question for me is this. If I have to pause and think about what God has reserved for me in heaven, what am I REALLY basing my confident hope on? What lens am I using to looking at the stuff in my life? What REALLY motivates me to follow Jesus?
So how about it? Why are you following Jesus?
As for me, I’m going to spend the next little while answering that question.
