Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the Ask Pastor John podcast. You all send us some really good Bible questions. To ask good Bible questions, you have to send us perplexing texts. And you do that with great frequency. I’ve said in the past that our most asked-about Bible text in our history is Romans 9:22 (we talked about that in APJ 1720) — a text rife with questions. Well, the third most asked-about Bible text in our inbox is 2 Corinthians 5:10, the text about some form of final judgment for believers that says, “We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.” We’re reading that in our Bible reading tomorrow.

We know that rewards will be unequally distributed in heaven. That’s been well covered on the podcast, as you’ll see in the APJ book on pages 363 and 364. But Caroline has in mind another angle to this question, an angle we have not looked at, about how rewards ebb and rise, based on this text.

“Pastor John, hello,” Caroline writes us. “Based on 2 Corinthians 5:10, can we lose rewards in heaven that we previously accumulated in life? Like, let’s say I have a great year and serve the Lord joyfully. But the next year I sin grievously, like sexual sin for example. As I understand my Roman Catholic friends, those past rewards would get washed away by the later sin. Or, more subtly, I have heard elderly people in my life suggest something similar. Not for sin, but in becoming intellectually incapacitated in later age, in being unable to really live a fully fruitful life for Christ, that the works they did all their life would slowly ebb away. Would the incapacities of later years, or the sins of a future year, negate or cause to wane the rewards earned from previous years?”

My answer, and I’ll try to show that it’s biblical, is no. The good works of a true Christian will never be canceled out, not by anything. The good deeds will always have their reward that God considered fitting when we did them. That’s my thesis.

True Christians and Fitting Rewards

Now, there are a couple terms in what I just said, a couple of critical, crucial terms that I need to clarify. Because if you get them wrong, it won’t make sense. “True Christian,” I said — “true Christian.” The works of a true Christian will never be canceled out — not a fake Christian. Not a hypocritical Christian. True Christians are born again. They’re elect before the foundation of the world. They are persevering in faith to the end of their lives.

When I say, “persevering to the end in faith,” I don’t mean they have the same zeal for Jesus in every phase or season of their life. It’s not that they have the same strength of faith in every season. I’m just saying they persevere in genuine faith to the end. According to Romans 8:30, “Those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.” Nobody falls out. Everybody perseveres to the end, according to God’s promise in Romans 8:30.

That means, for example, that a person may go to church for twenty or thirty years and look like a Christian. And then that person may commit apostasy and totally reject Christ, live all the rest of their fifty years in rebellion against Christ, and perish. And according to 1 John 2:19, that person was never born of God, because people who are born of God (that is, who are truly Christian) are kept by God from turning away and never coming back. Jude 24, one of the greatest doxologies, celebrates this keeping power of God.

Now, that means that all those presumed religious and good deeds during those twenty or thirty years of hypocrisy were not viewed by God as the kind of thing he rewards — even though people saw them that way. Specifically, they were not works of faith because there was no true faith. And the only thing that gets rewarded in the Christian life is works of faith, because everything else is sin, according to Romans 14:23. God doesn’t reward sin. There’s no thought of any rewards being canceled, because that hypocrite was not storing up any rewards in the first place. So, that’s the first term — “true Christian” — that needs to be clarified in my first statement.

The other crucial term that I used was this: “the reward that God considered fitting when we did the good deeds.” He sees a good deed, he sees it exactly for what it is, and he deems it appropriate to reward. God knows all our motives. And our rewards won’t simply be owing to an outward act but to the relationship between the outward act and the motivation. God sees it all. We can’t see it, but God does. He knows exactly the quality of every single deed that a Christian does.

“Not only is our conversion to Christ a gift of totally free grace, but so are all our virtues and good deeds.”

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 4:5, “Do not pronounce judgment . . . before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive his commendation from God.” So, God knows the inward and outward quality of our deeds way better than any human being does. And his assessments of what should be rewarded are perfect. And because they are perfect, they can never change. He doesn’t make any mistakes, like, “Oops, I shouldn’t have thought that one was going to be rewarded.”

Three Reasons for Enduring Rewards

Let me give three more reasons why I think it’s a mistake to say that a true Christian can lose rewards in heaven that they would have had except for some downturn in strength of their faith or dementia in their old age. Here are my three reasons.

1. God has promised.

First, there are texts in the Bible that make promises that are unqualified concerning this. For example, Matthew 10:42: “Whoever gives one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he will by no means lose his reward.” Ephesians 6:8 says, “Whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord.” So, since those are unqualified promises, we’d better be careful lest we cancel God’s promises by some kind of theology of reward-loss.

2. God doesn’t forget.

Here’s the second reason. It is a matter of God’s faithfulness and justice not to forget what he has regarded as something to reward. Here’s what I mean. Hebrews 6:10: “God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love that you have shown for his name in serving the saints.” It seems to me that’s clearly promising, as time goes forward, that God’s not going to change his mind on this. God’s not going to forget that.

I think one of the reasons, as we grow older — I’m thinking to myself here; I think about this question a lot. One of the reasons, as we grow older, the question becomes urgent — whether we will receive rewards for the deeds we did thirty years ago, like when I was a pastor — is because we feel the reality of our present experience as our true life. We even feel it as our only life, because the life we lived thirty years ago is so distant. And almost all of its details and feelings, good and bad, are gone.

I mean, we may have ten memories from 1972. But we can’t help but feel as though, if we get any rewards, it’s just going to be for today. “I was a jerk today,” or “I did something good today,” or “I was faithful today,” or “I was red-hot for Jesus today. And yesterday I was cool.” But what happened forty years ago? Good night — that’s just so far gone in my memory.

But here’s the crucial thing. The life you lived ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years ago is as real and present before the face of God as though you were living it today. It counts with him as much in his mind, for your rewards, as what you are doing today. It’s that real. It’s that present to God. And no sin that you commit today, if you are a true Christian, changes God’s assessment of what he regarded as a good deed to be rewarded fifty years ago.

3. Good deeds are God’s gift.

Finally, third — and this may be the most important thing for people to think about. I’m thinking especially because the person who asked this question referred to her Roman Catholic friends, and this may be where the stumbling happens. One of the main reasons people think that present defects in faith and zeal and love and obedience can cancel out past virtuous acts is because they think of rewards as earned, not freely given. They think of good deeds as meritorious. So, good deeds earn merit on the positive side of the ledger of life, and bad deeds diminish merit, so that when the merits and the demerits are added up, the demerits in later life can cancel out some of the merits in early life. That’s totally a wrong way to think.

Why is it a wrong way to think? Because not only is our conversion to Christ, our new birth, our faith, our repentance, a gift of totally free grace, but so are all our virtues and good deeds.

Christians never earn anything good from God. Everything good that they do is a gift of grace from God. “What do you have that you did not receive?” Paul said. “If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?” (1 Corinthians 4:7). Listen to Paul: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.” That’s 1 Corinthians 3:6–7. By the way, just six verses later, he’s talking about rewards. So, this is a context of rewards. He hasn’t forgotten what he’s talking about. That planting that Paul did, that watering that Apollos did, those labors are going to be rewarded freely, even though he said, “We’re nothing; God is everything.” God rewards his own gifts in us.

Or here’s what he says in 1 Corinthians 15:10: “By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.” So, Paul worked. He worked works of faith. He was trusting God’s working in him. And he will be rewarded for that hard work, but it will be as graciously given as was his conversion.

All the good deeds that God approves and rewards are works of faith and the fruit of the Spirit. So, let’s get the idea of merit for these good deeds totally out of our minds. If we do, then we will be able to see more easily that the weaknesses of our present life do not diminish God’s gracious promise not to forget the good of the first sixty years.