“For all of us must appear before Christ, to be judged by him. We will each receive what we deserve, according to everything we have done, good or bad, in our bodily life” (2 Corinthians 5:10 GNB).
Knowing that God considers our thoughts and motivations to be important, it may be helpful to take an inventory of the things that initiate us to act. For example…
- Do we seek to honor ourselves or do we seek to honor God in the things we say and do? As we’re told in 1 Thessalonians 2:4, “…We didn’t speak to please people, but to please God who knows our motives” (CEV).
- Are there questionable motives hiding behind a veneer of spirituality?
- Do we seek to do the right thing in a given situation or do we generally seek to do the easy thing?
- Are we acting selfishly or unselfishly?
- Do we consider the needs of others or do we routinely prioritize our own needs?
- Are we doing good things as an outgrowth of our relationship with God or are we doing those things so others will see them and praise us for them?
As we close our look at this portion 2 Corinthians chapter five, one commentator leaves us with the following observation…
“There is a verse in Hebrews that tells us that, ‘without faith it is impossible to please God’ (Heb_11:6). Faith must be present in what we do, or whatever we do is not pleasing to him. Paul understands this, therefore he wants that moment before the judgment seat of Christ to be a moment of disclosure that will not be of shame to him, of facing things that he refused to face in life, but a moment of joy. The Lord will have the joy of showing him many things that he thought were failures that were really successes, and things that he did that no one heard anything about will be brought to light and vividly displayed before others.
…So it is a time of disclosure, but it is also a time of evaluation when we learn for the first time who was right and what attitudes we should have had or should not have had. It is a helpful time of seeing the truth about ourselves. If that frightens you, I want to tell you this: There is something you can do about it. It is found in First Corinthians 11 where Paul says, ‘If we judged ourselves truly, we should not be judged'” (1Co_11:31 RSV). (1)
(1) Excerpted with permission from What’s There to Live For?, © 1979, 1995 by Ray Stedman Ministries. All rights reserved. Visit www.RayStedman.org for the complete library of Ray Stedman material. Please direct any questions to [email protected].