God Rewards Our Faithfulness

For God is not unjust so as to forget your work and the love which you have shown toward His name, in having ministered and in still ministering to the saints.
–Hebrews 6:10

Each of us has a unique purpose in life, and we all are to do something to further God’s kingdom. I want to share a third principle from Nehemiah 11: God rewards us according to our faithfulness to the task, not the size of the task. I think this passage indicates that. It is full of names that are unrecognizable and unpronounceable to most of us, but God said, “Here are the people who deserve to be rewarded.”

Maybe you are ministering in obscurity. You are doing things nobody else knows you are doing to further the kingdom of God. Others may not know about you, but God sees what you are doing, and one day He is going to reward you. The writer of Hebrews said in Hebrews 6:10, “For God is not unjust so as to forget your work and the love which you have shown toward His name, in having ministered and in still ministering to the saints.” It is not the size of the task we have, it is not whether we minister in the limelight or behind the scenes–it is our faithfulness to the task that God rewards.

In 1927, Gutzon Borglum and his men began the massive job of sculpting the faces of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Thomas Jefferson into the 5,725-foot Mount Rushmore. Over the years that would follow, Borglum and his men would use jackhammers and dynamite to remove 450,000 tons of granite rock to accomplish their masterpiece. But every day as the men went up that mountain with their jackhammers, they were not thinking about the size of the task they were trying to accomplish. Many years later, Nick Clifford, the youngest man hired to work on Mount Rushmore, said, “At the time, of course, it was just a job. You went up there, went to work, did your job and didn’t think much about it. You might have thought, ‘Would it ever be completed one day?’ But, the more you worked, the more familiar you became with your job, the more important the project became to each of us. . . . I feel like Mount Rushmore was the greatest thing with which I was ever involved.”

That is true about our work for God. It really does not matter the size of the task or the size of the ministry we have–we are all working toward a greater purpose. Our job is to pick up the jackhammer and go to work every day so that one day we can hear the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

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Today’s devotion is excerpted from “Declaration Of Dependence” by Dr. Robert Jeffress, 2010.

Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Mount Rushmore National Memorial,” by Kenneth Pletcher, March 20, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Mount-Rushmore-National-Memorial; Tom Griffith, “Last Living Rushmore Worker Turns 95,” Rapid City Journal, July 5, 2016, https://rapidcityjournal.com/news/local/last-living-rushmore-worker-turns-95/article_da7d4ebf-4d15-58a4-80fc-d2a9c8e6a2af.html.

Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.lockman.org