We Are Very Well Compensated
From Turning Pro
:
There’s a well-known gunnery sergeant who, when his young Marines complain about their pay, explains that they get two salaries:
A financial salary and a psychological salary.
The Marine’s financial salary is indeed meager. But what about the psychological salary — the feeling of pride and honor, the sense of belonging to a brotherhood with a brave and noble history, and knowing that, no matter what happens, you remain a member of that fraternity as long as you live? How much, the Gunny asks, is that worth?
The same applies to those of us in ministry (which should be all of us). The servant of God gets three rewards:
- Some of us in vocational ministry get a paycheck.
- We also get the honor of joining the company of those who have gone before us and have served the Lord with all they have.
- None of this compares to what we ultimately receive from God: “Each will receive his wages according to his labor” (1 Corinthians 3:8).
John Frame writes:
I confess that I was surprised by the number of times Scripture uses rewards to motivate obedience. Like many of us, I tend toward the Kantian notion that we should simply do our duty for duty’s sake and never think about reward. but that notion is quite unbiblical. If God takes the trouble (this many times!) to urge our obedience by a promise of reward, we should embrace that promise with thanks, not despise it. That is, we should not only do good works, but we should do them for this reason. (The Doctrine of the Christian Life
)
We’re very well compensated indeed.
