657 Sowing Righteousness - Proverbs 11:18

What is a true reward and how do we get it?

Hi, I'm Mike Henry Senior with Follower of One, thanks for joining me today on the Follower of One Podcast, we're grateful to have you back. And thank you if you share these podcasts with others, we're a listener supported podcast and ministry, and our goal is to help marketplace Christians integrate their faith into their everyday life. Thank you so much for joining us.

Today I want to read from the Old Testament, Proverbs 11:18 from the New American Standard, "the wicked earns deceptive wages, but he who sows righteousness gets a true reward." I wonder sometimes about how these comparisons are made in Proverbs. Some months. I often read through Proverbs by reading one chapter a day, based on the day of the month. I read this several weeks ago and marked that I wanted to talk about it on the podcast because it's challenging to think in today's context about what it means to sow righteousness and what a true reward really is.

" The wicked earns deceptive wages, but he who sows righteousness gets a true reward." Sowing righteousness, I believe that in our current work context, is living according to what we believe. Living according to what we understand about Jesus. Growing, our understanding, we have to continue to grow in our faith.

But , it's a difficult enough job for us to live according to what we already know. We know that we should trust God, do the right thing, and let him work out the difficulties but we get tempted to cut corners. I know that I shouldn't tell a story or that I shouldn't make something sound better than it is, but sometimes I get tempted to do that.

We need to be careful, how we live. We sow righteousness by living, according to what we understand about Jesus. We know that if we pray for our coworkers, he will use us in their lives. And so we can step forward and start praying for people. And often that begins with the here I am prayer, and then asking God to bless our coworkers.

We can soe righteousness. We have to remember when we do that, this analogy is not wasted. Sometimes it takes a long time for the righteousness that we sow to grow. Often we see that we do the right thing, only to get negative consequences. We may do the right thing and lose our job. And yet later we get a better job. Sometimes it takes a long time for this reward to actually come to us. It may not come to us, even in this lifetime, he who sows righteousness gets this true reward

we may get this when we go to be with the Lord full time in our eternal life. We get to be with him now part-time. In our temporal life, we can bring eternity to bear by sowing this righteousness. I believe we bring the kingdom of heaven with us into our workplaces and into our jobs just simply by the way we live.

And so we get some of that reward now and we get the ultimate parts of that reward in the long run. Today. I want to challenge us as marketplace Christians. Let's so righteous. Let's plan a few more seeds and let's invest a little more of our energy in living according to our beliefs, trusting that God will give us a reward when the time is right.

That reward will come, and it may not come in this life.

Thank you for being a marketplace minister. Thank you for listening to me, as I stumbled through some of this podcast today. Our challenge as believers is to live in such a way that we know our job is sewing the righteousness. It's not counting the rewards, it's not seeking the rewards. Our job is simply being who Jesus wants us to be, so that he becomes visible in the world.. Thank you for being a marketplace minister. As you're listening to this, if you think you'd like to do this a little more, why not join us as we practice. We get together in the Follower of One online community at https://community.followerofone.org.

And once you create a profile there, you can join us on the next marketplace mission trip. Thanks so much for being a marketplace minister.