How Jesus’s People Find Reward—Matthew 6:1-18

In this passage, Jesus teaches us how to get rewarded for our righteousness.

Does that sound rather mercenary? Would it be better to do what is right without any thought of reward? I think of my two-year-old, who is learning to dress herself. When she puts on her clothes by herself, she comes to us, and she wants us to throw our hands in the air and say, "I'm so surprised!" and give her a big hug. Would it be better for her to say, "No need for a hug. I am diligent simply for diligence's sake"? Hardly. I'm glad she wants us to be pleased with her. And it's equally proper that we should want God to be pleased with us.

Or does the idea of getting rewarded for our righteousness sound too optimistic, too arrogant? It could be, if we think we can pay for our sins and then, what's more, put God in our debt. But that's not what Jesus is saying. He's the one who pays for our sins and brings us into a right relationship with God. He makes us God's children. And God has a right to reward his children, not because he owes us, but because he loves us.

The overarching truth here is that Jesus Christ gets his people to their reward. He does this by his teaching, and by his life. We'll start with his teaching, which is the focus of this passage.

By His Teaching

He begins with his teaching on giving. Give in secret, and God will reward you. Give publicly, and the reward you get is the one you are looking for: the admiration of other people, which, you can tell, Jesus counts as pretty cheap.

The same applies to prayer. Pray in public, in order to be seen, and all you get is the impression you make. You may be praying to God, but you aren't praying for God. But go in your closet to pray -- or wherever you won't be noticed -- and you can be sure you are praying not just to God but for God, and God will reward you.

Also, don't pray like the Gentiles prayed in Jesus' day, babbling on and on. The point is that you can't manipulate God by repeating yourself, and you don't need to inform God by going into exhaustive detail. The point is not that you shouldn't pray long prayers, pray persistently, or pour out your heart: Scripture commends all these things, if done sincerely.

Jesus gives an example: what we call the "Lord's Prayer." Whole books have been written on the Lord's prayer. To sum it up: Pray for God's glory, and pray for everything you need. And don't turn around and refuse forgiveness to others, which is a quick way to prove yourself a traitor in God's kingdom.

The last point of Jesus' teaching here is on fasting. I used to wonder why my Christian mentors didn't fast, because they never talked about fasting. Then it occurred to me that maybe they do fast, and they just do it the way Jesus told us to. The New Testament never tells us to fast, but it clearly assumes that fasting has an important purpose. What Jesus does tell us is that when you do fast -- "when," not "if" -- do it for God, not to show off to others.

By His Life

All this teaching wouldn't be enough to get us rewarded, if Jesus turned around and left us to get ourselves out of the mess of our sin and into a relationship of peace with God. But he didn't do that. Jesus gets us rewarded, not just by his teaching, but also by his life.

By his obedience to God and his death on the cross, he paid for all our sins and washed us clean. By his resurrection, he conquered the devil and claimed the throne of heaven. He himself got his reward, and now he is in the position of ultimate authority to lead us to our reward.

From heaven, he sent his Holy Spirit to live in his people. And the Spirit gives us a heart of true love for God. Before we had the Spirit of Christ, we were hypocrites, and no amount of instruction would have made us anything else. Even if we had given in secret, prayed in secret, and fasted in secret, we would have found a way to turn it into sin -- by a lonely, self-righteous, sneering pride, for example. But Jesus changes all that. He makes us into true children who love to do what pleases our Father, because our Father's pleasure is all the reward we need.

Pastor Nathaniel Jeffries