Hear the words of the Collect for the Sunday next before Advent:

Stir up, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the wills of Thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may by Thee be plenteously rewarded.

May the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be alway acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. We pray in the name of The Father, and of The Son, and of The Holy Ghost. Amen.

Today is the last Sunday of the Christian year as we begin a new one next week with Advent Sunday. All of that history, teaching and preaching of the past year comes to a point today with its focus on the will of man, for it will decide if all of that effort was in vain. The Collect is a prayer for God to stir up our will so that we will want to do good things and for this we will be plenteously rewarded. There are three key ideas here that must be examined or we could easily go astray. The words are ‘human will’, ‘good works’, and ‘reward.’

The human will is perhaps the most powerful thing outside of God Himself. The reason for this is that our human will can thwart the Will of God. It can actually send someone to Hell that God wants to go to Heaven.

That is correct. We can send someone to Hell that God wants to bring to Heaven. That person is of course the person who looks back at us from the mirror. ‘I have seen the enemy and it is me’ just about sums up this reality, because we can refuse to allow Christ’s sacrifice on The Cross to save us by opposing our will to His Will. We play out that struggle every day when we are tempted to do something we know is wrong, but we want to do it anyway. This temptation may come through the world by accident, or it may be placed before us by the evil one on purpose, or we could just as easily tempt ourselves just because of what we want to do.

Whichever way it happens, we begin to want to do something we know is wrong, or at least know that God doesn’t want us to do it. We may perceive God’s way to be less fun, or that it will interfere with something else we want to do, and that forms the basis for our refusal to follow His Will and do our own will.

This objection of our will is what prevents anyone from being saved by Christ’s sacrifice on The Cross. This happens when we do anything that is a sin, which is basically the human will opposing itself to the Will of God. We know exactly what we are doing and what the results will be, but we do it anyway. We certainly are strange creatures to do things against our own best interests, aren’t we.

Next we come to the question, “What are good works?” The answer to that question is that works are good when they are what God would have us do and that our reward for doing it is His pleasure and not for any worldly glory or reward.

There is no other creation in this universe that can do something bad, except man. Man is the only creature that can sin, because we are the only creature that can choose how they respond to an event. Only man can decide how they will react in any situation. We can choose between sin and salvation, and we choose between them by deciding to follow God’s Will or our own will.

It is when this decision is made in favor of God that the works that we do become godly and therefore good. It is as we follow the Will of God that we do good works. When we do good things we get a feeling that is gratifying. We know we have done the correct thing and it is pleasing to us because it is pleasing to Him. We could say that a good deed is its own reward and we would be correct.

However, God wants to give us even more. Our Lord tells us this truth with His words recorded in Luke 6:38:

Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again.

When we hear words like this some have erred in believing that if I give $10 to a church, God will give us back $1,000. I am so very sorry that it does not work that way. In that situation the intent of their hearts is focused on the reward, not the good deed. This in itself negates any act of charity, for it is no longer charity but a business transaction that is taking place. While God does not frown on business transactions per say, He certainly does not trade eternity for money or works.

The reward that we look for is alluded to in the lesson for the Epistle for today. It is a reading from the Prophet Jeremiah. The beginning of the passage invokes the coming of the Messiah. It is the righteous branch of Jesus Christ that Jeremiah is talking about here. This is the first advent of God coming into the world of man as a man that he is foretelling.

The end of this passage is another prophecy. This time it is the Second Advent that he is foretelling. This is the time when people will not look back and say, ‘God brought us out of Egypt,’ but as Jeremiah 23:8 tells us they will be saying:

The Lord liveth, which brought up and which led the seed of the house of Israel out of the north country, and from all countries whither I had driven them; and they shall dwell in their own land.

It will be at that time that the entire Kingdom of God will be known and seen as well as God Himself being known and seen.

This reward is beyond all that we can do or give. It is aptly referred to as ‘plenteous.’ But there is more indeed for us to receive. We are told this in the Gospel lesson for today from John chapter 6. Here is repeated the feeding of the five thousand with five barley loves and two small fishes.

This miracle and those like it are the pre-figuring of the celebration of The Eucharist that Christ will institute on Maundy Thursday, the night before He would be crucified and pay the price for our sins by His death.

It is in receiving the Eucharist that we receive a gift indeed, The Body and Blood of Christ, Very God and Very Man. He that is sitting at the right hand of The Father waiting for the day that He will return and fulfill the prophecy that Jeremiah made almost twenty-seven centuries ago.

These are rewards indeed for us to look forward to. They cannot be earned or bought. However, they can be secured by the free will offering of our wills to His Divine Will. Let us therefore always endeavor to mold our will to the Divine Will of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ so that our reward is sure and our ultimate destination is with Him and not somewhere else. With all of that being said. The question becomes, “Which side do we take in that battle of wills?” I pray we make the right choice.

Amen,

The Rev. Canon John Jacobs