What brings you joy? Is it dessert right after supper or your morning coffee? Is it a television show, or a blockbuster film? Is it your significant other? All these pale in comparison to what truly should give us joy in this life.
We start out this essay saying that we are too easily amused. How many times has your parents said that? We humans are so enthralled by the most minute and petty things. Perhaps you heard a musical piece that sent chills down your spine, or found a steak that was seasoned better than all others were. This is nothing compared to the infinite joy that has been offered to us, yet we allow ourselves to become caught up in these things. The rewards from these are frivolous. There are two types of rewards in our life, natural rewards and proper rewards. If man loves a woman and his checking account increases, that is a natural award. If the man and women become married, that is a proper reward. Proper rewards are the activity itself, or the desiring of the activity. But what to Christian; what do we desire? We desire heaven, a place that we do not know much about. We are given descriptions of it, but these descriptions are due to interpretation since the authors who described heaven used images that were as close as they had to describe what they had saw. We run into a problem here, where the secular world seeks to draw our attention back to earth saying that all the happiness we need can be found here. They use rhetoric to through off believers saying that all ends in death. But we must overcome this, focusing on the promises of rewards the Scripture offers.
Lewis splits the promises within the scripture into five parts: we will be with Jesus, we will be like Jesus, we will have glory, and we will have an official position. There is one we focus on, that is we will have glory. What does this mean? One explanation is that God recognizes us. God acknowledges us as part of his kingdom.. God is all-knowing, all-powerful being, so to not be recognized by him would mean you are truly an outsider, an exile. We long for this since there is a divide between God and ourselves. Another explanation of glory is brightness, splendor, and luminosity. In this, we do not merely perceive beauty; rather we are united with it. We would be able to truly appreciate all that God has made, and what God is. In the end, we should seek after God for the proper reward. For now, we must think too much on our own glory, but lift each other up love one another, for it was commanded, love your neighbor as yourself.
This was a pleasant read, and was easier to follow along more so than the others I have summarized up to this point. The action is the proper reward, and I waited to put the ending inside of my portion of the summary. The proper reward for serving God is the acting out of love. We are commanded to love our neighbors, and in the last part, Lewis addresses this. What is love without comradeship? Love is a two way street, for what flows one way will flow another. I am not saying that every person who shows love to another person gets a “immediate return on their investment,” but it does happen. In Old Testament Literature, we have learned that to be truly happy in life, one must serve God. That service is the happiness, the proper reward. Lewis focused on the glory we received and the weight it cast upon those who bear it, but I believe that the true reward comes from serving God in the way He wants to be served. In that, it is serving others, and lifting others up as they might due to others they run across. This is something I need to instill in my life more. In doing this, I must be cautious. I should not be serving God because I want glory or a job in heaven, rather, I should be serving God because I desire to have a relationship with Him.
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