SPIRITUAL COMPETITION FOR GOD’S REWARDS

CUỘC TRANH TÀI THUỘC LINH

Kinh thánh: 1Cô-rinh-tô 9: 24-27

Câu gốc: 1CÔ-RINH-TÔ 9: 24 – Anh em há chẳng biết rằng trong cuộc chạy thi nơi trường đua, hết thảy đều chạy, nhưng chỉ một người được thưởng sao? Vậy, anh em hãy chạy cách nào cho được thưởng.

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SPIRITUAL COMPETITION FOR GOD’S REWARDS

Bible: 1Corinthians 9: 24-27

Main verse: 1CORINTHIANS 9: 24 – Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain.

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As we have heard about the pandemic of the corona virus that is spreading around the world, many Christians wants to hear it mentioned in sermons or during Sunday services. We know that everything happened for a reason, that God has His way to warn of the world of its sins. For us Christians, the best we can do is pray.

In the time of Paul and other Apostles, the sport competition that we call the Olympics today had been around since the 8th century B.C. When Paul used the image of an athletic in competition to illustrate his point in the letter to Christians in the city of Corinth, everyone can understand him easily.

The Holy Spirit had inspired Paul to use such image to let Christians of all ages know that there is a spiritual competition that God wants His children to undertake in order to improve themselves spiritually. That way, we can glorify God and present ourselves as the children of God to the world.

We know that the slogan of Olympic is ‘higher, faster, farther and stronger.’ In the same way, we can imagine the spiritual competition like this: each church is a team and each Christian is an spiritual athlete and we will compete against each other to be better, holier, more compassionate, and more loving toward God and others in order to win spiritual rewards and trophies from God.

1CORINTHIANS 9: 24 – Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain.

According to this verse, in the spiritual competition, we will have the rewards for first place, second and third place for churches and for individuals.

We can understand that within the Vietnamese churches, there will be teams and individuals that will get the first, second and third places in categories such as reading and studying the Bible, praying, serving, singing, attending Sunday services and witnessing to unbelievers.

If each church is a team and each Christian is an athlete, then each minister is a coach. In my case, I want my team to get the highest reward, and I want my church members to get the gold medals from God when He comes back to Earth.

That is the reason that I have pushed you harder in the past years. I wanted you to get to the levels of the heroes in the Bible, so some of you may have felt tired, disheartened and abandoned the attempt because they are too high to achieve. It’s like pushing amateur athletes to achieve the levels of professionals.

In that case, I will choose lower levels to make it more easier for some of you, so that you will be more confident. It will be like jumping over 1 or 2 feet hurdle before moving forward to higher ones. It will be like running a half-mile first before trying to run 1-mile or 2-miles.

According to 1Corinthians 9: 24, God wants us to get His rewards and He has allowed me to coach these two churches as two teams within the Vietnamese churches, so I will do my best to encourage you and equip you with whatever is necessary to get the gold medals from Him. We will maybe compete with churches from other nationalities, but not now.

My dream is my two teams will get the 1st and 2nd places, and many of you will get the gold medals from Jesus Christ, and I hope that you will share this dream too.

Please do remember that in a competition, spectators only pay attention to the athletes, not the coach. When you come up to get the medals, they will ask for your signature and take pictures with you, not me. Our spectators are the angels and the whole world, so we should try our best.

HEBREWS 12: 1 – Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us.

The Bible lets us know that if we do our best, then we will get the most blessed rewards from God:

1TIMOTHY 3: 13 – For they that have used the office of a deacon well purchase to themselves a good degree, and great boldness in the faith which is in Christ Jesus.

The rewards will be for everything that we do in the name of the Lord, both physical and spiritual.

As I have mentioned before, from now on I will not choose the levels of heroes in the Bible because they were all gold medal achievers among the Israelites. I will choose for you the levels within Vietnamese churches to make it easier for you to start with, then later on, as we become stronger spiritually, we will aim for higher goals.

The first competition that I want you to yearn for is praying. This is the most important aspect in our spiritual life and also important for the church. We should try to pray more faithful, more heartedly and more often. God has put forward the level we need to achieve which was recorded in Matthew 24: 1 and in Luke 18: 1

LUKE 18: 1 – And He spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint.

There may be someone who argues that we should pray because of love and not because of rewards, but actually, our prayers are motivated by those two reasons. God wants us to be rewarded for our consistent prayers and even king David wanted to get rewards from God

PSALM 27: 13 – I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living.

If there were some Christians saying that he or she just wanted to pray because of love, not because of any reward then that person had more faith than David. In that case, it’s so extraordinary that I don’t want to talk about it. All I want to talk about is the prayer for ordinary Christians who want to please God’s will and try the best to get His rewards for praying the way He wants.

We should look at our brothers and sisters in this church and see who is the best prayer among us, then we will try to do better than them. Please do not compare with me because I am a minister and a coach. No athlete wants to compete with a coach, but compare yourself with other spiritual athletes and try to do better.

God will have His rewards for such a person, but for me, at the end of the year I will give my own rewards of praying warriors trophies for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd places.

May God bless our church and help our church to get the gold medal in praying from Him. May God bless us and help us to receive many individual gold medals in praying on the day Jesus Christ comes back to Earth. Amen.