Everyone who reaps these souls for eternal life will receive a reward. Both those who plant spiritual seeds and those who reap the spiritual harvest will celebrate together with great joy!
So, my dear brothers and sisters, please don’t interpret my failure to visit you as indifference, because many times I’ve intended to come but have not been released to do so up to now. For I long to enjoy a harvest of spiritual fruit among you, like I have experienced among the nations.
But now, as God’s loving servants, you live in joyous freedom from the power of sin. So consider the benefits you now enjoy—you are brought deeper into the experience of true holiness that ends with eternal life!
Those who are wise will shine radiantly as the sky at midday. And those who turn many to the way of righteousness will shine brightly as stars for all eternity.
Give careful attention to your spiritual life and every cherished truth you teach, for living what you preach will release salvation inside you and to all those who listen to you.
For what will be our confident hope, our exhilarating joy, or our wonderful trophy that we will boast in before our Lord Jesus at his appearing? It is you!
For anyone who has left behind their home and property, leaving family—brothers or sisters, mothers or fathers, or children—for my sake, they will be repaid a hundred times over and will inherit eternal life.
but if anyone drinks the living water I give them, they will never be thirsty again. For when you drink the water I give you, it becomes a gushing fountain of the Holy Spirit, flooding you with endless life!”
“I speak to you an eternal truth: if you embrace my message and believe in the One who sent me, you will never face condemnation. In me, you have already passed from the realm of death into eternal life!”
For those living in constant goodness and doing what pleases him, seeking an unfading glory and honor and imperishable virtue, will experience eternal life.
If it were my own idea to preach as a way to make a living, I would expect to be paid. Since it’s not my idea but God’s, who commissioned me, I am entrusted with the stewardship of the gospel whether or not I’m paid.
So then, where is my reward? It is found in continually depositing the good news into people’s hearts, without obligation, free of charge, and not insisting on my rights to be financially supported.