People do good things for three reasons. Some do good to avoid punishment. Others do good to earn rewards. The best reason to do good is because we love God. Doing good to get a response from God is contractual. Love is not a contract. When we are judged by God on Judgment Day, He wants to see our hearts so filled with love that we do good, not hoping God sees us, but simply because we love.
Transcript:
There are three reasons that people do good things. The first reason people do good things is to avoid getting in trouble with God.
The second reason people do good things is to be rewarded by God.
But there’s a third reason, and I will suggest to you the best reason to do good. Simply because we love God. If we can embrace that truth, this morning’s gospel will change our lives forever because this morning’s gospel on this Judgment Sunday is not just a parable, but a direct explanation of how God is going to judge us at the end of time. And so it would help us to understand how God is going to judge us when the time comes. The gospel begins, “When the Son of Man comes in His glory. He will sit on the throne of His glory in all the nations will be gathered before Him.” So there’s the first thing that we have to understand about the judgment. All of us are going to be there and God is going to divide us into two groups, the sheep and the goats.
He will say to the sheep on His right hand, the goats on His left. To the sheep on His right, He says, “Come you blessed of my father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” We know the story. “I was hungry, I was thirsty.” But listen to what their response was to God. “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you or thirsty and give you drink?” You see, my brothers and sisters, they were doing good not to get God’s reward, but simply because they loved God and in their hearts their very being drew them to do good, to feed, to clothe the naked, to visit the sick. They said, “If we had seen you, Lord,” meaning that they didn’t even have to see God to do good.
Now let’s talk about the goats. “He will say to those on his left hand, depart from me, you cursed into the everlasting fire prepared for the Devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food. I was thirsty and you gave me no drink,” etc. And they said, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison and did not minister to you?” The goats, my brothers and sisters are the ones who do good either to avoid punishment or to gain a reward. If we live our lives thinking the good things we are doing are going to get us into heaven because we do them, we are going to be sadly mistaken.
What the gospel shows us this morning, my brothers and sisters, is that God wants us to have in our hearts such overflowing love that whether we know God is watching or not, that that is the natural response of our lives. Imagine that kind of love. St. John Chrysostom, we were discussing this last week in Bible study. St. John Chrysostom was talking about love and he says, “If everyone had genuine love, we wouldn’t even need any laws.” If everyone had genuine love, my brothers and sisters, there would be no suffering.
Unfortunately, if we listen to St. John Chrysostom because there is suffering, because we are required to have laws, that must mean that we do not know how to love. And the only way we can learn love is to become like God. In our baptism, we were united to Him physically, mystically, spiritually, we have become one with God in our baptism, and yet we do not act as God would act because the love we have is conditional. We love God because we think it’s going to get us into Heaven. We love God to avoid Hell. We even love each other conditionally because we are loved in return. My brothers and sisters, that is not love. That’s a contract. What God desires for us, what he shows us in His own life and in His own existence is how to love whether or not someone is watching. And so as we wrestle with these truths, every one of us will have an opportunity. I would suggest to you even before liturgy is over, to express the kind of pure love that God wants for us.
For sure, when we go out these doors, when we encounter our neighbors, our friends, our family members, our co-workers, even the strangers on the street, every one of those interactions will be our way to love. But don’t love because you think God is watching that will gain us nothing. So for the rest of divine liturgy, my brothers and sisters and every day, ask God to bring love into your hearts so that we together with Him, can be the example of love to the world. So that when people see our church community, they don’t just see Greeks. They don’t just see cross-dive participants, but they see people who love. And if we can achieve that love, all the laws on the books would go away. And we could simply love the way God loves and live with Him. And then he will say to us, “Come enter into the kingdom which had been prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” Stop offering God a contract and just start to love.
