Morning Prayer with Pastor Sean Pinder
There's a Reward For Following Jesus
Pastor Sean Pinder welcomes guest speaker Pastor Jeffrey Zimmerman for a word for anyone who has wondered whether following Jesus is really worth what it costs. Following Jesus will cost YOU something — but what it pays back is more than YOU can calculate. There is a quiet fear underneath real surrender: that if YOU truly give God everything — the thing YOU are holding onto, the security YOU have built, the plan YOU made for yourself — YOU will end up with less. So YOU hold back. YOU follow, but with one hand still gripping what YOU are afraid to lose. These passages confront that fear head-on, with both an honest warning and a staggering promise. It opens with a man who had everything but the one thing he was searching for. He came asking how to gain what money could not buy. He had kept the rules, done the right things, checked every box — and still sensed something was missing. And when he was told the one thing standing between him and what he wanted, he could not do it. He walked away sorrowful, choosing to keep what he was holding rather than follow. He counted the cost and decided it was too high. Here is what most people miss. Right after that, the ones who had actually left everything to follow asked the honest question everyone is afraid to ask out loud: we gave up so much for this — what do we get? And instead of rebuking them, the answer they received was one of the boldest promises in all of Scripture. A specific, multiplied return was named — not a vague someday, but a real reward, both in this life and the next. But the promise came with a detail most people leave out. Because the reward was not described as a cost-free, comfortable payoff. The same promise that guarantees the multiplied return names honestly what comes with it — that following Jesus is worth everything, but it is not without hardship. That honesty is exactly what makes the promise trustworthy. It is not a sales pitch. It is a real accounting of what YOU give and what YOU gain — and the gain is not close. There is something in the contrast between the man who walked away and the ones who followed — what one kept and lost, and what the others left and gained — that will completely change how YOU see whatever God is asking YOU to surrender. What was the one thing the man could not give up? What was the reward named for those who followed? And what does it mean that the promise comes honestly, with hardship included?
