Luke 14:12-14

HEAVENLY RECOMPENSE

Luke 14:12-14. “ But He also said to the one having invited Him, When you may make a dinner or a supper, do not call your rich friends, brothers, relatives, or neighbors, lest they may also call you in turn, and there may be a recompense unto you. But when you may make a feast, call the poor, maimed, halt, blind, and you shall be happy, because they have nothing to recompense you; and it shall be recompensed unto you in the resurrection of the righteous.” The Bible plainly teaches two resurrections

that of the just and of the unjust. (Revelation 20:5.) This is certainly an exceedingly beautiful paragraph, enunciated by our Lord to that Pharisaical ruler who had complimented Him with an invitation to that Sunday festival. With what meekness and simplicity does He administer this good advice to His kind host! As we find the theologians and Pharisees present at this festival, and no allusion to the presence of the different sympathetic characters here specified (i.e., the poverty-stricken, the lame, the maimed; i.e., persons whose hands were afflicted till they could not use them. All persons who are deprived of the use of either their feet or their hands are objects of universal charity; while the blind always deserve, not only our pity, but our benefactions), I trow this man had called his rich friends, brothers, relatives, and neighbors, while these real objects of charity are all absent. Jesus knew that they would all make a festival and invite this man, thus compensating his favor. Lord, pour in the light, that we may all see this beautiful truth taught by Thyself! How insignificant the recompense of another festival, where you will go, and lose your time, and make yourself sick, eating to gluttony! O what a grandeur and glory in the heavenly recompense of the first resurrection, giving you a place in the bridehood of Christ, to reign with Him a thousand years, during the glorious millennium, which will be succeeded by the celestial ages, promoting you to grander honors, and opening to you worlds of bliss and glory, possibilities, attainabilities, achievements, aggrandizements, emoluments, and triumphs infinitely beyond the possibility of conception while incarcerated in these mud houses! O the infinitude of immortal developments evolved out of the possibilities of redeemed intelligences, winging their flight from world to world, and exploring the grandeur, sublimity, and glory of Omnipotence through the flight of eternal ages! N.B. “There are infinite degrees in the heavenly state.” (1 Corinthians 15). Do you not know that the heavenly recompense in the resurrection of the just is a thousand million times more valuable than the invitation which some rich family could give you to a dining? How strange that the followers of Jesus do not remember and practice this beautiful precept, calling the poor, distressed, unfortunate, afflicted people of every sort to a feast, and using the opportunity to preach Jesus to them and get their souls saved!