The Judgment Seat of Christ

Great God Almighty, I come before you by the blood of thy dear son Jesus. You are a dreadful sovereign who knows the end as well as the beginning. You hold our very breath in your hands and your eye is ever upon us as a father watches over his children.

I ask you right now, Almighty God, to break through our dullness and soften our hardened hearts and give us clarity and insight into the dreadful hour of the final judgment where we will stand before your throne at the beam of seat for believers. Open our eyes as we peer into eternity and let us see the seraphim and cherubim as they worship you day and night, crying, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory.

Bend our pride, great God, and break our hearts today by your holy spirit so we can see eternity. Grant us enough grace, O Lord, to turn off our TVs long enough and get off the internet to get on our faces before you as we agonize over the souls of man. Let us see a glimpse of eternity today in a view of your judgment seat where our very lives will be exposed and evaluated by the King of kings and Lord of lords.

And let the thought of it so radically shock us that we will be transformed by the very sight of a nail pierced king reviewing our lives. May our hearts burn within us as we worship a risen Lord who sits at the right hand of the Father and who earned that right by way of a bloody cross. Let us see Jesus clearly today and I pray, O God, that you will get a hold of someone listening to this message and peel the bark off of them and make them sensitive to your spirit and turn their life upside down.

Do it, Lord, for thy sake and the sake of eternity. I pray these things in the strong name of Jesus. Amen.

In 2nd Corinthians 5 10 we read, for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ that everyone may receive the things done in his body according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad. The judgment seat of Christ for believers is different from the great white throne judgment for unbelievers. It is not condemnation or damnation but commendation and acclamation, not hellfire and punishment but heaven's joys and its rewards.

Christ at the great white throne judgment for unbelievers will be a dreadful judge of severity and scrutiny who will carry out the sentencing of the law upon all guilty lawbreakers. And the sentence is the second death in a lake of fire. But at the behemoth seat for believers there will be a paternal tenderness in the judge as he examines and reviews our life particular to us.

He will bring out the book of remembrance which is our life's biography, so to speak, and he will review every detail in it to show where we obeyed him or disobeyed him, delighted him or disappointed him. But a time of review and rewards it will be. It is more like a flower show at a county fair where blue ribbons are handed out for excellence.

Yet it is a very serious event which every believer must face to have his life reviewed by the judge of all the earth who has eyes of fire. How well we ran the Christian race will be on display that day, including our stumbles. I was introduced to Jesus back in 1968 when a pastor who lived across the alley behind me took an interest in an awkward teenage boy who was growing up in a godless home.

He invited me to have breakfast with him and his family each Saturday morning. It was the first time I ever saw a man pray. He had a spower heads and he began praying for each member of his family and he prayed for me.

It was the first time anyone had ever prayed for me. He then offered me a job in his bible bookstore and gradually I learned what a Christian was. I began to attend their little church and it was during a revival meeting one evening that I made a public profession of Christ.

The pastor had me meet him in his study the next morning where he prayed earnestly for me and wept for me and thanked God for me. When I went home I told my parents that I had become a Christian but they forbade me from ever attending that church again and cursed that pastor. So for a time I quit going to church and I went back into the world.

Yet that was the beginning of my Christian journey. One that has been filled with peaks and valleys, highs and lows, hallmarks and blots. Gradually I learned how to study my bible and pray.

Many people through the years have influenced me for God. I ended up with a godly pastor in Adrian Rogers who for 20 years always reminded me of Jesus. I sat under his teaching but eventually I had to learn how to walk with God on my own and that took time.

It took years. Now that I'm an old man I can look back on my life and reflect and see how I lived it. Regretfully I've wasted much of my life by squandering it on the wrong things of this world.

It wasn't until later in life that God got a hold of me and altered the course of my life through the ministry of Dr. Stephen F. Alford. I'll never forget hearing Dr. Alford recite a poem that I never had heard before. It went like this.

Only one life will soon be passed. Only what's done for Christ will last. And it's true friends.

Before I met Stephen Alford all I wanted to do was to make a lot of money and play a lot of golf but God used him to change the course of my life and call me into ministry. But when life comes at you from every direction and at times knocks you to the ground it's easy to lose sight of eternity. We begin to focus our attention on our problems and take our focus off the beam of sea.

But the judgment seat of Christ must always be fresh on our mind before us as we serve God with the abilities he has given us. Life is brief often much shorter than we realize and when we die and leave this world we go into another world for all eternity. And the day friends is fast approaching where we will all stand before God and give an account to him as to how we lived our life for him.

I look back on my life and I see periods where I was really on fire for God and I see other times sadly where I turned away from God and went my own way but it's not the length of time that matters as much as how we use the time God gave us. I like what Dr. Graham Scroggie said of Stephen. He said Stephen's day of ministry had scarcely begun when it was violently ended but the greatness of one's life must not be looked for in length of days.

Stephen means crown and early did he receive his. We can't work our way into heaven friends but we can work for rewards they'll be handed out at the judgment seat of Christ. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ.

How marvelous it would be to see those believers who are mighty for God as they stand before him. Oh look over there stand the disciples of Jesus. Let us hear their testimony for their Lord.

Let's see how the blood of the martyrs was the seat of the church. There is Peter who was crucified upside down in Rome. There is James who was beheaded.

There is Andrew who was crucified on a x-shaped cross. There is Matthew who was first impaled to the ground and then beheaded. There is Nathaniel who was flayed to death by a whip to where his skin was torn to shreds.

There is Thomas who was stabbed to death with a spear. There is Philip who met a cruel death whereby he was impaled by iron hooks in his ankles and hung upside down to die. Look over there is the apostle John who spent his last days in exile on a Greek island called Patmos where he received the book of Revelation from the risen Lord.

Oh look friends at that stack of crowns at their feet and here comes the apostle Paul who spread the gospel across Asia Minor. Oh wonder how he will stack up. Listen to his laundry list of service to Christ and the gospel.

In labors more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths oft of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck. A night and a day I have been in the deep, in journeyings often, in perils of water, in perils of robbers, in perils by my own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren, in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, and fastings often, in cold and nakedness, besides those things that are without, that which cometh upon me daily, the care of all the churches.

Paul's lacerated back must have looked like a crossword puzzle. Every time he laid down to sleep he was in pain, but then to top all this the Romans chopped off his head. Now how have we suffered for God? We get bent out of shape if the line in Starbucks is too long.

Imagine seeing that long line of worthies from Hebrews chapter 11 stand before Christ to give their account. Well, can you imagine, friends, the glorious review of Wesley and Whitfield and Fanny and Moody? But we don't have to be a big name for Jesus. We can be a nobody and serve him faithfully and cheerfully, and the sufferings and trials we encounter in life will be but crowns of gold, silver, and precious stones on that day.

I remember years ago when I was a successful businessman and I was trying to live for God at the same time by serving him through various ministries, and I was plum worn out. It was two o'clock in the morning and I couldn't sleep. In fact, I felt like I was dying.

I was having trouble breathing, so I got out of bed and went to my study and plopped down before my open Bible. And I told God how tired I was and that if he was ready for me, I was ready to go to him. Then I heard a voice, not an audible voice, but a voice nonetheless.

The voice asked me a question, What do you do for a living? I answered investments. Then he said, I have an investment in you and I will receive the dividends from my investment. Well, I went back to bed and I'm still here these many years later, although I've had a few close calls where I went down to the river for a time or two.

But my greatest regret is that I have not done more for God. How I weep over the lost opportunities and squandered time. Only one life will soon be passed.

Only what's done for Christ will last. There's another poem, friends, I like, and it's about the judgment seat. It's entitled His plan for me.

And it goes like this. Oh, when I stand at the judgment seat of Christ, and he shows his plan for me, the plan of my life, as it might have been, had he had his way. And I see how I blocked him here and checked him there.

And I would not yield my will. Would there be grief in my savior's eyes? Grief though he loves me still? Would he have me rich and I stand there poor, stripped of all but his grace? While memory runs like a haunted thing down the paths I cannot retrace. Lord of the years that are left of me, I give them to the hand.

Take me and break me and mold me to the pattern that thou has planned. I like that poem. But every time I read it, it shames me.

Years ago, my wife and I built our dream home. We met with a builder and an architect and together we designed a blueprint of our dream house. But without that blueprint, we would have made terrible construction errors, errors, both costly and bothersome.

If the builder had strayed from the blueprint, we would not be living in the house we had planned. It would have been a different house altogether. God has a heavenly blueprint for our life and it is laid out just according to his plan.

And at the judgment seat of Christ, he is going to roll out that blueprint before us and point to it and say, just according to plan. We want to live our life in light of the judgment seat so we can hear him say, just according to plan. For there is a common day of review where our life will be tested as we give an account to Jesus, as we stand before him and he examines the things we have done in the body, whether it be good or bad, and it passes beneath his intense scrutiny.

We get a sense of this from 1 Corinthians chapter 3. 1 Corinthians chapter 3, beginning in verse 11, reads, For the foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble, every man's work shall be made manifest, for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire, and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is. If any man's work abide, which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward.

If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss, but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire. This striking passage of scripture illustrates the great review of our lives at the judgment seat for believers, how every act we did in the body will be reviewed as God shines his holy spotlight on the record of our life. Our words, our deeds, our motives will all pass before the one who has eyes of fire as he looks at the whole expanse of our life since we became a Christian.

He will examine our prayer life. He will peer into our personal life. He will look at how we managed the time he gave us, how we used the money he entrusted to us, how we witnessed for him to the lost in our community, how we served him with the talents and abilities which he gave us.

We will have to give an account for the sins of commission as well as the sins of omission. We will have to give a reason why we didn't spread the gospel more in our generation. Why did we neglect to tell others about Jesus? Why did we spend so much time on things of this world to the neglect of things of eternal worth? Why didn't we pray more? Why didn't we intercede more on behalf of the lost and perishing? Why did we let our neighbors and family members go to hell because of the lack of prayer for them than the difference to them? Why didn't we give more? Why didn't we weep more over our own sins and the sins of our nation? When we were with others, did we make them thirsty for Jesus or did we just fill them with more of this world? Will we stand there before him who bled and died on a cross for us and make excuses on that day? Will we stand there in the radiance of the gold, silver, and precious stones that represent our lives and that reflect his glory? Or will we stand there bankrupt, knee-deep in the ashes of a wasted life and then bend down to scoop up those ashes and then place them into his nail pierced hands? Only one life will soon be passed.

Only what's done for Christ will last.