Robin Claire nominated me for an award. She did so out of kindness, knowing I would decline the “star”.

But check out her site and her article about this. She is definitely worth following and you may find inspiration from the other blogs she names – Christian Overcomer.

Rewards, status and awards present a problem for me (unless they come with a big cash bonus ha 🙂 ha).

I illustrate this by thinking about a pastor who got a citizen of the year type award from the government. This screams many pitfalls and extreme danger to me.

  • An evangelist would hardly be honoured by a secular institution;
  • The word of God against bureaucratic abuses could offend the very ones giving the award, unless those words never got spoken;
  • A certificate hanging on the wall of a study declaring the secular world thinks the pastor is a great person advertises the strong possibility that the pastor plays politics with Good News;
  • Since the fact remains this particular pastor betrayed a colleague, humiliated a prospective member in public and ignored the request of a group for dialogue and imposed a personal agenda instead, tells me, despite a veneer of religion, something doesn’t ring true spiritually;
  • Besides, an award tends to honour the human, not the Divine.

I choose to err on the side of servanthood rather than honours. A blog award star will vanish with the termination of this world, but my faithful service and focussed purpose will remain forever.

Of course, this is a personal view and must NOT be taken as a standard which I intend to impose on others, or one by which I criticize blogging colleagues.

It’s just me. I express my gratitude to Robin. I also express my allegiance to Jesus with as few trappings and as little distraction as I can muster in my fluster.

“These things that I once considered valuable, I now consider worthless for Christ. It’s far more than that! I consider everything else worthless because I’m much better off knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. It’s because of him that I think of everything as worthless. I threw it all away in order to gain Christ and to have a relationship with him” (Philippians 3:7-9a God’s Word).