Another prevailing myth:

The view of the Judgment Seat of Christ as a kind of sports award banquet in which all participants receive some kind of award but no believer is punished. The change of the Judgment Seat of Christ into an awards banquet is fairly common in Christian teaching. It is a complete misunderstanding of the Judgment Seat.

God has warned us in the Bible that there is coming a Day of Judgment. The unsaved have invented the fantasy of evolution to prove there is no God and thus no Day of Reckoning. The Christians have invented unconditional grace to remove from the believers the fear of the Day of Judgment.

If we had any idea of the terror of the Judgment Seat of Christ we would flee from such a perversion of truth.

Here is the truth: the most important issue a believer faces is the day of resurrection, for it is after this that he will be judged and rewarded.

The physical body of every person who has lived on the earth will be raised on the last day and stand before Christ. Then the consequences of his behavior on earth will clothe his resurrected frame as a robe, or house from Heaven. We will reap in that day precisely what we have sown.

The individual who has cooperated with the Spirit of God in the transformation of his inward nature will be clothed with a glorious body of eternal life and glory.

The individual who has not cooperated with the Spirit of God but has continued in his unchanged way, walking in his worldliness, lusts, and self-will, will be clothed with corruption and death.

This is an inviolable law. No mercy, no grace, no belief in Christ—nothing can alter the Kingdom law of sowing and reaping.

The Apostle Paul was striving, at the end of his days, to attain to the out-resurrection from the dead. He warned us to be thus minded. To attain to the out-resurrection is first, to attain to the inner resurrection in which the adamic man has been put down and the believer is living by the Life of Christ. As a consequence, the individual will be clothed with incorruptible resurrection life and to rise to meet the Lord Jesus at His coming. The teaching of today is that every believer will rise in the first resurrection, but this is not true. Only the blessed and holy members of the royal priesthood will be clothed in white and rise in the first resurrection. It is a goal, a mark worth pressing toward, as did the Apostle Paul.

Jeremiah did not know of the first resurrection. But he did understand that it is God's will to bring back His elect to the land of Jerusalem. So it is true that those who attain the first resurrection from the dead will return with the Lord Jesus and rule with Him from the city of Jerusalem.

Therefore they shall come and sing in the height of Zion, and shall flow together to the goodness of the Lord, for wheat, and for wine, and for oil, and for the young of the flock and of the herd: and their soul shall be as a watered garden; and they shall not sorrow any more at all. (Jeremiah 31:12)

To be continued.