#DailyDevotion God Gives Us Daily Bread Purely For Christ Jesus’ Sake
Matthew 20:1–16 “The kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a place who went out early in the morning to hire men to work in his vineyard. He agreed with the workers to pay them a denarius a day and sent them into his vineyard… 5“He went out again about twelve o’clock and three o’clock and did the same thing. 6About five o’clock he went out and found some others standing around. ‘Why are you standing here all day long doing nothing?’ he asked them. 7“ No one has hired us,’ they answered him. “ You go into the vineyard, too,’ he told them. 8“When evening came, the owner of the vineyard told his manager, ‘Call the men and give them their pay. Start with the last and go on to the first.’ 9“Those who started working around five o’clock came, and each got a denarius.”
Jesus often tries to convey to us in the Gospels what the kingdom of heaven is like. In doing so he also conveys to us what God is like. It isn’t what we normally think God is like for certain. Here he portrays God like the owner of a vineyard. Now the owner of a vineyard has a base line of servants who take care of it on a daily basis but when harvest time comes they probably hire extra workers. Here the owner goes out into town and hires who he can for the standard wage normally paid day workers, a denarius for a day’s work.
Now this owner a few hours later see some men standing around doing nothing. He tells them to work his vineyard and he’ll pay them what is right. Now the owner went out during the course of the day and as he found men not working he tells them also to go work in his vineyard and he’d pay them what is right. Now it seems to me this owner of the vineyard does not necessarily not like people just laying around. He is generous and wants men to have some dignity and work so they may make a living. This fully comes to fruition at the end of the day when it is time to pay the workers. A great surprise! The last men hired get paid first and they get paid a whole day’s wage. Wow! How generous! What kind of crazy owner does that? That’s no way to run a business. But we’re not talking about a business here, we are talking about the kingdom of heaven.
This may get under the skin of those whose have an overly good sense of justice and fairness. They should have gotten like 1/10th of a denarius or something like that. The LORD our God, our heavenly Father, doesn’t play by our rules. He is the God you think you’d like to have except of course when he acting like the God you think you’d like to have. Unless of course you know your own value, worth, what you really deserve for your life is. In which case you would know you deserve nothing good from the hand of God. You deserve neither health, strength, work, food, clothes, shelter, good government, family, friends, and loved ones. You have sinned and you are sinful. All these things come to us out of the goodness, kindness, love, steadfast love and generosity of our Creator. But our Father in heaven, for the sake of the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ gives us all good things. For that we should be thankful.
Heavenly Father, we deserve no good things from you but for the sake of your Son Jesus Christ you provide us all we need. Give us thankful hearts that realize this and mouths that praise the work of our Lord Jesus Christ. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.