God Is Not Unrighteous to Forget Your Work and Labor of Love

A woman told me she did it nine years ago and that nobody has ever mentioned it since.

She made a decision that cost her a great deal. Everybody around her at the time knew about it. There was a period of about three months where it was the thing people asked her about.

And then it stopped being a thing anybody asked about, which is normal and correct and how life works, and she is not complaining about the people.

What she said is that somewhere in about year four she noticed she had started asking a question she had never asked before, which is whether it counted.

Not whether it was right. She still thinks it was right. Whether anybody, anywhere, including God, actually registered it, or whether it simply happened and then the world carried on exactly as it would have.

She said asking that felt like a betrayal of the decision, so she has never said it out loud to anybody until she said it to me.

There is a verse in Hebrews written to people who had paid something and were nine years down the road from it.

It is a legal double negative

Here is the verse.

For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister. (Hebrews 6:10, King James Version)

Not unrighteous to forget.

That is a strange construction and it is deliberate. The writer does not say God will remember, which would be a warm sentiment. He says forgetting would be unrighteous, and that God is not unrighteous.

It is a legal argument. He is saying that a record exists and that overlooking it would be an injustice, and that injustice is not available to the character of God.

Which is a much stronger thing to hand somebody in year nine than a reassurance would be. A reassurance can be doubted. This is an argument from what God is like, and it does not depend on how anybody feels about it.

You have work that would have to be overlooked unjustly in order to be forgotten. Hebrews 6:10 says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love. It is His Spirit, Romans 8:16 bearing witness with our spirit, who carries a legal fact into a person who has stopped feeling it.

The chapter that admits most of them did not see it

There is a chapter that lists people who paid enormous prices, and it ends with a sentence most people skip.

And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise. (Hebrews 11:39)

Received not the promise.

That is the honest end of Hebrews 11. The whole chapter is a list of people who did remarkable things at real cost, and the summary says most of them did not see the thing they were promised in their lifetimes.

And they are held up as the examples anyway. The chapter is not embarrassed by this. It does not treat their not receiving as a failure in the arrangement.

So the woman in year nine is standing exactly where the people in that chapter stood, and the chapter's own verdict on them is a good report through faith.

You are standing where the people in that chapter stood, and the chapter calls it a good report. Hebrews 11:39 says having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise, and it is the Holy Spirit, Ephesians 1:14 called the earnest of our inheritance, who is named as the deposit on what has not arrived.

There is a book with a record in it

There is a small scene in Malachi that is almost domestic and that I have never been able to forget.

Then they that feared the LORD spake often one to another: and the LORD hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon his name. (Malachi 3:16)

A book of remembrance was written.

Read the setting. The chapter before it is people complaining that serving God is pointless and that the arrogant are getting on fine, which is very close to the question she has been carrying.

And in the middle of that, a group of people talk to each other, and the text says God listened, and a record was made.

Nobody in that scene is told anything. They do not get a sign. What happens is that a book gets written and the passage tells the reader about it, which means the writing is the point rather than the announcing.

You are in a record that was written whether or not anybody told you. Malachi 3:16 says a book of remembrance was written before him. It is the same Spirit, 1 Corinthians 2:10 searching all things, who is named as the one who knows what a book like that holds.

What Paul says about the timing and the tiredness

Paul writes one line to people at exactly this point, and he names the condition rather than denying it.

And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. (Galatians 6:9)

Let us not be weary. He does not say they are not tired. He tells them not to be worn out by it, which is an instruction given to people who are already close to it.

In due season. Not soon and not on anybody's calendar. It is a phrase about the right time being somebody else's to determine.

And he ends the same subject with the sentence I would put on the wall of anybody in year nine:

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord. (1 Corinthians 15:58)

Your labor is not in vain in the Lord. And notice the qualifier, because it is doing real work. In the Lord. He is not making a general claim that all effort pays. He is making a specific claim about where a thing is done.

You have labor described as not in vain, with the location specified. 1 Corinthians 15:58 says your labor is not in vain in the Lord. It is the Spirit of God, Romans 8:23 called the firstfruits under which we wait, who is named as the down payment on a season that has not arrived.

And if year nine has begun to feel heavier than year one, say it out loud to a person: a counselor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line, which answers every hour there is. A price paid a long time ago with nobody left to talk to about it is a specific loneliness, and it deserves a room with somebody in it.