[aron]

On the positive side, I think that maybe the overcomers don't pay much attention to the idea of overcoming. They are too busy paying attention to Jesus Christ. They see Him standing before the Father. They hear the Father's voice: "This is my Son, the Beloved. In Him I find My delight." They see His faithfulness (Heb 3:6) in stewardship of the Father's house. They have an overwhelming image of the Glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. They can see the tears streaming down that face, they can hear the loud cries; they become aware of the piety of a mortal Man here on the earth, whose reverent submission saved Him from the clutches of death (Heb 5:7).

The Lord's tears become their tears. Their small, weak cries begin to rise in echo to His. They feel His saving love for the sinners, not condemnation. They have the realization that the feeling in their heart "...is no longer I, but Christ in me." The Father, through His Son, is reaching out to His lost children. Even a whiff of this experience sets their soul on fire. Whether their works are great or small is irrelevant -- they remember that "It was only what we were supposed to do." (Luke 17). If anything is worth enduring reward, they know that it is only from the power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead, which now enlivens their mortal bodies. In this context they seek in the Word eagerly, in order to be equipped to serve the Master. They continually consider the hard questions, many of them perhaps unanswerable in this age. They don't consider themselves to have understood or to have laid hold of anything.

The point, for me, is to go forward. Where you are in relation to some benchmark of "approval and reward" is up to God. E.g. John 21: "What is that to you? You follow Me."