Summary: You're going to be paid great dividends in the future. Your difficult work will be renumerated. Rest assured, oh saints, you will be paid. But your reward and payment will be realized in the coming kingdom.

Elon Musk is an amazing entrepreneur. He started Space X and Tesla Electric cars. He is quoted as saying, “You are paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of the problems you solve.”

In the kingdom of God, we may not be paid like an Elon Musk. However, don’t think that the problems you solve are somehow unimportant or difficult. One of the greatest problems in the church is volunteer leadership. We cannot do it alone. Beyond this, there's never going to be a time when the church will have enough resources to hire everyone needed to get the job done. It doesn't work that way. By the way, it's not supposed to work that way.

I want to reframe this entire conversation a little bit. You're going to be paid great dividends in the future. Your difficult work will be renumerated. Rest assured, oh saints, you will be paid. But your reward and payment will be realized in the coming kingdom. Our work is hard. Volunteer leadership is hard, isn’t it? It’s hard to get somebody to do something without being paid. And it's going to come down to meeting all of the other needs in a volunteer’s life that will keep them in the game with you. Knowing that you don't get to pull that magical arm of compensation, forces us to make sure we have a far more holistic plan for care and influence.

Here's the deal. Your job is hard. You will have to be very relationally savvy in order to convince people that this thing is worth it. You will be paid, certainly, but it's deferred payment. Your payday is coming. You will receive a great reward from heaven. You are solving hard problems, but your pay is truly deferred.