For God is not unrighteous, so as to forget your work and the labor of love which you showed toward his name, in that you served the saints, and still do serve them.
Hebrews 6:10 (WEB)
in its setting: Hebrews 6:9-12
1 Where we are
The queue at the coffee kiosk in Paya Lebar moves fast on Tuesdays, and Sharon is looking at her phone when the boy at the machine says her name. She has to look twice. He is twenty-four now. Two years ago he stopped answering her calls, and she wrote the last note in his file and closed it. He asks whether she still takes it without sugar. Eleven years of intake and aftercare, and somewhere she stopped expecting to see anything come of it — not because she stopped caring, but because hoping had begun to cost more than it returned. If she expected nothing, nothing could be taken.
2 What the passage is doing
The letter to the Hebrews was written to people who had been at this a long time. They had visited prisoners, stood by others when it cost them, and the years had worn thin. Straight after a hard warning about drifting, the writer says this: God is not unjust. He does not lose track of what they did for his people. The ground of that confidence is not their stamina. It is God's character, the kind of God who keeps an account nobody else was keeping.
ἐπιλαθέσθαι
epilathesthai · to forget, to let slip out of account
The word is not only about memory failing. It carries the sense of overlooking something, letting it drop, leaving it out when the accounts are added up. The writer joins it to justice: it would be unjust of God to let your work slip. So this is not God being sentimental about you. It is God refusing to lose a single thing you did.
3 Taking it with you
If you have stopped expecting anything, hear this. God has not asked you to produce a field you can see. He has already counted the cups you carried, the calls nobody answered, the mornings you turned up when it felt like nothing. He counted them while you felt nothing about them, because his memory does not run on your feelings. Jesus went into the ground himself, and for three days there was nothing to show for it. He was not wasted, and neither are you. You may never meet your own twenty-four-year-old at a kiosk. What you gave is held, and not one hour of it is lost.
A prayer you can pray
Father, I have stopped expecting to see much, and I am tired of hoping and being let down. Thank you that you have not overlooked one thing I have done, even the parts I felt nothing about. Hold what I cannot see. Keep me at it today, not because I can feel it working, but because you have not forgotten. Amen.
Soli Deo Gloria — to God alone be the glory.
