1 John 5:9 “We accept man’s testimony, but God’s testimony is greater because it is the testimony of God which he has given about his Son.”

It has become common to hear about some person falsely convicted, released from prison. At their trials experts testified about the evidence from the crime scene, and juries believed them. Witnesses testified about things they had heard or seen, and juries believed them. Lawyers led the jury along carefully guided logical paths. We accept man’s testimony. Now, however, DNA evidence may show that all the experts and witnesses were mistaken.

Science is useful, but it doesn’t offer the certainty many people believe it does. I have nothing against science. Often it is the best information we have to go on. But it doesn’t always get things right. Scientists were once convinced that heat passed from warmer things to cooler things in some mysterious vapor called caloric fluid. That theory has been discredited. Good medical science once believed that you could cure a fever by letting blood out of a person. Our nation’s first president died that way. In the 1800’s the American Medical Association forbad doctors to wash their hands before surgery. They said there was no evidence that anything so small it was invisible could make a person sick. “But science is better today,” we may believe. Don’t be too sure. It’s still done by fallible humans.

For all their faults, we tend to accept man’s testimony, John says. It doesn’t take a great deal of faith to reach John’s next conclusion, then. “But God’s testimony is greater, because it is the testimony of God, which he has given about his Son.” Ironically, some people want to discount God’s testimony in favor of human ideas about some subject or another. This makes no sense.

Many years ago my friend’s dad disassembled an old mechanical adding machine to satisfy his curiosity about how it worked. I looked into his workshop. Spread all across the workbench and the floor were the parts of this machine. Who do you suppose would be in a better position to tell you how that machine worked: the inventor, who imagined it and built the prototype, or my friend’s dad, who tried to figure it out by taking it apart? Wouldn’t you go to the inventor?

God is the Inventor of everything. As the Inventor he knows more on every subject than fallible humans who try to figure his creations out by studying them and taking them apart. His testimony is always to be preferred. On no topic is that more true than the testimony he has given about his Son. This is the subject nearest and dearest to his heart. He may have created the world, but he did not give us a science book to explain it all. God invented social institutions like family and government. He provided no detailed instruction manual for their operation.

But the theme, the focus, the point of the testimony he has given us is his Son, the one he sent to save us. This is the topic God spoke about for thousands of years to patriarchs, deliverers, kings, and prophets. It wasn’t dumped on one man all at once, so you need not wonder if it was all just one man’s personal fantasy. As generations rolled along, he revealed a little bit more, then a little bit more, building on what had already been revealed, always supporting, never contradicting, what had come before.

Finally, God’s Son arrived to save us. He sent angels to announce his birth. He sent his Spirit to empower his ministry. On at least two occasions his own voice announced from heaven that Jesus was his Son. He confirmed Jesus’ ministry with an outbreak of miracles unlike anything the world has seen before or since.

In the end he let his Son be captured, convicted, and crucified, so that by his blood he could fulfill all of the old promises. He satisfied the demands of justice for the whole world’s crimes, freed us all from debt we owed for our sins. He redeemed us as God’s own sons and daughters, reconciled and restored to a dear place in God’s own family. By raising Jesus from the dead God has given us proof of this and placed his approval on all that Jesus said and did.

So important is the testimony God has given about his Son, he had it written down in four separate accounts–four separate accounts! He further explained those in twenty-three books and letters. We call them the New Testament, the last quarter of our Bible. “Jesus love me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so,” our children sing. “We accept man’s testimony, but God’s testimony is greater, because it is the testimony of God, which he has given about his Son,” is the way that John says it here.

We have God’s testimony, his word. It has been spoken from heaven, sent by his Spirit, embodied in Jesus’ life and death, and recorded on the pages of Scripture. It convinces me of his grace and love.

John 5:28-29 “Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out–those who have done good will rise to live, and those who have done evil will rise to be condemned.”

This is what we usually mean when we talk about “the resurrection.” Dead bodies come back to life and leave their graves. The dust and ashes of the dead, no matter where they have been deposited, come back together to live and move again. The purely scientific sorts may object, “Dead bodies don’t come back to life.” We know. That’s why this is sort of a big deal. If this were common, why would Jesus bring it up as evidence of his divinity and power?

Note again what Jesus says will bring them out of their graves: they “will hear his voice.” The same power that turns dead unbelief into living faith turns dead human remains into living, breathing people. Jesus will give the command, and all will rise.

But they will not all rise to the same fate. Moments before (vs. 27), Jesus said that he had been given authority to judge. Now we see why that matters. Many of those he calls from the grave “will rise to be condemned.” The Bible’s warnings of Judgment Day, of people being cast away from God to be punished forever, are not just the bad dreams of sub-Christian religion. There are some who believe this was all made up by mean and grumpy men who practiced a legalistic Old Testament religion. They were trying to scare people into good behavior. Then Jesus replaced it with a New Testament religion of grace and love.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. You know, Hell is rarely mentioned in the Old Testament. Other than a few verses at the end of the Prophet Isaiah, we have very few descriptions of what it might be like.

Almost everything we know about hell and the final judgment comes from the lips of Jesus himself in the gospels. Time after time he talks about the flames, the darkness, the weeping and gnashing of teeth. Those are his own words. But he doesn’t talk like someone who relishes the chance to see people suffer. He talks like someone who knows about unspeakable horrors, and he sees people going there. It breaks his heart and he desperately wants to spare them of this.

He wants them to be “those who…will rise to live.” Those Jesus raises to the new life of faith now he will also raise to the new life of restored bodies, purged of every sin, healed of every disease or deformity, transformed and perfected for the endless life to come. To “rise to live” is not an endless extension of our current experience. It’s not more of the slow decay we know now, only slowed and stretched across eternity. It is finally only life, only health, only strength, all the time. It is life that is truly worthy of the name. On the last day, when he speaks, that life will be yours.

So today we listen. We hear his voice speaking to us in his book, and from the songs we sing, and from the mouth of the man who stands and preaches to you on Sunday morning. We hear it speaking to us in the gospel encouragements of Christian friends, and in our private moments of devotion and prayer. We hear his voice, and believe his words, and do what they say, because one day Jesus will speak, and people will live.

John 5:25-26 “I tell you the truth, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to judge because he is the Son of Man.”

We might think that Jesus is talking about the resurrection of the dead at the end of time. But there is an important clue in his words that this is not so: “A time is coming and has now come.” Jesus is talking about something going on even on the day he was speaking. Dead people heard his voice. Those dead people lived.

But Jesus wasn’t preaching in the cemetery. We hear no reports of people crawling out of the ground or coming out of tombs, not on this day. Jesus was preaching in the city of Jerusalem during one of the Jewish holidays. Still, dead people were hearing his voice, and those dead people were living.

Jesus was using a very common picture of our natural spiritual condition. As we are born, as we exist before coming to faith, we are dead to God. There is a saying common in Mediterranean cultures that has found its way into TV and movies. “You are dead to me.”It’s a way of saying, “We have nothing in common, no way of getting along anymore, and no way you can fix it. It is as though you don’t even exist.”

Isn’t that what sin does to us? Adam and Eve ran and hid from God after they ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. They were afraid of him. They lost all trust in him. They didn’t want anything to do with him anymore. And they were helpless to fix this themselves, if they had even wanted to do so. They were dead to God.

Don’t you see that in the lives of people who have no faith? Isn’t that where our own sin is constantly threatening to take us back? Some have created deep misery for themselves with an ungodly lifestyle. Their vices have destroyed their health, consumed their wealth, and brought pain and separation to practically all their relationships. But they lack even the faintest desire for God’s love or grace, in large part because that would come with an admission that they were wrong all along, the humility of repentance. They can only pity themselves and resent their bad fortune. They are dead to God, dead in sin.

For some, spiritual death does not look so dramatic. They were born without such a strong taste for self-destructive pleasures. They have reasonably stable families. They are contributing members of society. They may not be overbearing or explicitly arrogant, but they are confident that they are good people. Maybe they betray just a hint of cynicism, or insecurity about the deep future, but they themselves may be mostly unaware of the vast spiritual emptiness inside of them. They may be no less spiritually dead than others, but their moderate, unassuming, unremarkable lives may make it even more difficult to see.

Jesus spoke to people just like this. He still speaks. And they live. “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to judge because he is the Son of Man.”

Jesus’ words didn’t rely on rhetorical tricks and clever strategies to raise the spiritually dead. They ran on divine authority. They brought miraculous power to bear. The power to create life has been part of God’s story from the very beginning. It is literally the first story in the Bible. God the Father doesn’t need help to create life. He doesn’t raw materials or willing subjects to create life. He “has life in himself.” He speaks, and there it is.

It is the same way when Jesus speaks to us. His words worm their way into heads and hearts, and they start changing everything. They create new ideas, new beliefs, new feelings, new realizations that never existed in that person before. Where there was nothing spiritual–no true knowledge of God, no true trust in God, no true agreement with God, no true presence of God–now there is. His words give birth to the miracle of spiritual life that we call faith or conversion.

This is all a feature of God’s grace. It is another example of God doing everything to save us because we could do nothing. How could we? We were dead in our sins. We had nothing to pay God for our sins, nothing we could do to make it up to him. You can offer tons of gold to the Almighty if you have it, but what good is that to him? In heaven, they pave the streets with that stuff. So, because we were dead in our sins and had nothing to give him, God himself paid the price. He gave his one and only Son. Jesus paid the full price for our sins and left not one thing for us to pay or do. It was all grace, all free.

Because of our spiritual death, we don’t even have the desire or ability to receive the gift. You can put a flower on top of a literally dead person laying in the casket and let gravity hold it there. But the dead person won’t reach out and grab it. He can’t. He’s dead. So with the spiritually dead Jesus speaks his words, and those words go in and create life. Eyes open and see. A heart beats with faith and believes. Jesus speaks, and people live.

1 Corinthians 12:4-6 “There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but the same God works all of them in all men.”

Paul looks at our spiritual gifts in three different ways to help us understand why God doesn’t give us all exactly the same thing. First, “There are different kinds of gifts.” The word for gifts in this passage is charismata, from which we get our word “charismatic.” It emphasizes that the gift is something God gives us for free.

Maybe that seems a little simple. Any gift that is truly a gift is free. But that reminds me I really have nothing to complain about if my gift is different than someone else’s, or if their gift somehow seems more appealing. Also, I have nothing to brag about if my gift seems better. They’re gifts, right? None of us earned them. We didn’t have them coming. We all have the big gift, which is Jesus. Anything beyond that is sheer generosity and goodness on God’s part, and better than nothing at all. Would we really want to complain because God gave us something more?

All of his gifts serve a purpose. They accomplish a task. They get something done. So Paul continues, “There are different kinds of service.” The Lord set up his world, and his church, with a need for many different things to get done. It makes sense, then, that he would distribute many different abilities to many different people. We can’t all be doing the same thing all the time. Imagine a world with no garbage collectors. Imagine a church with no cleaners. Eew! Who would want to be a part of that? So the Lord gives gifts that line up with all these many tasks that have to get done. Maybe like the Corinthians we would like to have some of the showier ones, the ones that seem more powerful or supernatural. But Paul tells them later that the Spirit’s power is just as much involved in making good teachers, administrators or simple helpers as it is in the miraculous ability to heal.

Finally, the Lord himself is active in all these gifts. “There are different kinds of working, but the same God works all of them in all men.” The word behind “working” and “works” is the word from which we get “energy.” Paul is saying that the Lord himself energizes his people to do all these different things. He is the one moving hearts and minds, and hands and mouths and feet. If God himself enters people, and then uses them to perform all these different functions, what is left for us but to accept that our gifts are different as the Lord himself sees fit to give them.

In doing it this way, perhaps we could say that God is giving us another gift: the gift to be individuals, the gift to be me. He hasn’t created an army of clones that came rolling off an assembly line and all look and think and function the same. I am unique, and so are you. He redeemed us from our sins all the same. He loves us as his children all the same. But because he loves us, we aren’t all the same. Our gifts are different. That’s what makes it possible for each of us to make a difference.

Revelation 20:4-6 “They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years. (The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended.) This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy are those who have part in the first resurrection. The second death has no power over them, but they will be priests of God and of Christ and will reign with him for a thousand years.”

The people John sees died for their faith. Yet they were alive in heaven, more truly alive than they had ever been before. They were the living dead, and John lists their blessings.

First, they are participants in the “first resurrection.” This is not the resurrection of the body, which Jesus says will take place one time for all people on the last day in John chapter 6. This is the resurrection Paul is talking about when he writes the Colossians about how they have “been buried with him (Christ) in baptism and raised with him through your faith in the power of God.” We have been raised with Christ through faith. God has raised us from being dead in our sins to being spiritually alive with Christ. This is the new birth, the resurrection to new life in faith.

This is why we can say these martyred Christians are blessed. In their earthly life, they didn’t look very blessed at all. They struggled with the struggles that are common to us all. They got sick. They weren’t particularly rich. Then they became Christians, and they didn’t fit in with their own family and friends anymore. They were like foreigners in their own hometowns. Eventually the authorities came and put an end to their short lives.

But in heaven, they don’t just live. They reign. “The second death has no power over them.” Yes, they died the first time. When the Roman authorities separated their heads from their bodies, their blood spilled freely, their hearts stopped beating, and all went dark. But that was just a temporary condition. The death that’s really scary, the one that cuts us off from God, the one in which people wake up in hell, the one that never ends–that one has no access to their souls, no way of touching their existence. They are finally, fully, completely beyond its reach because they live and reign with Christ.

In their heavenly life “they will be priests of God and of Christ.” In most Lutheran churches, we don’t call our clergy “priests” because every Christian is a priest by faith. “A royal priesthood” Peter calls us in his first letter. At the beginning of this book John tells his readers that Jesus has made us “a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father.” Men, women, young, old–every believer is a priest.

That doesn’t mean we don’t need someone teaching or preaching to us. It means that through Jesus we all have a direct line to God. There is not a class of believers closer to God than anyone else. We don’t need to know an influential Christian who can get God to do us special favors, because we are all influential Christians who know Jesus personally. The only difference between us and the beheaded martyrs is that we say our prayers and practice this privilege by faith. They see Jesus face to face.

So, “they will reign with him for a thousand years,” during the whole time from death until Judgment Day. They are kings and queens in God’s kingdom. Everything in heaven and on earth has to serve them, because it all has to serve Christ, alongside whom they rule. They may have lost their earthly lives for their faith, but they aren’t to be pitied. They live and rule. They are blessed.

Sometimes the picture looks bleak for us Christians. It looks like we are losing. But in this scene from Revelation we get to skip ahead to read the last pages of the story–not just of the Bible, but all human history. Don’t worry. Don’t be afraid, even if we die. The truth is, we still live. We reign. We win.

Revelation 20:4 “I saw thrones on which were seated those who had been given authority to judge. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony for Jesus and because of the word of God.”

Through the ages, the world God wants to save has wanted to kill the very people the Lord sends to their rescue. Many of the Old Testament prophets met an untimely death at the hands of the people to whom they were sent. Isaiah was sawed in two on the orders of the king. Several attempts were made to murder Jeremiah. Jewish tradition says he was eventually stoned to death. Zechariah was killed inside of God’s own temple.

Of Jesus’ apostles, John, the writer here, was the only one who died a natural death. Many missionaries since have died at the hands of the people they were trying to reach. When the established Christian churches across Europe became corrupt, many faithful men who tried to reform them and lead them back to the Scriptures were burned at the stake for their efforts.

At the time the Apostle John saw this vision in Revelation, beheading was the favorite method for getting rid of Christian leaders. Feeding them to the lions would come later. John was writing to comfort people who had seen their spiritual leaders put to death this way. The people in his vision are not necessarily, however, limited to those who died under this kind of persecution. It is not out of keeping with John’s vision to see others added to this group by various methods across the span of history.

The reason for killing prophets, preachers, and missionaries was not just to silence their voices. It was also intended to intimidate the Bible-believing Christians who followed them. It could even drive some away from the Christian faith. Christians in our country have been spared this kind of treatment for most of our nation’s history. It has been an island of safety, an odd blip on the historical timeline. This is due in part to the influence of so many persecuted Christians who fled here from the very beginning.

But persecution has not been absent altogether. It grows as American Christianity shrinks. Tolerance for Christian teaching on sex and marriage, the sanctity of life, Jesus as the only way to heaven, etc., has been eroding. People of influence in industry, entertainment, sports, politics, and even religion vilify ideas that can easily be demonstrated to be the teachings of Jesus and his apostles. They regard them not merely as ignorant or misguided. They denounce them as hurtful and evil. The point of the campaign is to shame such beliefs and those who hold them.

The Lord’s reason for showing John these persecuted martyrs of the faith was not to kindle a spirit of revenge or rally believers to violent resistance. We need to guard against those kinds of reactions. That’s not Christ’s way.

But he understood the temptation to despair under persecution, abandon the faith to escape it, and hide our faith to avoid it. These are the inclinations we need to resist. For believers, death always leads to reward, even if that death was violent and unjust. “Thrones” are in view in John’s vision. These martyred believers didn’t die in defeat. They were granted a promotion. We still have every reason to believe, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?” (Hebrews 13:6).

1 Corinthians 9:12 “If others have this right of support from you, shouldn’t we have it all the more? But we did not use this right. On the contrary, we put up with anything rather than hinder the gospel of Christ.”

Paul did not collect a salary from the people to whom he preached. Of course, he had to have some kind of support. Sometimes he received gifts from people on the outside, Christians in other cities who wanted his mission work to succeed. Many times he worked with his own hands. Jewish rabbinical students generally learned a trade in addition to their theological studies. Their teachers recognized the ministry would not work out for all of them, and they needed to have a backup plan so that they didn’t starve. Paul learned how to make tents while he attended seminary with Rabbi Gamaliel. He used this skill to support himself when he began his mission work in Corinth.

So while Paul defended his right to receive a salary, and taught that this was the normal thing for those who preach, he confessed that the thing that really drove him was doing whatever it took to win people to Christian faith. “Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law, I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some” (1 Corinthians 9:19-22).

The apostle is describing different kinds of people in these verses, the kinds of people he met in his mission work. Sometimes he preached to Jews. They still lived under the Old Testament restrictions that forbad pork or shellfish, certain kinds of cloth, and limited activities on the Sabbath. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection made these things optional. He set us free. But Jewish people who were new to Jesus didn’t know that yet. Paul continued to observe these laws so that Jewish people would not automatically dismiss him before he had a chance to tell them about the gospel.

Sometimes Paul preached to Greeks and Romans. They thought Jewish ways and customs were weird. They might be offended if they served Paul pork chops or shrimp scampi and he wouldn’t eat it. Keep in mind that for Paul, growing up Jewish, these foods had always been considered “unclean.” He might have had to work to choke them as we would struggle to eat certain insects or rodents common to other nations’ cuisines. But rather than offend his host and lose the chance to share his faith, Paul “made himself like one not having the (Old Testament) law.” He closed his eyes and swallowed hard “to win those not having the law.” He wasn’t going to let his tastes get in the way of someone’s salvation.

In one way or another, all of these people were “weak.” They did not yet know Jesus. They did not yet know grace and forgiveness. They did not yet know about Christian freedom. They did not yet know how Jesus united people from every culture and made them his own by faith. These were the main things. If it wasn’t sinful and it meant people would let him tell them about Jesus, Paul was willing to give it a try. “I do this all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.”

For this reason Paul even relinquished his rights to a salary, “for the sake of the gospel.” As long as the Lord was keeping him fed, clothed, and housed by other means, he didn’t want a little money to come between some blind soul and salvation. Religious hucksters were part of the religious landscape in his day, too–maybe more than our own. Paul had the truth: this incredible message of God’s love, that God left heaven to become one of us, died in our place, forgave all our sins, and gave us heaven as a guarantee. Maybe if Paul gave the message away for free, people would realize his preaching was sincere. So, he relinquished his rights. He hoped more people would believe.

Today Paul’s example applies to more than paying preachers. It is a model for how all Christians can approach the rights and freedoms Jesus has given them. In the Gospel Jesus has not only set us free from all our sins. He has given us great freedom about our food, our clothes, our worship, other matters of personal taste in various facets of our lives. By all means, defend your rights and keep the free things free. Don’t let anyone take your gospel freedom away. But indulging these rights and freedoms is never so important as loving others and saving their souls. It’s okay to set them aside if it means we can bring someone the gospel.

1 Corinthians 9:7-10 “Who serves as a soldier at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard and does not eat of its grapes? Who tends a flock and does not drink of the milk? Do I say this merely from a human point of view? Doesn’t the Law same the same thing? For it is written in the Law of Moses: ‘Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.’ Is it about oxen that God is concerned? Surely he says this for us, doesn’t he? Yes, this was written for us, because when the plowman plows and the thresher threshes, they ought to do so in the hope of sharing in the harvest.”

 I don’t believe Paul’s pictures are hard to get. When people work at something, they expect to enjoy the fruits of their labor. This is “fair.” This is right. There may be things for which we “volunteer.” But you would likely not show up for work anymore if your employer was making money but you got no paycheck. You would likely stop planting a garden if one hundred percent of your produce were confiscated every year. You might drop out of school if they told you they were keeping no record of your GPA, would not acknowledge your attendance, provided no graduation or diploma, and had nothing to offer for securing employment at the end.

That is how it works in the material, physical, secular world. Does this really have application to spiritual life? God established the principle of paying those who serve his people spiritually as far back as Moses, writer of the first Bible books. It applies to people and work in general, and that means it applies to those whose work is spiritual as well.

This, then, is the conclusion: “If we have sown spiritual seed among you, is it too much if we reap a material harvest from you? If others have this right of support from you, shouldn’t we have it all the more?” Those whose work is teaching and preaching God’s word should be compensated for their work. This is how Paul says it a few verses later: “…the Lord has commanded that those who preach the gospel should receive their living from the gospel” (vs. 14).

That’s the principle. Now here’s the problem: All pastors and all laypeople are essentially sinful, selfish creatures. We are all familiar with the offense and scandals caused by greedy “ministers” who have used their following to fund lavish, indulgent lifestyles. One televangelist told his audience he needed them to donate $54 million so that he could purchase a private luxury jet with a 6000-mile range. It would be the fourth aircraft in his fleet.

He says he needed it to preach the gospel. Truth is, such nonsense creates a barrier for the gospel. A man with whom I had a conversation while I was canvassing his neighborhood had a few questions about my church: “What kind is it? Where is it located? How many attend?” Then he made the comment, “So you want me to come so that you can build up your little church.” His implication didn’t even strike me at first. I think he was saying, “You don’t really care about me. I would be feather in your cap, a notch on your belt, someone to attend and pay and make you more successful.” Why do people think that way about pastors? Because sinful, selfish ministers, and not just the ones on TV, have talked and acted in ways that made their ministries all about the money.

On the other hand, members of churches, and people in the general public, are infected with the same spiritual disease. Many give to support their own spiritual care somewhat grudgingly, or not at all. Historically the average pastor has struggled financially. One woman I know, who grew up in a pastor’s home, said that when she was a little girl (1950’s) she used to dream about chewing meat. The average minister in the United States today is paid $30,000 to $40,000 less per year than people with a similar level of education. On average, clergy make just a little more than a high school graduate working full time.

I am not saying this to complain. My church pays me something close to the average person with a college degree. If a congregation and its pastor want to do this God’s way, then they will work out an arrangement that allows the minister to support his family without creating a scandal–either because he is living in obscene luxury, or because the church is stingy and keeps him just above the poverty line.

I once heard my grandfather say, “The pastor is not in it for the money.” That is true, or should be. This is one profession in which there is no honor, and some shame, for being at the top of the pay grade. But Paul’s message to the Corinthians takes up the other side: For their financial support, preachers have the right to receive an income, too.