daily java

Daily Java:

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.  (Romans 6:23)

America is the land of the self-made millionaire, the land of doing things yourself. Or, at least, it used to be.

People always admired those who made their own way, the rags to riches story, coming from nowhere and working their way to the top.

And that is admirable. Nobody really likes to be given anything in life. Not really. We appreciate most the things we earn.

I remember layaway. You rarely see it anymore, but it was good. You paid on something for a while and when you got it out of layaway, it was paid for, all yours. With credit, you pay for it plus interest. A lot of our problem as a culture is that we get so much on credit that we never own anything.

But then comes grace. Grace is totally different from life. In life, we want to work for things and not be given them.

In grace we are given these things. We cannot work for them.

In fact, if we work our way towards anything in grace, we work our way towards death. God gives us grace.

And that is hard to realize. In John 6:28, those who were trying to understand asked Jesus, What must we do to do the works God requires? What they wanted want is a list of things to do, a checklist of requirements. If you finished them, God would be happy and give you life. But Jesus replied in verse 29, The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.

The work is belief. Now at one time in the past, I thought that meant that faith was a work, so therefore even your believing was engaging in a work. I wanted works that I could do to justify myself.

But you cannot do anything to justify yourself. All you can do is surrender to God. Even your faith is given to you. John 6:44 says No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them.

The work is belief like the law is love. They are things that are somewhat mutually exclusive. You cannot work by believing any more than you can have love mandated. But yet, that is what God said.

So what does that mean? Does it mean that there is nothing we can do in God’s service? All we can do is sit around and wait for God to bring us to him?

No. but what it means is that the works we do are because we love him, not in order to make him love us. He already loves us and has already chosen us. All we do is accept his choice.

Then, as Ephesians 2:8-10 says, we do what we do because he loves us.  

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

This is the illogic of the gospel spoken of in 1 Corinthians 1. God just made it different than we would if we were him. In him, we are made to do good things. We do not do good things to be made. If we could do stuff to earn his grace, it would no longer be grace. It would be wages.

And as the word says, the wages of sin is death. Earn yourself anywhere, it is to hell. Accept the gift of heaven and you are in him.