Paying It Forward

When it comes to relating to God, would you rather “pay it forward” or “pay it back”?

That seemed to be the best way to describe the Gospel to a positive and enthusiastic young lady named Kamala, whom I found doing her own car maintenance, due to the tragic loss of her husband fairly recently.

After the recorded part of our conversation, Kamala described herself as coming back to God after some dark times and I think our conversation might have helped her keep heading in that direction. But it was only because I had asked her some rather perplexing questions and challenged some of her initial assumptions about God.

She knew, from her past church experience, that there is “glory, honor and peace for everyone who does good” (Romans 2) and that “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6), and she definitely sees herself as counted among those who do good, and, therefore, heaven bound.
I had to push back a little at this. “Does that mean you are a better person than those who are condemned?” I asked. “Well, no, I think I just make better decisions. I learn from my mistakes and don’t continue doing the same sins” she told me, not quite convinced herself.

Kamala saw herself in the “those who do good” category and not in the “wages of sin” group, but she didn’t really want to put it that way. So I had to ask another hard question. “So if you could be a good enough person, then you wouldn’t really need Jesus, right?”

Hmm. That can’t be right either. Kamala knows we are supposed to need Jesus. After all, He is to be our Savior, and that means we need to be saved. “Maybe Jesus made a way for us to be saved, but we need to prove that we deserve it by doing good deeds in addition?”

But the Bible says we are saved by grace, through faith and not by works. “Faith” means to trust in Jesus and not in ourselves or our own good works. We can’t save ourselves, not by any amount of good that we might try to do to “pay back” God for the bad things we’ve done.

This is where I think Kamala realized that we can’t “pay it back” when it comes to doing good to make up for past sins. The wages of sin is death, and that’s a debt none of us can afford to pay.

Only Jesus is the one who could make that sin payment for us. Being sinless and guiltless, Jesus had no need to “pay it back” for His own sins. Instead, He was able to “pay it forward’, allowing His good works to apply to our account. His life, death and resurrection paid our debt, and gives us the freedom to “pay it forward” with our own good deeds as well.

What a much better way to live life – not always having to “pay it back” under the debt of our sin. We can have the freedom to “pay it forward”, expressing gratitude to God for freeing us from our debt and sharing our joy and freedom with others around us.