| For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. |
| —Romans 6:23 |
Here’s a scenario for you to consider:
It’s your birthday. Your Aunt Sally approaches you with those ruby-red-painted lips of hers that you used to dread when you were four or five years old. Remember those kisses she always planted on your cheek? No matter how hard you seemed to scrub, that lipstick would not come off easily! Nevertheless, here comes Aunt Sally carrying a medium-size box wrapped in colorful paper with cartoon drawings of balloons all over it.
Aunt Sally smiles as she hands you the box. “Happy Birthday, Sweetie!” she says with a smile.
“Thank you, Aunt Sally,” you dutifully reply.
“That will be $29.95,” Sally intones.
“What?” you reply.
“I said that will be $29.95 for your gift,” Sally repeats.
You stand there immobilized by the shock of it all. Pay for my gift? you think to yourself. That’s absurd! How can it be a “gift” if I have to pay for it?
And, there it is. You can’t pay for a “gift.” You simply don’t pay for a “gift.” After all, a gift is a gift.
Furthermore, wages that you earn because of something you have done is certainly not a gift either. Wages are paid for what you’ve done. You’ve earned your wages. No reasonable person pays you wages and calls it a gift.
Please take note of what the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 6:23:
For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
We surely have earned the “wages” resulting from our sin. Yes! We most definitely earned those wages. You earned them and I earned them. Our sin extracted a price, and that price was justly paid to us for our sin.
However, the good news is that the “gift of God”—the substitutionary death of His Son, Jesus, in our place on the cross, along with Jesus’ resurrection from the dead—has freed us from sin, from the power of Satan, and from eternal death. God gave this redemption to us as His special gift of love. We did nothing, absolutely nothing, to earn this salvation. It’s a gift. In fact, it’s the most precious gift we could ever receive.
As another new day begins, we need to make certain that we make the distinction between spiritual wages and spiritual gifts. It’s important we understand what we’ve earned as our wages—eternal death for our sins—and God’s undeserved gift to us of eternal life, through His one and only Son, Jesus.
