![[Photo of a Scripture verse]](https://www.deankwilson.com/Blog_images/Romans_6_23_v02.jpg)
| “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” |
| —Romans 6:23 |
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! 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 don’t pay for a “gift.” A gift is a gift. Nor are wages that you earn because of something you have done a gift either. Wages are paid for what you’ve done. You’ve earned your wages. No one gives you wages and calls it a gift.
So now, we turn to 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 have earned the wages resulting from our sin. We earned those wages. You earned them and I earned them. Our sin extracted a price and that price was paid to us for our sin.
But, the good news is that the gift of God—the substitutionary death of His Son, Jesus, in our place on the cross and Jesus’ resurrection from the dead—has freed us from eternal death. God gave this 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 wages and gifts. It’s important we understand what we’ve earned—eternal death for our sins—and God’s undeserved gift to us of eternal life through His one and only Son.
