Rrack-rracked

Rrack-rracked

All need to be made right with God by his grace, which is a free gift. They need to be made free from sin through Jesus Christ. God gave him as a way to forgive sin through faith in the blood of Jesus. (Rom. 3:24-25)

Remember the good ol' days when credit cards were imprinted by hand? The clerk would take your plastic and place it in the imprint machine, and rrack-rrack, the numbers would be registered and the purchase would be made. I learned how to operate an imprint machine at a Sears’s store where I worked in sporting goods. For about a dollar an hour I sold all sorts of sports stuff. My favorite task, however, was imprinting the customer’s credit cards, usually a Sears card. There's nothing like the surge of power you feel when you run the imprinter over the plastic. I'd usually steal a glance at the customer and watch him or her wince as I rrack-rracked his card.

Credit card purchases today aren't nearly as dramatic. Nowadays the magnetic strip is swiped or inserted in a slot. No noise. No drama. No pain. Bring back the rrack-rrack days when the purchase was announced for everyone to hear. Buying some sporting goods? Rrack-rrack. Charge some clothes? Rrack-rrack. Paying for dinner? Rrack-rrack. If the noise didn't get you, the statement at the end of the month would. Thirty days is ample time to rrack up enough purchases to rrack your budget. And a lifetime is plenty of time to rrack up some major debt in heaven.

You yell at your kids, rrack-rrack. Covet a friend's car, rrack-rrack. Envy your neighbor's success, rrack-rrack. Break a promise, rrack-rrack. Lie, rrack-rrack. Lose control, rrack-rrack. Rrack-rrack, rrack-rrack, rrack-rrack. Further and further in debt. Now, initially, we attempt to repay what we owe. So, every prayer is a check written, and each good deed is a payment made. If we can do one good act for every bad act, then won't our account kind of balance out in the end? If I can counter my cussing with compliments, and my vices with victories – then won't my account be justified? It would, except for two problems. First, I don't know the cost of each sin. The price of a baseball at Sears is easy to figure. The cost of a sin? Not so much.

What, for example, is the charge for getting mad in traffic? I get ticked off at some guy who cuts in front of me, for instance. What do I do to pay for my crime? Drive fifty in a fifty-five mile per hour zone? Give a wave and a smile to ten consecutive cars? Who knows? Or what if I wake up in a bad mood? What's the charge for a couple of mopey hours? Will one church service next Sunday offset one grumpy morning today? And what qualifies as a bad mood? Is the charge for grumpiness less on cloudy days than on sunny ones? Or am I permitted a certain number of grouchy days per year? Kind of like sick leave. It can get confusing.

And not only don't I know the cost of my sins, I don't always know the occasion of my sins. There are times when I sin and I don't even know it. How do I pay for those? Do I get an exemption based on ignorance? And what about the sins I'm committing now without realizing it? What if somebody somewhere discovers it’s a sin to play golf? Or what if God thinks the way I play golf is a sin? Not good. I'll have some serious settling up to do. And what about you? Any sins of omission on this month's statement? Did you miss a chance to do good? Overlook an opportunity to forgive? Neglect an open door to serve? Did you seize every chance to encourage your friends? Rrack-rrack, rrack-rrack, rrack-rrack.

And there are other concerns, too. The grace period, for example. My credit card allows a minimal payment and then rolls the debt into the next month. Does God? Will he let me pay off today's greed next year? And what about interest? If I leave a sin on my statement for several months, does it incur more sin? And speaking of the statement . . . . Where is it? Can I see it? Who has it? How do I pay it off? There it is.

That's the question, isn’t it? How do I deal with the debt I owe to God? Deny it? My conscience won't let me. Find worse sins in others? God won't fall for that. Claim lineage immunity? Family pride won't help. Try to pay it off? I could, but that takes us back to the problem. We don't know the cost of our sin. In fact, we don't even know how much we owe. So, what do we do?

Listen to Paul's answer. “All need to be made right with God by his grace, which is a free gift. They need to be made free from sin through Jesus Christ. God gave him as a way to forgive sin through faith in the blood of Jesus.” (Rom. 3:24-25) Simply put: the cost of your sin is more than you can afford to pay. The gift of your God is more than you can imagine. "A person is made right with God through faith," Paul explains, "not through obeying the law." (v. 28) This may very well be the most difficult spiritual truth for us to embrace. For some reason, people accept Jesus as Lord before they accept him as Savior. It's easier to comprehend his power than his mercy. We’ll celebrate the empty tomb long before we'll kneel at the cross. We, like Thomas, would die for Christ before we'd let Christ die for us. We aren't alone, however. We aren't the first to struggle with Paul's presentation of grace. Apparently, the first ones to doubt the epistle to the Romans were the first ones to read it. In fact, you get the impression that Paul expects some questions. It’s like Paul lifting his pen and imagining his readers – some squirming, some doubting, and some denying. Anticipating their thoughts, he deals with their objections head-on.

The first objection comes from the pragmatist. "Do we destroy the law by following the way of faith?" (Rom. 3:31) The concern here is motivation. "If I'm not saved by my works, then why work? If I'm not saved by the law, then why keep the law? If I'm not saved by what I do, then why do anything?" You've got to admit, grace is a little risky. There’s a chance that people will take it to an extreme. There’s the possibility that people will abuse God's goodness. A word about that Sears card might be helpful here. I have a simple rule about credit cards: own as few as possible, and pay them off as soon as you can. I don’t like paying interest to a bank; I get so little from them in return, anyway. So, if it’s at all possible, I try to pay the balance in full at the end of each month.

So, you can imagine my children’s surprise when my wife and I put a credit card in their hand the day they left for college. Standing in the driveway with the car packed and farewells said, we handed it to them. Our only instructions were, "Be careful how you use it." Pretty risky, don't you think? And as they were driving away to college, it probably occurred to them that they were now free. They could go anywhere they wanted. They had wheels and a tank of gas, their clothes, money in their pocket and a stereo in the trunk. And, most of all, they had a credit card. The shackles were off. They could have been in Mexico before nightfall. So, what was to keep them from going wild? That’s the question of the pragmatist. What’s to keep us from going wild? If worshiping doesn't save me, why worship? If giving doesn't save me, then why give? If my morality doesn't save me, then watch out. Jude warns of this attitude when he speaks of people who "abuse his grace as an opportunity for immorality." (Jude 4) Later, Paul will counter his critics with the question, "So do you think we should continue sinning so that God will give us even more grace? No!" (Rom. 6:1-2) Or as one translator writes, "What a ghastly thought!"

A ghastly thought, indeed. Grace promoting evil? Mercy endorsing sin? What a horrible idea. The apostle uses the strongest Greek idiom possible to repudiate the idea: Me genoito. The phrase literally means, "may it never be!" As he has already said, God's "kindness is meant to lead you to repentance." (Rom. 2:4) Someone who sees grace as permission to sin has missed grace entirely. Mercy understood is holiness desired. "[Jesus] gave himself for us so he might pay the price to free us from all evil and to make us pure people who belong only to him – people who are always wanting to do good deeds." (Titus 2:14) Note that last phrase: "people who are always wanting to do good deeds." Grace fosters an eagerness for good. Grace doesn't spawn a desire to sin. If one has truly embraced God's gift, he will not mock it. In fact, if a person uses God's mercy as a liberty to sin, you wonder whether that person ever knew God's mercy at all.

When we gave the kids their credit card, we didn't attach a list of rules and regulations. There was no contract for them to sign or rules to read. We didn't make them place their hand on the Bible and pledge to reimburse us for any expenses. In fact, we didn't ask for any repayment at all. And, as things turned out, they went a few weeks into the semester without ever using it. Why? Because we gave them more than a card – we gave them our trust. And where they might break our rules, they weren’t about to abuse our trust. God's trust makes us eager to do right. That’s the genius of grace. The law can show us where we do wrong, but it can't make us eager to do what’s right. Grace can. Or as Paul answers, "Faith causes us to be what the law truly wants." (Rom. 3:31)

The second objection to grace comes from those who are cautious of anything new. "Don't give me any of this new-fangled teaching. Just give me the law. If it was good enough for Abraham, it’s good enough for me." "All right, let me tell you about the faith of your father, Abraham," Paul answers. "If Abraham was made right by the things he did, he had a reason to brag. But this is not God's view, because the Scripture says, 'Abraham believed God, and God accepted Abraham's faith, and that faith made him right with God.'" (Rom. 4:2-3) These words must have stunned the Jews because Paul points to Abraham as a prototype of grace, not works. The Jews upheld Abraham as a man who was blessed because of his obedience. Not the case, argues Paul. The first book in the Bible says that Abraham "believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness." (Gen. 15:6) It was his faith, not his works that made him right with God.

Five times in six verses Paul uses the word credit. The term is common in financing. To credit an account is to make a deposit. If I credit your account, then I either increase your balance or lower your debt. Wouldn't it be nice if someone credited your credit card account? All month long you rrack-rrack up the bills, dreading the day the statement comes in the mail. Then, when it comes, you leave it on your desk for a few days, not wanting to see how much you owe. Finally, you force yourself to open the envelope. With one eye closed and the other open, you peek at the number. What you read causes the other eye to pop open. "A zero balance?" There must be a mistake. So you call the bank that issued the card. "Yes," the representative explains, "your account is paid in full. A person who wishes to remain anonymous sent us a check to cover your debt." You can't believe your ears. "How do you know their check is good?" "Oh, there’s no doubt. Your benefactor has been paying off people's debts for years."

Jesus would love to do the same. And he can. He has no personal debt at all. And, what's more, he’s been doing it for years. For proof, Paul reaches into the two-thousand-year-old file marked "Abram of Ur" and pulls out a statement. The statement has its share of charges. Abram was far from perfect. There were times when he trusted the Egyptians before he trusted God. He even lied, telling Pharaoh that his wife was his sister. But Abram made one decision that changed his eternal life: "He trusted God to set him right instead of trying to be right on his own." (Rom. 4:3) Here’s a man justified by faith before his circumcision (v. 10), before the law (v. 13), before Moses and the Ten Commandments. Here’s a man justified by faith before the cross. The sin-covering blood of Calvary extends as far into the past as it does into the future.

We must not see grace as a provision made after the law had failed. Grace was offered before the law was revealed. Indeed, grace was offered before man was created. "You were bought, not with something that ruins like gold or silver, but with the precious blood of Christ, who was like a pure and perfect lamb. Christ was chosen before the world was made, but he was shown to the world in these last times for your sake." (1 Pet. 1:18-20) But why would God offer grace before we needed it? Good question.

God doesn't want us to sin. But he knows us. "He made their hearts and understands everything they do." (Ps. 33:15) "He knows how we were made." (Ps. 103:14) And he knew that we would someday need his grace. Grace is nothing new. God's mercy predates Paul and his readers, predates David and Abraham; it even predates creation. God's grace is older than your sin, and greater than your sin. Sound too good to be true?

That's the third objection. Just as there was a pragmatist who said grace is too risky, and a traditionalist who said grace is too new, there was likely a skeptic who said, "That’s too good to be true." This is by far the most common objection to grace. Questions of a young man who spent two university years saying yes to the flesh and no to God. A young woman who wonders if God could forgive an abortion she had a decade ago. A father who’s just realized he'd devoted his life to work and neglected his kids. All are wondering if they've overextended their credit line with God. They aren't alone. The vast majority of people simply state, "God may give grace to you, but not to me. You see, I've charted the waters of failure. I've pushed the envelope too many times. I'm not your typical sinner. I'm guilty of ___________________." And they fill in the blank. How would you fill in yours?

Is there a chapter in your biography that condemns you? A valley of your heart too deep for the firstborn Son to reach? If you think there’s no hope, then Paul has a person he wants you to meet. Our barren past reminds the apostle of Sarah's barren womb. God had promised Sarah and Abram a child. In fact, the name Abram meant "exalted father." God even changed Abram's name to Abraham, “Father of many.” But still no son. Forty years passed before the promise was honored. Don't you think the conversation became dreadfully routine for Abraham? "What’s your name?" "Abraham." "Oh, 'father of many'! What a great title. Tell me, how many sons do you have?" Abraham would sigh and answer, "None." God had promised a child, but Abraham had no son.

He left his home for an unknown land, but no son was born. He overcame famine, but still had no son. His nephew Lot came and went, but still no son. He would have encounters with angels and Melchizedek but still be without an heir. By now Abraham was ninety-nine, and Sarah wasn’t much younger. She knitted and he played solitaire, and both chuckled at the thought of bouncing a boy on their bony knees. He lost his hair, she lost her teeth, and neither spent a lot of time lusting for the other. But somehow they never lost hope. Occasionally, he'd think of God's promise and give her a wink, and she'd give him a smile and think, “Well, God did promise us a child, didn't he?” When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn't do, but on what God said he would do.

Abraham didn't focus on his impotence and say, "It's hopeless. This hundred-year-old body could never have a child." Nor did he survey Sarah's decades of infertility and give up. He didn't tiptoe around God's promise cautiously asking skeptical questions. He plunged into the promise and came up strong, ready for God. That's why it’s said, "Abraham was declared fit before God by trusting God to set him right." (Rom. 4:18-21) Everything was gone. No youth. No vigor. No strength. The get-up-and-go had got up and gone. All old Abe and Sarah had was a social-security check and a promise from heaven. But Abraham decided to trust the promise rather than focus on the problems. And, as a result, the Medicare couple was the first to bring a crib into the nursing home.

Do we have much more than Abraham and Sarah? Not really. There's not a one of us who hasn't rrack-rracked up more bills than we could ever pay. But there's not a one of us who has to remain in debt. The same God who gave a child to Abraham has promised grace to us, too. So, what's more incredible, Sarah telling Abraham that he was a daddy, or God calling you and me righteous? Both are absurd. Both are too good to be true. But both are from God.

Grace,

Randy