What We Owe

Romans 6:15-17 (TPT)

What are we to do, then? Should we sin to our hearts' content since there's no law to condemn us anymore? What a terrible thought! Don't you realise that grace frees you to choose your own master? But choose carefully, for you surrender yourself to become a servant - bound to the one you choose to obey. If you choose to love sin, it will become your master, and it will own you and reward you with death. But if you choose to love and obey God, he will lead you into perfect righteousness. And thanks be to God, for in the past you were servants of sin, but now your obedience is heart deep, and your life is being molded by truth through the teaching you are devoted to.

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I plan to continue looking at the ecclesia soon. I'm learning this a little bit at a time and sharing it with you as I do. In the meantime, something else has come up which I thought was significant.

For those who don't know, I recently started studying philosophy as an addition to my course. That study has started this semester with a subject on morality - good and evil, right and wrong, etc. My readings and lectures for this week are focusing on how religion, among other things, shapes how we understand morality, but as I was reading through, I found myself getting frustrated because there was so much missing or misleading information in them. I decided to post to our class forum, addressing some of the issues I had noticed, and in doing so I had to think very intentionally on a topic that I usually take for granted. God used this reflection to make some things crystal clear to me like never before, and it is one of these things that I want to share with you.

Why should we obey God? What reason do we have to act morally, especially if God has set us free from the consequences of our sin through Christ's death and resurrection? Can we just do whatever we want now, since our debt has been paid? Paul tackles parts of that question in the passage above - I want to take it a step further.

Paul reminds us that what we choose to obey is what will rule over us. If we obey our bodies and our sinful nature, then we will be ruled by our bodies and our sinful nature, and they are very harsh slave masters who will drive you to your death. On the other hand, if we obey God, then God will be our master - one who promises an easy yoke and a light burden. (Mat 11:30)

A little later in Romans, Paul makes this statement: "So then, brothers, we don't owe a thing to our old nature that would require us to live according to our old nature." (Rom 8:12 CJB) Think about it for a second. What have our bodies, your sinful nature, ever done for us? Do they provide us with food, with clothing, with money, with joy, with anything at all? No, the only thing our sinful nature does is separate us from our loving Father, our source of life, and condemn us to death. On the other hand, what has God done for us? What do we owe him? Let's list a few.

Firstly, God created us. "For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb." (Psalms 139:13 NIV) We owe God our very existence. Even the universe we live in was formed by him: "He made heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them. He keeps every promise forever." (Psalms 146:6 NLT) We owe him the world around us.

Secondly, he provides for our every need and sustains us from day to day. "The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing." (Psalms 23:1 NIV) "The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food at the proper time." (Psalms 145:15 NIV) We owe him our food, our drink, our breath, our senses, our health.

Thirdly - and most significantly - God became human (John 1:14), lived a normal life facing all the same temptations as us without giving into them so he could empathise with us (Heb 4:15-16), then died and rose from the dead so that we could be spared of the judgement that we rightfully deserve as morally flawed beings, marred by sin (Rom 8:1-4). Because of this, we owe him our gratitude, our joy, our thanksgiving, our pain, our sadness, our thoughts, our attitudes, our decisions, our actions, ourselves, our way of living, and even our deaths.

There is far more to this list than what I've included here - in fact, this hardly even begins to scratch the surface, because we owe God literally everything. Despite this, all that God asks of us is that we choose to love him with our whole selves, and that we extend his love to the people around us, our fellow human beings. (Mark 12:30-31)

In the face of that kind of debt, with that little a price attached to it, what choice is there but to listen to what God says and obey, especially since God will only ask us to do what is good for us, and obeying him will lead us into a greater life than we could ask, think, or imagine. (Eph 3:20)

Sorry that this has been longer than usual, but I hope it's been an encouragement and a reminder to you all! I know it has been for me, and it has helped put some things back into the right perspective. Let's thank God together for all he's done for us!