Audio Transcript
You do something nice for someone. You invite a struggling neighbor over for dinner. You take a friend who you know is suffering out for coffee. You give a family at church some money to get through a rough season. You help someone, and in the back of your mind, you wonder: Am I doing this because I’m a good person? Or am I doing this because I want God to reward me for it later? And if I am doing it for future reward, then in the moment, it can all feel transactional, right? Like we’re engaged in an under-the-table deal with God that the person we serve doesn’t know about. Today on Ask Pastor John: Does God owe you?
This important question comes from an anonymous listener to the podcast who writes, “Pastor John, thank you for your ministry and for this podcast avenue to ask questions. I have one for you. You have famously built your theology on the idea that Jesus entices us with rewards to sustain our love, specifically in Luke 14:14 [which we read tomorrow], where Jesus promises we will be ‘repaid,’ antapodothēsetai, in the kingdom for inviting the poor to our banquets in this life. This very incentive motivates the kindness. Yet, you also fiercely oppose what you call ‘the debtor’s ethic,’ using Romans 4:4 to argue that any wage reckoned ‘as his due,’ kata opheilēma, nullifies grace.
“So, here’s the challenge I see: If I feed the poor because I am pursuing a future payout from God, have I not operationalized this into a business transaction of grace? If the promise of repayment is the sustaining power of the act, doesn’t the poor man become a mere tool to my reward rather than an object of my love? And how can seeking a divine ‘repayment’ be anything other than working for a wage?”
This is a really important question. Just a few days ago, I was discussing this very question with Dieudonné Tamfu, a friend from Cameroon, as we sat in Olive Garden sipping our soup and eating breadsticks (which is one of the reasons I go to Olive Garden: the breadsticks).
And the way we were posing the question was this: Well, if it is wrong to speak of earning rewards from God — and I think it is wrong to use the word earn in relation to God — how do you describe the correlation between our obedience and the rewards we receive for it, if not earning? It’s the same question that our friend is asking when he or she says (I’m not sure who’s asking the question), “How can seeking a divine ‘repayment’ be anything other than working for a wage?” That’s the key question.
What Do We Give God?
Now, here’s the problem. Jesus says in Luke 14:13–14, “When you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.” And the word repaid there is a word that certainly can be used for earning wages. It can be. So, it looks like our obedience to Jesus to bless the poor with our feasts is a way of earning his payback, earning a wage.
“Even the giving of our service to God is a gift from God. Our willing is owing to his willing. Our working is owing to his grace.”
But here’s the catch. The very same word for payback, antapodothēsetai, is used in Romans 11:35 like this: “Who has given a gift to [God] that he might be repaid?” It’s the exact same word and form of the word. And the implied answer, of course, is nobody. Nobody has given a gift to God that he might be repaid. “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen” (Romans 11:36). In other words, it is a fundamental biblical truth that the only thing we can give to God is what he already owns.
Here’s the way David prays in 1 Chronicles 29:14: “Who am I, and what is my people, that we should be able thus to offer willingly? For all things come from you [O God], and of your own have we given you.” Here’s the way God himself puts it (and this is what Paul is quoting in Romans 11). God himself in Job 41:11 says, “Who has first given to me, that I should repay him? [Nobody.] Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine.” Paul says the same thing again in Acts 17:25: God is not “served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.” In other words, we can’t give God anything that is not already his. And so, you can’t put him in your debt by supplying some need.
But that’s what wages are. They are paying a worker what you owe him because he supplied you with a service that you needed, and now you are in his debt to pay him. That’s what justice demands. We can never do that to God. Who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid? Paul says, nobody. “What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as [though it were not a gift]?” (1 Corinthians 4:7).
Gift of Grace
But someone might say, “Well, yes, you can’t give to God anything that is not already his, but the giving itself — the act of giving — might be the service that he pays back with a wage.” Maybe that’s it, but that doesn’t work because even the act of our serving or giving is a gift of God’s grace.
This is really clear in 1 Corinthians 15:10: “By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, [and then he adds this:] though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.” So, Paul is saying that after we are justified by grace alone through faith alone, even our obedience, our act, our giving, our serving, is a gift of God’s grace, a working of God’s grace. “It was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. That’s what was decisive in enabling me to do what I ought to do.”
This is what he says again in Philippians 2:12–13: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will [that’s the key] and to work for his good pleasure.” So, our working is first the working of God. He works through our working. We work by his working. This is what Hebrews 13:20–21 says: “Now may the God of peace . . . equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.” Of course, “to whom be glory.” He gets the glory because he worked it in us.
And all this was prophesied in Ezekiel 36:27. It’s part of the new covenant framework in which we live that our obedience was bought with the blood of Jesus. “I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.”
Beauty of Obedience
The point of all those texts is that even the giving of our service to God is a gift from God. God causes us to walk in paths of obedience for his name’s sake. He works it in us. Our willing is owing to his willing. Our working is owing to his grace, so we cannot put God in our debt. We can’t give to him what he doesn’t have, and we can’t offer him service that he does not provide first. Like 1 Peter 4:11 says, we serve in the strength that God himself supplies. So, we can’t earn anything from God, because earn means that we supply a labor or a service or a product that puts someone in our debt so that they owe us. But we can never put God in our debt. He never owes us anything. All his gifts and all his rewards are undeserved grace.
So, the question is, okay, what, then, is the correlation? That’s what we were discussing at the Olive Garden table. What is the correlation between our obedience to Christ and our rewards from Christ? God clearly rewards obedience. It’s inescapable. He rewards, and he rewards proportionately. They can even sometimes be called wages — they can — and repayment, because that’s what they look like at the human level.
But in reality, that’s not what they are. They’re not wages the way humans earn wages. Rather — here’s my answer now — they are God’s way of declaring the beauty of the obedience of faith. Rewards are God’s way of declaring the beauty of the obedience of faith. God loves to be trusted for his grace and power. It honors him. And when we trust him and do what he says, he doesn’t get richer; his riches are put on display. This is the beautiful thing. This is the beauty of obedience, the obedience of faith. God shows his delight in this beauty — this trusting him in obedience — he shows his delight in this beauty by rewarding it.
So, the answer to the question is this: When we are seeking a reward, we are not seeking a wage or a payback. We are seeking the expressions of God’s delight in his own grace in our lives.
