My Pockets Are Empty, I Can’t Pay, but I’m More Than Okay
Years ago, when I was the Director of Student Ministry at a church in the North Hills of Pittsburgh, I invited a family to go out to Rita’s Italian Ice with my wife and me. The invitation was accompanied by my kind offer to pay. When we got to Rita’s, I realized I was missing something important – my wallet. I couldn’t pay. I guess I could’ve scrounged up a few coins from the car, but it wouldn’t have covered the bill. Rather than dejectedly heading back to the car and just leaving, I somewhat sheepishly asked my friend to pay, not only for himself and his family, but for me and my wife. He happily paid, because he’s a great guy.
Do you have a mortgage? If you do, remember the bank expects you to pay them back. And not just for the original amount. They are expecting you to express your gratitude by paying them interest. A lot of it. After several years of paying, you could suggest to your bank, “Hey, how about I pay you 50% and you excuse the rest.” They won’t accept, but you could try. They are entirely right to expect full payment. You had an agreement with them, and paying anything less than the full amount, including interest, is unacceptable. Criminal even.
Heidelberg Catechism six says that “God created man good and in His image, that is, in true righteousness and holiness, so that he might rightly know God His Creator, heartily love Him, and live with Him in eternal blessedness to praise and glorify Him.” As the famed Westminster Shorter Catechism one explains, God created humanity to glorify and enjoy Him. We exist to give worship and affection. God requires them; He requires perfect and perpetual obedience, which makes sense.
God created humanity in true righteousness and holiness with the capacity to obey Him. He gave Adam and Eve guidelines which promoted and protected their relationship with Him, a relationship which was their highest good. It was when Adam and Eve decided to violate God’s law that things fell apart. By virtue of their being created by God and placed lovingly beneath His authority, human beings rightfully owe God perfect and perpetual obedience, including adoration, love, praise, worship, joy, etc. When humanity violated God’s perfect law, they failed to pay God what they owed (they had broken the Covenant of Works), what He deserved as their Creator. By their fall into sin and misery, human beings were no longer able to pay in full. In fact, they were unable to pay at all.
Until the reality of your inability to pay what is owed sinks in, you will not understand the payment Christ made for you. Neither will you grasp the importance of Jesus for life and death. Heidelberg Catechism one states that your only comfort in life and death is that Jesus Christ, your faithful Savior, “has fully paid for all [your] sins with His precious blood.” He did not offer a partial payment making salvation possible, if you can pay for the portion he can’t cover; he himself is the full payment, which makes salvation certain. Speaking in financial terms, every penny of your sin debt was paid by Christ to God on the cross. If you accumulated one billion dollars of debt, Jesus paid one billion dollars, not a penny less. How much did you pay? Not a penny. How much did Jesus pay? Every penny.
Believing that your debt was insurmountable, and Jesus’ payment was in full is your only hope of experiencing the joy of being out of debt? Maybe you believe that Jesus paid for all your sins, but then you live in a way that suggests you still owe some of the debt. Did Jesus pay for your justification only to make you pay for your sanctification? No. He paid it all.
You may very well recognize your sin and guilt and still feel like you have something to pay. You may feel like you must do a lot of good things to ensure God is satisfied and your record of debt is canceled (Col. 2:14). You may punish yourself with self-loathing, assuming feeling bad will make up for what Jesus didn’t pay. This isn’t likely your theology, but it may be how you sometimes think and act.
First John 1:7 says, “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.” Several verses later John adds, “He is the propitiation for our sins” (2:2). Our comfort in life and death is not that Jesus pays some and we pay the rest. Our comfort in life and death is that Jesus paid our sin debt in full with the sufficient and efficient payment of himself. We need not nor cannot pay for any of it, considering Jesus has paid it all.
Take heart, brothers and sisters, because there is nothing you have to pay; Christ paid what you couldn’t pay, so that you would be ever grateful for his marvelous grace. As you strive to glorify and enjoy God, you live not to repay what was paid; you live to exult in and magnify the love of Jesus, who paid what you could never repay.
Quotes from the Heidelberg Catechism are taken from Zacharias Ursinus & Jonathan Shirk, The Heidelberg Catechism (Manheim: Small Town Theologian, 2021).
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. May not copy or download more than 500 consecutive verses of the ESV Bible or more than one-half of any book of the ESV Bible.
