Wages

 October 27, 2024

A couple days ago we began laying the foundation of the Christian life with Romans 3:23—“All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Today we look at the second foundation stone; Romans 6:23: 

“The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ, our Lord.”

First of all, notice the difference between wages and gift. Wages are what we get in exchange for our work. We earn them. A gift on the other hand, is not, and cannot be earned. If it is earned, by definition it can’t be a gift. 

What this means is this: missing the mark earns us death. We might not like those wages; we might think we deserve something different, just like we wouldn’t like getting paid less than we bargained for when we took the job. Here’s the deal: you might not have known what the wages were, but that doesn’t change them. The wages of sin is death.

The other side of this is the gift. If it’s a gift, we cannot earn eternal life. Work all you want; it’ll never be enough. Because the only way we can obtain it is to receive it as a gift. If we try to gain eternal life by working for it, we’ll never get it because the price is beyond our ability to pay. It’s always and only obtainable by receiving it as a gift. The gift of God is eternal life. Tomorrow we’ll look at how we can make it our own.