I Cannot Repay My Debt

When I hit the low point in my life and I felt I had nowhere to turn I called out to God and he answered my prayer. He pulled me out of the darkness and into his marvelous light.¹ That was just over ten years ago now, and sometimes when I look back at that time I feel a pang of guilt for only calling out to him when I felt there was no place else to go.

When I think about this I marvel at God’s unbounded love and the loyalty he showed to me when I neither loved him nor was loyal to him, and then I wonder, “how can I ever pay that back?” I did not deserve it and yet there he was. God was always there, just waiting for me to come to him.

But it goes beyond even this, because then I think about how he sent his son to earth in the form of a man to be rejected, tortured, and murdered for our sins, taking on the punishment we deserved and again I ask, “how can I repay my debt?”

The truth is that I can never pay him back for the peace he gave me in my time of distress. And I can never pay him back for his death on the cross in my place.

You Cannot Repay Your Debt

But I am not alone, all of us who are saved owe God this debt that we cannot repay because none of us deserved God’s grace and mercy in the first place. We are all sinners who deserve God’s punishment and yet he shows us grace because he loves us and wants us to turn to him. How could we possibly repay that debt?

We can do nothing to earn our salvation, and we can do nothing to repay the debt, because it is by God’s grace alone that we have been saved. That’s what makes God’s love for us so astounding: even while we were sinners Christ died for us.²

Slaves for Christ

I remember those shows on television when I was young where a person saved someone’s life and that person had to become the other person’s slave. Usually this led to hilarity and a scheme to free the person from this debt.

But this is no joke. God saved my life and God saved your life, and we have become his slaves.

¹⁶ Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? ¹⁷ But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, ¹⁸ and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.³

²² But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.⁴

The word slave is uncomfortable for many people today, and some bibles translate the Greek word δούλος (doúlos) and the Hebrew word עֶבֶד (ʿeved) as servant, but the sentiment is basically the same.

Many times in the Bible the word translated as slave has the connotation of an indentured servant; a man who cannot repay his debt so he sells himself as a laborer until he has worked off the debt. (See Exodus 21:2 and Leviticus 25:39-41.)

Although we cannot repay our debt to God and will be his forever, this is the sense of the word we are using today. We are to do God’s will, to serve him, because he has redeemed us and we love him.

We Love our Master

In the old testament there were provisions made for a slave who loved his master and wanted to stay with him even when he was freed.

⁵ But if the slave plainly says, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free,’ ⁶ then his master shall bring him to God, and he shall bring him to the door or the doorpost. And his master shall bore his ear through with an awl, and he shall be his slave forever.⁵

It goes without saying that I am not talking about body mutilation, but this is exactly how we should feel about God. He is our master but we love him, we want to be his forever and we want to serve him forever because he has set us free from our previous master–sin.

Behold, My slaves will shout joyfully with a merry heart,⁶

We cannot work off the debt, all we have to offer to God in return for what he has done for us is to give him our hearts, minds, bodies, and souls, and that is all he wants in the first place.

Serving God

The next logical question is; how do we serve God? We serve God by giving ourselves over completely to him, we should surrender to him. This is what it means to give him our hearts, minds, bodies, and souls.

We must put our faith and our trust in him while pushing away anything that is ungodly and sinful. We must let God create a clean heart within us.⁷

And this means submitting to his will and becoming subservient to him. A slave must obey his master’s commands, and we will do this willingly because we love him.

¹⁵ “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.⁸

The last command Jesus gave to his followers was to go and make disciples of the world.⁹ We love God and we are indebted to him for saving our lives, so why wouldn’t we want to share with others the news of what he did for us? Why wouldn’t we want others to feel the love of God, or to experience his grace?

If we love others as we love ourselves¹⁰ we would love them enough to tell them about the saving grace of Jesus Christ. What better way to serve God and to show others our love for him than to spread the word of Christ’s atoning and substitutionary death on the cross for all of us?

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1. See 1 Peter 2:9 ESV ↩︎
2. See Romans 5:8 ↩︎
3. Romans 6:16-18 ESV ↩︎
4. Romans 6:22 ESV ↩︎
5. Exodus 21:5-6 ESV ↩︎
6. Isaiah 65:14 LSB ↩︎
7. See Psalm 51:10 ↩︎
8. John 14:15 ESV ↩︎
9. See Matthew 28:19-20 ↩︎
10. See Matthew 22:39 ↩︎