[INTRO]
You worked for it. That’s what you tell yourself when the check clears, when the crop comes in, when you sit down after a long day and feel like you’ve earned the rest. Nobody in Climax gets paid for staying home. The paycheck follows the shift. The harvest follows the planting. The world runs on wages, and we like it that way. It feels right. It feels fair.
And we assume God runs the same system.
Be faithful, and God pays up. Show up to church, read your Bible, keep your nose relatively clean — and God will deliver. Skip out on all that, and God docks your pay. It makes perfect sense. Everybody in town operates on this logic, whether they’ve thought about it or not.
And it is completely wrong.
This Sunday — the Second Sunday in Lent, Reminiscere — Paul takes us to the strangest courtroom you’ve ever seen. The defendant is guilty. The evidence is clear. Every mouth is stopped. And the Judge declares him righteous. Not because the case was weak. Not because the defendant made a compelling argument. Because the Judge paid the fine himself.
Here’s what I want you to see: God does not justify the godly. He justifies the ungodly. And until you hear this as good news — until you hear it as the only news that can actually save you — you haven’t heard the gospel.
[THE PROBLEM]
Keeping Score
We are all scorekeepers. Every last one of us.
We keep track of who showed up and who didn’t. Who put in the work and who coasted. Who deserves a break and who had it coming. We file these things away without even thinking about it — mental ledgers running in the background of every relationship we have. And we assume God keeps the same ledger.
“Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due” (Romans 4:4).
Paul names the system. He calls it the economy of wages — ὀφείλημα (opheilema), a debt owed. Under this system, God is your employer. You put in your hours of faithfulness, and he owes you. You show up to church, tithe your income, raise your kids in the faith — and God had better deliver. That is not faith. That is a contract. And the moment you treat your relationship with God as a contract, grace is off the table. You cannot call a paycheck a gift.
Do you see the trap? If God owes you for your obedience, then everything you receive is a wage, not a mercy. And if it’s a wage, you’d better hope your hours are sufficient. You’d better hope your performance review comes back clean. Because under the economy of wages, there is no grace — only what you’ve earned and what you haven’t.
And the problem with the contract is not that God fails to keep his end. The problem is that your account is overdrawn.
Paul has spent three chapters proving this — Romans 1 through 3. Every mouth is stopped. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. There is no one righteous, not even one. If God deals in wages, we are bankrupt. Every one of us. The man who hasn’t missed a Sunday in forty years and the man whose truck is at the bar every Saturday night — both overdrawn. Both unable to cover the debt.
Here’s what we miss about Abraham. We turn him into a moral hero. Be brave like Abraham! Step out in faith! Take the risk! Sunday school flannel graphs of a noble patriarch striding boldly into the unknown. But that is not what the text says. Listen to what Joshua tells Israel centuries later:
“Long ago, your fathers lived beyond the Euphrates, Terah the father of Abraham and of Nahor; and they served other gods” (Joshua 24:2).
Abraham was an idolater. His family worshiped the moon god in Ur of the Chaldeans. He did not earn God’s call. He did not build an impressive spiritual resume. He did not raise his hand at a revival meeting. God broke into a pagan household and said Lech-lecha — “Go.” Sheer initiative. No audition. No application. No resume required.
The Hebrew is striking. לֶךְ־לְךָ — an imperative followed by an ethical dative. “Go, for yourself.” It appears only twice in Abraham’s story: here in Genesis 12, when God sends him away from his past, and again in Genesis 22, when God demands his future. Abraham’s entire life is framed between these two commands, and in neither case did he do anything to deserve the call. The first lech-lecha comes to a pagan. The second comes to a father asked to give up everything.
And then there’s Nicodemus. The Gospel reading gives us Israel’s teacher showing up in the dark (John 3:1-2). A ruler of the Jews. A Pharisee. A man with every credential the religious world could offer. He comes to Jesus at night — and John’s Gospel uses darkness as a theological symbol; Nicodemus comes in the dark because he is in the dark — with his resume in hand: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God.”
And Jesus doesn’t congratulate him. Jesus tells him he has to start over entirely. “Unless one is born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). The word ἄνωθεν (anothen) means “from above” — not “again,” as if you could repeat the process. This is not a second try. This is a birth that originates in God, from God’s side, by God’s initiative. A baby does not cause its own birth. A dead person does not raise himself.
“That which is born of flesh is flesh” (John 3:6). Flesh cannot transcend itself. All that learning, all that moral seriousness, all that religious devotion — and it cannot produce the new birth. The best religious resume in Israel was worth exactly nothing in the kingdom.
In Climax, we know what scorekeeping sounds like. I’ve been going to church my whole life. I raised my kids right. I never missed a Sunday. I put my money in the plate. And then comes the quiet thought — the one you don’t say out loud: So why isn’t God holding up his end? Why is my marriage falling apart? Why are my kids walking away? Why does everything feel so hard?
That’s the economy of wages. And it always ends in one of two places. Pride — if you think your account is in the black. Despair — if you know it isn’t. There is no third option. Not under this system.
I do this. You do too. We keep score with God because it’s the only economy the human heart knows. We assume that if we put in enough, we’ll get enough out. And it never occurs to us that the whole system is broken — that we are not employees negotiating wages but beggars in need of a gift.
The Augsburg Confession, Article IV, says it as plainly as it can be said: “People are freely justified for Christ’s sake, through faith, when they believe that they are received into favor and that their sins are forgiven for Christ’s sake.” Freely. Not as wages. Not as reward. For Christ’s sake — not for yours.
So if the godly can’t earn it and the ungodly don’t deserve it — where does that leave us?