What do you Deserve?

Romans 6:23, Psalm 103:10

It seems like advertisers are telling me all the time what I deserve. You deserve a vacation. You deserve luxury. You deserve the best. They’re trying to get at my inner self, that thinks that “yeah, I have worked hard. Oh yeah, I am a special person. So I shouldn’t worry about spending extra money on nice things for myself.” And buy their products.

But what do I truly deserve? When it comes to spiritual things sometimes we think in a similar fashion to those advertisers what they’re trying to get us to think, that “yeah I have been a good person. Yes I am special and so God should declare me to be his child. God should prosper me and bless me in so many ways. God should give me heaven because I’ve been faithful. I go to church every Sunday, I give a full 10% of my income to the Lord and his work, I deserve it.”

But God tells us in his word what we really deserve in Romans chapter 6 he says

For the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23)

See, for us, we so often focus on those good things that we think we do. Not often do we really do them. God truly expects us to do good things in thought, word, and deed all of the time, not just on occasion. When we use that as a standard we see we’ve fallen incredibly short. What we do deserve is really judgment, punishment for our sins and disobedience and failures to be perfect.

Thanks be to God, though, that he doesn’t give us what we deserve. In Psalm verse 10 it says

He does not treat us as our sins deserve.
He does not repay us according to our guilty deeds. (Psalm 103:10)

Instead of giving us the punishment that we deserve God has placed that punishment on Jesus and in Jesus we have forgiveness. In Jesus God gives us only the best: eternal life forever in heaven. Thanks be to God for not giving you what you deserve, but by His grace giving you an internal inheritance. Amen.

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