Christians are not slavish debtors but rather grateful responders

“Jesus Christ alone offered a sufficient sacrifice for sin (Heb. 5:19:2610:12), and this brings to an end any notion of debt in our relation to God. Therefore, the line from the hymn, “Come, Thou Fount” that says, “Oh! To grace, how great a debtor, daily I’m constrained to be,” makes the wrong connection. Debt is the wrong correlate to grace. We can never be debtors to grace: ‘Who has given a gift to Him, to receive a gift in return? For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen’ (Rom. 11:35-36). We were once debtors to the law, but in Christ we are justified. Therefore, there is no debt relation to God whatsoever through faith in Christ.”

Michael Horton, People and Place, p. 299

(HT: John Fonville)

Peter serves as a pastor-teacher, at home and abroad, resourcing gospel-centred communities.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s