[Steve Myers] My very first job I ever had was picking raspberries. I earned a phenomenal wage of ten cents a quart. That’s what they paid for picking all those little berries. I’m not sure it was really worth it, but boy, at that time I thought that was quite a bit of money to earn. Now if you think about what you earn in life when it comes to spirituality, the Bible’s pretty plain. We put the question up today, “Can you earn salvation?”. Maybe an important place to begin is what God tells us in the book of Romans. In the book of Romans, it’s really, really clear in chapter 6 verse 23 – because it tells us very plainly, “For the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). So when it comes to our righteousness, how perfect we can be, how we can rise to the spiritual heights on our own, without God – that’s what we are. We earn death.

Now, the great part is what that verse says immediately following that. It says, “But the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord”. So our earnings are death. So when it comes to the fact – can you earn salvation? The simple answer is no. No, I cannot. It’s something that has to be given to me. And there’s a famous passage that’s over in the book of Ephesians – Ephesians 2:8. Ephesians 2:8 spells it out beautifully because it reminds us of that very fact, that this isn’t something we can earn. We can’t earn eternal life. We can’t earn a place in the kingdom. We don’t earn salvation. So Ephesians 2:8, it says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith”. And that connects directly to what Romans 6 talked about – that it’s a gift. The word for “gift” and the word for “grace” are intricately connected in the Greek. So it makes it very clear – it’s God’s favor, it’s because He loves us, it’s because of the fact that God is who He is, and we can’t earn it. It’s something that has to be given to us by the grace of God. And so that’s why He says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God.” And so scripture makes it very plain – we have to be given salvation.

Now, of course, that raises another question – what is our response to God’s grace?

We’ll talk about that in our next BT Daily. We’ll see you then.