Not Just Our Due!

Not Just Our Due!

Psalm 121

Romans 4: 1 - 5

March 1, 2026

There are a handful of books that have absolutely transformed my faith. Now, I am not including the Bible in this library of life changing books only because Scripture is, I believe, God’s inspired word thus it does have an inherent divine quality that books written by humans do not possess. So let’s just kind of envision a library pyramid of books with the Bible at the top and human constructions cascading down from that original divine start.

Certainly, the fairly recently departed pastor, theologian, and author Tim Keller would have at least two books on this transformation list for me.  His book, A Reason for God would be there, as would his book Prodigal God, and actually for very similar reasons.

In Prodigal God, amongst many important insights, Keller does not concentrate on the sins of the younger son – although neither does Keller casually dismiss them. Instead, in a somewhat surprising turn for mainstream Christianity, Keller concentrates on the self-righteousness of the elder brother’s response to the overwhelming gracious love of the father.

The elder brother has been dutiful, diligent, and hard working. When the younger brother demands his inheritance from his father, he forces the father to liquidate a full third of his hard-earned assets to satisfy the request. The father does so and off goes the newly rich younger brother to squander his inherited riches in wild and disgraceful ways.

Many know how the story goes. The younger brother, now penniless and homeless, is feeding himself from the food provided for the pigs that he is now tending. A Jew – tending pigs and eating their food – it can’t get much worse! The story says that he “comes to his sense,” travels home, and the father runs out onto the road to embrace him in an overwhelmingly gracious reconciliation. He then throws a party for the son who was once lost, but now is home.

The dutiful, compliant, hardworking elder brother is incensed! Isn’t his father just enabling bad behavior? Has his father forgotten that when the younger son insisted on his portion of the family inheritance, he was essentially stating that his brother and father were dead to him? Where has been my party, where has my special food been? Why is he getting treatment that only I have earned?

And that is really the key to this story. The elder brother may actually have been all of the things he was claiming to be: hardworking, obedient, diligent in completing all of the family expectations. The elder believed that his hard work earned him a special place and consideration.

The punch of the story is in Keller’s comparison of the attitude of the elder brother to many of us in Christianity. Far too many of us have bought into this notion that somehow our hard work, our diligence in the maintenance of a veneer of faith, our ability to do the right thing has somehow placed God in our debt.

We have earned our salvation. Oh, we would not be so crass as to say it that way. We know better. But I think Keller was smiling when he wrote in another book, that if we were honest, most of us think that God is getting a pretty good deal when he got us.

In his book, Prodigal God, Keller tells this story:

1 “I knew a woman who had worked for many years in Christian ministry. When chronic illness overtook her in middle age, it threw her into despair. Eventually she realized that deep in her heart she felt that God owed her a better life, after all she had done for him. That assumption made it extremely difficult for her to climb out of her pit, though climb she did. The key to her improvement, however, was to recognize the elder-brother mindset within.”

Deep in her heart she felt that God owed her a better life, after all she had done for him.” “All. She. Had. Done. For. Him.” Friends, let’s be honest. How many times have we felt the same way? How many times has tragedy struck, how many times has misfortune fallen, how many times have we woken up in the pig stalls of our own making like the younger brother and felt like God OWED us a better result?

We’ve been dutiful, respectful, law-abiding. We have been active church members, volunteering our time, coming to those events that looked attractive to us. We have been on endless church committees – my goodness, that has got to count for something, right? There has to be some kind of eternal upgrade for that committee work!

We live in a culture that, until recently has always strongly validated right behavior and a commensurate reward. Hard work, education, and diligence reap the cultural rewards of life. And I am not, at this point, necessarily speaking against that. But when we allow that same cultural conviction to infect our faith life, we create a works salvation - the sense that somehow, we can place God in our debt. As Keller wrote, we believe that God owed us a particular set of results in this life and the next. Our works, we believe, will save us.

Friends, you can do all the right things for all the wrong reasons. Back to Keller.

2  “Elder brothers obey God to get things. They don’t obey God to get God himself—in order to resemble him, love him, know him, and delight him. So religious and moral people can be avoiding Jesus as Savior and Lord as much as the younger brothers who say they don’t believe in God and define right and wrong for themselves.”

Keller captures this motivation in a number of different places when he wrote, “Religion [and by that understand Keller to be talking about the cultural, works salvation Christianity when he says religion], Religion says, ‘If I obey, then God will love and accept me.’ The gospel says, ‘God loves me and accepts me, therefore I want to obey.’”

What an incredibly important distinction this is. We obey, we seek Godly lives, we pursue biblical righteousness not because we think it earns us special favor or a special eternal seating. We do these things as an expression of the love that is infused within our relationship. We are in a special place before God because of that relationship, NOT because it is a just reward for exemplary action.

And this isn’t just Keller talking, writing, selling books and earning places at public speaking events. Look with me once again at our text from Romans. The Jews of Jesus’ day had constructed a notion of what it meant to be God’s covenant people, God’s chosen people, a nation and a people uniquely blessed by God and for these Jewish people of the first century much of that was demonstrated, was rightly earned by a blood lineage to Abraham, the father of the Jewish faith.

Abraham, a life filled with good works. Abraham, a man ready to sacrifice his only son Isaac. Abraham, a man who left a good life and prosperity in Ur to travel far to a seemingly desolate land to which God had directed him, this Abraham – the poster boy for obedience and good work, this Abraham stands in a special relationship with God NOT because he had completed all of these good works, but because Abraham….. believed. It says that this belief was “reckoned to him as righteousness.” (Genesis 15: 6)

Back to Paul and our Romans text, he has just finished saying in chapter 3 that the righteousness of God, that unique relationship with God that we aspire to, is “through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.” Faith. Belief. And just in case his Jewish listeners and readers are seeing this is a dilution of their work responsibilities to God, Paul demonstrates that it was always about faith, not works.

And if we want to get really crazy, Paul tells us in chapter three that even faith is not our own doing, but is instead a gift from God. (Romans 3: 24) But that is a conversation for another day.

Friends, for years now, at the time of Lent, I have asked you about what new thing, what new commitment, what new special act of service and obedience are you going to take on as a new spiritual discipline that will draw you closer to the Jesus who has set his face towards Jerusalem and Calvary.

Keller reminds us that the gospel proclaims that we are simultaneously – at the same time – “The gospel says you are simultaneously more sinful and flawed than you ever dared believe, yet more loved and accepted than you ever dared hope.” How will you lean into that understanding of God’s great love for you – a love that is completely separated from what you do; instead, a love that is extended because that is who God – and you – are? God’s beloved!

Friends, works salvation is a way of earning, but strangely, also a way of avoiding God – avoiding the opportunities and benefits that come when we choose a relationship over a works contract.

It has never been about getting our just due. It has always been about losing ourselves in the love, grace, and righteousness of God available to us in a relationship with him. May we embrace, and be embraced, in that relationship. Amen.

1 Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith, pg. 48, 49 (New York: Penguin, 2008),

2 Ibid, Prodigal God, 49.