Earning death, receiving life

I just read Romans 6:23 during my lunch break and it blew a fuse in my mind:

"For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Wages = what one works and strives hard for

Free gift = what one does nothing to deserve yet receives anyway

Can you imagine if your paycheck or degree was replaced by a paper bag filled with fermented fecal matter? Yet this isn't even close to what the Bible says our situation was.

We used to be people who worked incredibly hard to earn death - not money, fame, comfort, peace or joy, which we thought we were working for. Now, we are counted as those who do (and should) not (have to) work at all, and our reward for that is eternal gift, at no cost to us. (The last two words there are infinitely important.)

This is our salvation, this is our gospel, this is our God.

The prodigal sprinkler, or the prodigal God

There has been a phenomenon that I have noticed many times this summer here in Evanston, Ill. Here is a picture of an example:

There are many front lawns and patches of grass in this town and virtually all of them are quite small. Yet, for whatever reason, the caretakers of these tiny squares of grass seem to love placing normal-sized sprinklers on them. As you can expect, this makes for funny scenes of humans waiting for an opening to quickly pass by the water that the sprinklers inevitably spray onto walkways. For many, it's a nuisance; for some, it's an occasion for a patient smile.

Does the grass get watered? Yes. Would smaller sprinklers do this too, without watering surrounding walkways and spraying water on passersby? Yes.

This reminded me of God and his people.

It seems to me that I oftentimes find myself believing that God's fount of salvation and redemption in my life is only meant for me, for my improvement, healing and help. But what I fail to realize, in simple terms, is that the outflows of this fount, of its Source, are much larger than I care to perceive.

It also seems to me that this fount is meant just as much for the passersby in my life as for me. For many in this fallen world it will be a cause for curious pity that I should have had such a wasteful sprinkler installed on my lawn, in what they will think to be ignorance and misunderstanding. For others, it will be a plain nuisance. But I trust that for a few it will be cause, at the very least, to pause and smile, and at the very most, to inquire about how to install a sprinkler with a similarly wasteful range and spring of their own.

Concrete and pavement are watered by the sprinkler's wasteful flow,
In hopes that through the cracks, hidden seeds into beautiful flowers will grow.

“Joseph is a fruitful bough,
a fruitful bough by a spring;
his branches run over the wall."
- Genesis 49:22 (ESV)