“You get what you pay for.”
I feel like my entire adult life has been spent trying to prove that saying wrong. I love to find an unexpected deal - whether it’s a final clearance sale at the store, or a price error online. You know what I mean: that thrill goes down your spine when you realize that this value is too good to pass up!
The reason we get excited over those discounts is because we didn’t plan for them. You stroll over to the meat section to pick up ground beef, but then sprint away with Porterhouse steaks you found on a huge markdown. In that moment, your normal calculations have changed dramatically!
It’s not just humans who rejoice in those unexpected blessings. Our God loves to flip the script. Scripture is filled with stories of redemptive reversal, where the Lord steps in and upends human expectations. Sometimes it’s the proud and powerful who are brought low by the mighty judgment of Yahweh. Other times, it’s the hopeless and helpless who are lifted up by his saving hand.
Read Psalm 113:7-9 for a couple of great examples of this. People in the “ash heap” are not there for the health benefits to their skin! Like Job long ago (Job 2:8), they’re sitting in total misery…only God can lift them up. In that culture, a woman without children or a home was vulnerable. Joy seemed impossible for her…until God reached out.
Deep down, followers of Jesus know that he can do great things. We’ve seen those redemptive reversals in the Bible, in history, and in our own lives. But daily life has a way of setting our spiritual thermostat to “lukewarm,” and gradually, we come to expect only the expected.
There just so happens to be a terrific way to recalibrate our thermostats (and hopefully you’re ahead of me on this). Look to the cross - the greatest redemptive reversal ever! So unexpected, so audacious, that it even caught Jesus’s disciples by surprise! All people everywhere were lying in the dust of sin and shame, held captive by Adam’s rebellion in the garden of Eden.
But Hallelujah, “the free gift is not like the result of that one man's sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification” (Romans 5:16). In the most shocking of plot twists, those who trust in Christ get what they didn’t pay for. May that truth forever drive us to worship!
“O love divine, O matchless grace
That God should die for men!
With joyful grief I lift my praise
Abhorring all my sin
Adoring only Him.”