"What shall I repay to the Lord for all His benefits to me?" Psalm 116:12

The lectionary gave me that question this morning, and it's the kind of question you don't want to answer too quickly. The psalmist has just been pulled out of something ("the cords of death entangled me, the anguish of the grave came over me") and now he stands before God asking what the appropriate response is to unearned rescue. What do I have to offer. What do I have to give. The honest answer, if you're paying attention, is nothing. From the moment of my first breath I have been taking. I continue to take. I will take tomorrow. The asymmetry is total.

And the psalm's own answer is almost scandalous in its smallness: I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord. That's it. The response to infinite benefit is to receive more. To lift the cup, not fill it. To call on the name, not earn the name. Receiving is the rendering. That's the strange economy of grace, and it's the economy Psalm 116 wants you to stand inside.

The Duality the Cross Requires

There's a temptation, when you sit with a text like this, to go one of two directions. One is the direction modern evangelicalism has largely taken, which is to soften the asymmetry into something manageable. God loves you, He's for you, you're His beloved child, and the question of what you actually are apart from Him gets waved away as unnecessarily grim. The other direction, which I want to resist going too far in, is to so emphasize what we are apart from Him that the love becomes almost incidental. Both are wrong, and both fail to explain the cross.

The cross is the measure. That's the thing neither sentimentalized evangelicalism nor a pure-wrath framework can fully account for. If the wages of sin is death, and if what was poured out on Christ was the cup of wrath that was rightly ours, then the question "how seriously does God take my sin?" has a real answer, and the answer is Golgotha. Not a metaphor. Not an abstract demonstration of love. An actual execution under actual divine judgment. The Father turned His face away. That tells you something about what sin is to Him.

And it tells you something about what love is, too. Because the same event that reveals the depth of the offense also reveals the depth of the commitment. He did not spare His own Son. Both things are true at once, and neither one collapses into the other. The Reformed tradition has tried to hold this with language about God's posture toward sinners in rebellion versus His posture toward those hidden in Christ. Same God, same face, but the difference is union. The contempt landed at Calvary so it wouldn't land on us. The psalmist lifting the cup of salvation is lifting the cup Christ drained first.

You need both sides of that, or the whole thing falls apart. Remove the weight of what sin is and the cross becomes overkill, or worse, cosmic child abuse, which is exactly where some theological traditions have landed, precisely because they lost the category of holiness that makes Calvary coherent. Remove the depth of the love and you end up preaching a God who is essentially angry and has to be appeased, which turns the gospel into a protection racket. The duality is the thing. It has to be held.

A Confession About Ray Comfort

I want to say something here that I've been working out for a while. For a stretch of my life, through my twenties and into my thirties, I was a Ray Comfort adherent. I used his materials. I taught others to use his methods. I ran people through the Way of the Master the way I had been taught to: the good person test, the commandments, the courtroom imagery, the appeal to conscience, the call to repent. I believed in it. I thought it was faithful evangelism, and I thought the people who didn't use it were soft.

I want to be careful here, because I don't think Comfort is a charlatan and I don't think everyone who came to Christ through his materials was deceived. The diagnostic is not wrong. The law does what the law does. Romans 3:20 is in the Bible and it says what it says. Conviction of sin is real, and a gospel that skips it is no gospel at all.

But the pastoral question, the one I didn't ask for a long time, is whether the Comfort method reflects how Jesus actually approached the people He met. And the more I've sat with the Gospels, the more I've had to admit that it doesn't. Not really. Not in most cases.

Where Jesus uses sustained, pointed, scorching rebuke is almost exclusively with the religious establishment. Woe to you. Whitewashed tombs. Brood of vipers. You shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces. The people who already thought they had the system figured out. The people whose religion had become a barrier between them and God rather than a way to Him. That's where the hammer comes down.

With the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the Samaritans, the Gentiles, the lepers, the demon-possessed, the paralyzed, the bleeding, the grieving, the ones who were already living inside their unworthiness, He does something entirely different. He meets them. He touches them. He eats with them. He asks them questions. He offers them things before He asks anything of them. The conviction, when it comes, arrives inside the encounter, not as its precondition.

Which is almost the exact inverse of how I was taught to evangelize. The Comfort method brings the hammer down on the ordinary person at the mall and saves the winsome grace for the in-group. Jesus's actual practice does the opposite.

The Woman at the Well

The text Comfort most often leans on for his method is John 4, the woman at the well. The argument goes that Jesus reveals her sin ("you have had five husbands, and the one you are with now is not your husband") in order to convict her, and that conviction is what opens her up to receive grace. It's supposed to be the template.

But read the text again and see if that's what's actually happening.

Jesus initiates with need. He asks her for water. He's the one sitting at the well, tired, thirsty. He doesn't approach her as a prosecutor approaches a defendant. He approaches her as a traveler asking for help. Then, before He names anything about her life, He offers her something. Living water. He gives before He diagnoses. The offer comes first.

Only then, after she's already engaged, already curious, already asking questions, does He name her history. And even then, He doesn't name it as accusation. He names it as knowledge. You have had five husbands. No condemnation attached. Just the fact, laid down between them.

And her response is not conviction in the Comfort sense. This is the piece that matters. She doesn't say "I am a sinner in need of a savior." She says, Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. And then she almost immediately pivots to the Samaritan-versus-Jerusalem worship question, which a prosecutor would treat as evasion but which Jesus doesn't treat that way at all. He actually answers her. He teaches her. He gives her God is spirit and must be worshiped in spirit and truth, some of the most theologically dense material in the Gospels, delivered to a Samaritan woman at a well in the middle of the day.

And what does she run back to the village saying? Not I am a wretched sinner. She says, Come, see a man who told me all I ever did. Could this be the Christ?

The thing that moves her is being known. Fully seen, and not destroyed by the seeing. He knew, and He stayed. He knew, and He asked her for water anyway. He knew, and He offered her something before He named anything. That's what breaks her open. Grace is not the reward for her conviction. Grace is the recognition. Grace is the fact that He knew and did not walk away.

Comfort needs the text to be a courtroom. It's actually a well. The furniture is entirely different, and so is the dynamic.

What Wrath-First Produces

I think there's a reason this matters beyond just getting a single text right. The wrath-first approach, when it becomes the template for how we encounter other people, produces something I've noticed in myself and in others who came up the same way: a strange combination of anxiety and arrogance that are actually the same posture from different angles.

The anxiety piece is well-documented. If the pivot of your Christian life is a moment of sufficient conviction followed by the correct verbal response, then the prayer itself becomes a kind of work. You're no longer saved by grace through faith. You're saved by having correctly performed the conversion transaction. Which is why those circles so often produce assurance-anxiety. People keep re-praying the prayer because they're not sure the first one took. That's not the gospel Paul preaches in Romans. That's a subtle Pelagianism dressed up in Reformed clothing.

The arrogance piece is less often named but I think it's just as real. I've had street preachers ask me, Are you saved? And when I answer that I am, the response is almost never Praise God, that's wonderful. It's Are you sure? You're probably one of those Christians. The question isn't actually a question. It's a credential check. And the person asking it is sitting in exactly the posture of the Pharisee in Luke 18, God, I thank you that I am not like other men, except now with a tract.

If your gospel is essentially I saw how bad I was and took the deal, then your relationship to other people becomes fundamentally about whether they've seen how bad they are and taken the deal. Every conversation becomes a diagnostic. Are you one of us, or are you still deceived? And the diagnostic itself becomes a way of reassuring yourself that you're on the right side of the line. It's Pharisaism with different furniture. Different century, different accent, same posture.

What's missing is the thing the woman at the well actually received, which is being known and loved in the same gesture. If you've received that, you don't go around auditing other people's salvation. You go around telling people there's a man who told you everything you ever did and didn't walk away. That's a fundamentally different evangelism. It's testimony, not interrogation.

What Shall I Render

Which brings me back to the psalm, and to the question I don't know how to fully answer.

What shall I repay to the Lord for all His benefits to me? The answer the psalm gives is that I will lift the cup of salvation and call on His name. I will receive. I will acknowledge. I will stand, like the woman at the well, in the fact of being known and not destroyed. That's the rendering. That's all there is.

And maybe, when I've received that clearly enough, I can run back to the village and say what she said. Not here is a diagnostic I'd like you to take. Not let me run you through the commandments and see where you stand. Just: Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?

That's testimony. That's what she had. And it was enough to bring the whole village out to meet Him.