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What is the best thing you have ever gotten in your life for free? Typically, our minds automatically are drawn to tangible gifts. Maybe it was a trip, a car, a piece of jewelry, or some other valuable physical item. For me, I'd say it was the opportunity to go skydiving with my brothers. Skydiving has been front and center in the news this week as Felix Baumgartner completed his record-setting jump, which basically was from outer space, and became the first man ever to reach supersonic speed without traveling in a jet or spacecraft. I had the opportunity to go skydiving with my two brothers in 2005 just before my younger brother got sent to Iraq for his first deployment as a special forces U.S. Marine. We jumped out of the plane at an altitude of approximately 14,000 feet, and it was the scariest and one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. Mr. Baumgartner went a little bit higher than that - like 114,000 feet higher! Yet even though his jump completely dwarfed mine, I found myself thinking almost exactly the same things he is quoted as saying after he completed his jump. "When I was standing there on top of the world, you become so humble, you do not think about breaking records anymore, you do not think about gaining scientific data. The only thing you want is to come back alive". Baumgartner also said, "Sometimes we have to get really high to see how small we are". What fascinating thoughts! The higher and bigger we get, the more we realize just how small we are compared to the greatness of God! I was thankful to have that experience because it taught me a lot about overcoming fears and realizing that my life is ALWAYS in the palm of God's hand whether I am 14,000 feet in the air or walking on the ground every day. That experience that God used to grow me in so many ways was given to me for free.

The thing about my skydiving experience and anything else that you can receive for free is that, while they may be free for the recipient, they cost somebody. My brother, the one who was going to Iraq, paid a great fee for this experience for all three of us. Whether you win an item in a contest or somebody gives it to you for free, somebody still had to pay for it in some way, whether they bought it as is or bought the materials to make it. The same is true with intangible things such as rights and freedoms guaranteed in our Constitution. They may be free to us and very easily taken for granted, but great costs were paid in human life and even money to assure those freedoms and great costs are still being paid today to protect them. As with anything we receive for free, we rarely remember who actually paid for it because our focus is mostly on ourselves.

I want to give us an opportunity in this blog to intentionally remember that the greatest gift many of us have received and everyone else has an opportunity to receive is FREE, but comes at a great cost to someone else. I'm talking about the gift of justification. As Katie pointed out in Monday's blog, the direct Scripture for this is Romans 3:23-24. "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus". Since Katie already did a great job explaining that justification is the act of sinful people being made righteous in God's sight, I want to focus mainly on the word "freely" in that passage. Some opponents to the Christian faith would say that it is not a free gift because God still requires us to live by a certain set of rules, which those same opponents view as incredibly arbitrary. If you look at my post from last week and the comments that follow, you'll see that just what kind of role we play in this process is a hot theological topic across the Christian faith. Rather than revisit all of that, I'll just say that we are indeed justified freely, and that the way we are commanded to live after realizing that we are saved, redeemed, and justified is for our benefit and for the benefit of those around us, not so that we can earn what we've already been freely given. As I said in last week's blog and in the comment section, how we live reveals more about whether we truly believe we have been redeemed than what we say.

Regardless of whether you choose to believe there is some minimal cost to you or not, it is undeniable that Jesus paid the greatest cost there ever was. Because the Judge is just in his nature, sin could not be overlooked. It had to be dealt with. There had to be a payment to satisfy God's wrath toward sin. So, he came to the world in the flesh, in the person of Jesus. The only possible way for the two characteristics of God's nature of love and justice to meet and not contradict one another was for God himself to come as a man and pay the penalty that was owed. I urge you to read Isaiah 53 and any of the Gospels' accounts of the crucifixion to see just how "expensive" a debt that was. Once you begin to grasp the enormity of the cost for a gift that you are able to receive absolutely free of charge, living a life in pursuit of godliness is the only response that makes any sense (Romans 12:1-2).