Every step you take in the next five seconds worth of future is taken in the power of grace.

The next one is in the power of grace.

The next one is in the power of grace.

And you are going down, down, down, down into glorious dependence upon more and more grace.

And your debt is becoming bigger and bigger and bigger to the glory of God's grace every second of your life.

So get out of your mind forever the payback mentality to God.

I think most of us at least sometimes live with some version of the idea that we need to pay God back, at least a little.

And Piper just says no.

I'm Dan Kroover.

In this episode of Light and Truth, John Piper pulls us deeper into the kind of grace that won't let us try to repay

it, even if just a little.

This message was originally delivered in Wheaton, Illinois at the Act III Reformation Conference

on October 29, 1999. The debtors ethic is impossible.

It's not just impossible because of human limitations, it's impossible because of the way God has set up the world.

What I mean is this.

If you say God has been so gracious to me, he's lavished me with grace, that I will now take steps of obedience by which I will pay the debt of grace that I owe him. Oh, to grace, how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be.

And so I will now take steps to repay my debt of grace.

You know why that's impossible?

Because every step you take called obedience is totally dependent on more grace.

And therefore, all you do with every step of obedience is go deeper into debt.

And I'm not making this up.

I'm basing it on 2 Corinthians 9.8, which says,

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