Eric Olson from Springfield, Missouri writes in,

Pastor John,

does the popularized pay-it-forward concept nullify grace?

I just read a segment of your book, Future Grace,

and I think it clarified why I've been

discontented with all of this paying it forward.

It seems too easily to fall into the camp of human obedience to match past grace

or the idea of giving to get.

Can you show a scripture that might reveal our motives

in the pay-it-forward phenomenon that we see today?

Let me give a little background first because my guess is

some of our listeners are not familiar with this at all.

I certainly was not aware of the phenomenon he's talking about.

So I had to do a little poking around.

So pay-it-forward is an expression for describing

the beneficiary of a good deed,

repaying it to others instead of the one who did the good deed to him.

So the concept is very old, but the phrase may have been coined,

according to Wikipedia, by Lily Hardy-Hammann in 1916

in her book The Garden of Delight.

There was a movie in 2000 called Pay-it-forward,

and the lead line in the movie was,

...