Mailbag! Works vs Faith, Church Volunteers, and Better Bible Habits

It’s mailbag time! Kaitlyn and Mike field your questions about faith and works, why churches sometimes prioritize nursery duty over community outreach, and how to move beyond the “Bible in a Year” grind. They talk salvation as allegiance, children as the church’s shared responsibility, and creative ways to stay rooted in Scripture without treating it like a daily vitamin.

0:00 - Theme Song

1:25 - Is Salvation a Gift?

6:33 - What Did Paul Mean by “Work Out Your Salvation?”

12:02 - Sponsor - Blueland - For 15% off first order of Blueland cleaning products, go to this link: https://www.blueland.com/CURIOUSLY

13:27 - Should churches focus on outreach or inreach?

22:20 - How to Read the Bible Beyond Daily Reading

31:32 - End Credits

The “Free Gift” Salvation: Does the Bible Actually Say That?

Christians often talk about salvation as a “free gift,” but where does that idea actually come from? Is it biblical? And if salvation is a gift, why does Paul also tell believers to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling”? Mike and Kaitlyn explore how ancient Christians understood grace, gift-giving, obligation, and why salvation is more than a transaction—it's allegiance to a king. (Listen to the full Curiously, Kaitlyn Q&A episode!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRxA2SuK7y4

Producer Mike, reading audience question: Where does the idea of a “free gift of salvation” come from? I don’t recall any scripture using this term. In fact, Jesus says to count the cost. It’s a question I’ve been pondering as I’ve heard

so many skeptics say, “Nothing is ever free. Never trust anyone who says there is.” And I’m thinking they have a point.

Kaitlyn: This is a fantastic question. This is actually a much more controversial question than I think this person might realize, and we’ll get to more of that in a minute. There are a couple of scriptures that say something along the lines of “free gift.” And we don’t want to make a theology based entirely off of, “Oh, chapter and verse, I found the phrase you’re talking about,” but I do want to reference two of them because I think they get us towards some of what we’re talking about here.

Okay, so one of those passages is Ephesians chapter 2, where it says, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.” So it doesn’t say “free gift,” but it says “gift,” gift from God, and it gives us some context for why Paul is saying “gift from God, not by works so that no one can boast.”

So that’s important for where we’re going to go, of like: how is this a gift? How is it not? At least one of the places in scripture it talks about it being a gift. It’s not saying being a Christian doesn’t require anything of you or that it doesn’t cost anything. It’s saying, “Hey, you might be tempted to think you have been given this gift because of the things you have done, and you might boast about it—and that’s not good. So we’re going to be very clear: this is not from yourselves; it is a gift of God.”

Second place that’s probably the most explicit: Romans chapter 6. Of course it would be Romans. It says, “When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death.But now you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God. The benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

So in this context it’s a little different—not saying, “Okay, you might want to boast, but it’s actually a gift”—but saying, “Hey, sin responds to you with…” It doesn’t say “gift,” but like the thing you receive from sin is death. The thing you receive from God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

It’s also interesting—and there’s a lot more we could say about this and scholars debate and disagree—but it’s interesting that when it comes to the thing you receive from sin, it’s wages. Like: you did this, and you are obligated. This is what you’ve actually earned. You earned this. But the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus. You didn’t do anything. It’s not the wages that you receive from God for being a really good person and faithful and good and, “Okay, you get eternal life back.” No—sin gives you what you deserve; God gives you something that you did not earn, that you don’t necessarily deserve. That is a gift.

So I think it’s important to say that when you go to scripture and look at gift language, it is mostly emphasizing both the fact that you did nothing to receive this and that you don’t get to boast in it and you don’t get to claim anything special for having gotten this. Which might seem… I mean, on some level we get this. This is where people sometimes in the church can act holier-than-thou, right? For “I’m one of God’s chosen people, I’m a better person than everyone else.” But this was even more of a difficulty, I think, at the time these epistles were being written, because there was this sense of, “I belong to God’s special people,” and it was important to make very clear to people who were surrounded by religious systems that did have a very transactional sense of, “I give something and I get something in return. I give a sacrifice to a god; that god is obligated to respond to me this way.”

It was important to make very clear: what God has given to you is not something for you to boast over. Being part of God’s family is not like being part of a really wealthy or royal family that you might see around you at the time. It’s a total gift. You were adopted. You were given the opportunity to be a citizen and a member of God’s household when you were far from God and you did not deserve it. And it’s important to make very clear that God’s relationship with you is not a transactional one where you have done something that obligates him to act in a certain way to you. He has given this freely. You don’t get to boast about it, and God has done it as a gift—as grace. Those are the things that are being emphasized.

Mike: Amen. Every Protestant is like, “We’re all happy with this. Saved by faith. Got it.” I feel like I’ve got to ask some sort of follow-up question here. So how would… I mean, there are many passages we could point to—whether in James about the importance of works—but I actually want to point to, and maybe you can show us, because I’m preaching on this passage in a month or so—

Kaitlyn:Let’s do your work for you.

Mike: Exactly. That’s why I work here. Philippians 2. After the Christ Hymn he goes, “Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.”

What on earth did Paul mean when he told the people in Philippi… Philippi… I know… what did Paul mean when he said to “work out your salvation”?

Kaitlyn: This is a very big question, and I think we’ve done something a while ago where we sort of gestured a little bit towards this. Unsurprisingly, part of my answer is: people disagree. We’re not totally sure.

But I think this actually relates to the gift thing. The last thing I want to say about gift—which is, and again, if you are like a super theology nerd here, you are going to listen to what I’m about to say and you’re gonna say, “Oh, that’s one school of how to interpret Paul and there are other schools.”

Mike: You’re such an academic that you even feel the need to make that clarification.

Kaitlyn: I know. But I think regardless of if you are a nerd or if you find yourself in a certain camp or denomination or whatever, there’s something to be learned from this idea that has become more popular in recent years that situates Paul’s language about “gift” in the context of how gifts were thought of in the ancient world.

And one thing that is true about gifts in the ancient world—there are lots of things that were true, and scholars have taken all these different routes—but one thing that’s important to know is: gifts are not totally free. Gifts do come with obligations.

So for example, now, by the time y’all are listening to this, it’s into January, but we are recording days before Christmas. On Christmas Day I run into a friend and they’re like, “Oh, I got a present for you,” and they give it to me, and I don’t have one for them. I feel really bad, because there’s sort of this social expectation that if you give me a gift, I give you a gift in return.

That was even more true and even more formalized in the ancient world. Again today, you might say, “Oh, someone invites me over for dinner, I bring a bottle of wine,” or I bring flowers. That was true in the ancient world but much more important and much more formal.

And especially if there were social differences between the person giving the gift and the person receiving the gift. So if a very wealthy person gave a gift to someone who was not wealthy, there would be particular expectations of that person who was not wealthy who received the gift. They would only receive it if they knew they could give in return what the wealthy person was expecting—which was very often public praise and a sense of loyalty or fealty to the wealthier person who had given them the gift. There was a whole system and codes of how these relationships worked.

What’s important to take from all of this is not that you can only understand the Bible if you understand ancient practices of giving and receiving gifts, but what is important is that a lot of scholars have started to think that when Paul uses this language of “gift,” he is emphasizing that you can’t boast because you didn’t do anything to receive this. He is emphasizing God was not obligated to give this to you and he gave it to you freely. He is emphasizing all of the, I think, classic Protestant ideas—that it is all grace, it’s all faith, there’s no works involved.

And yet he’s not saying, “It’s a free gift so you can do whatever you want after you receive it.” He might be drawing on this practice that was common at the time to say: when God gives you a gift, that obligates you to do something in return.

To be clear, you don’t even need to know any of this first-century context to know this, because this is what the New Testament often says. To your point about Philippians, there is often either an implication or an explicit command that basically says: once you are in, once you’re in the family, there are family rules.

There are things that are expected of you. There are people you are supposed to take care of. There are ways you are supposed to act that if you do not act, you’ll be disciplined for not acting in those ways. We’ve lost a lot of that in our modern church, but it has been true for most of Christian history that we were able to hold these two things in tension:

This is a free gift. My works do not grant me salvation. Yet my response to God’s grace obligates me in a very serious way.

This isn’t just, “Oh, I generally want to live in the way that God wants me to live.” No—my community has said: we will hold you accountable for this newfound sense of loyalty you have to a new king. You belong to a different nation. You owe fealty to a new king. That king can ask anything of you. Thank goodness this king wants your greatest flourishing and goodness and is gracious enough to tell you what that looks like. You will still, because of your fallenness, be tempted to act in ways counter to that. And because of this gift you have received, you also come with a community that’s going to rein you back in when you start acting in ways that you shouldn’t.

Mike: Theologian Matthew Bates wrote a book called Salvation by Allegiance Alone—

Kaitlyn: Yes.

Mike:—where he basically just unpacks all of this and a dynamic of understanding faith and works that we should think of more like being allegiant to a king, which comes with responsibilities and expectations on you. Anyone who wants to read more about it, I just think that book is so good.

Kaitlyn: That’s a much better book than the very nerdy academic book that came before it that sort of rocked the world by saying some of this stuff. No one should read that probably. But yes—Matthew Bates’ book: great.