No Need for Karma

Today Karin read me a thank you note she received from a lady who had lost her driver's license at the bakery. Karin mailed the ID back to the woman, and she responded with a note, which went something like this:

"Thank you so much for mailing my license back to me. I didn't really worry about finding it; I hoped some nice person would find it and send it back to me, and that nice person was you! I just mailed off a box of clothes to the children of an unemployed friend, and now the cycle has come around with the good karma returning to me."

So does she find this method of living to be foolproof -- doing good things in order to avoid inconvenience, tragedy, and harm?

Only a few minutes later, Karin came to me again. This time she had sad news: one of our friends and co-workers had just received word that her mother (in far-away Europe) was taken to the hospital over the weekend with what turned out to be brain aneurysms. I joined her in the office so we could share a quiet moment of prayer, beseeching a sovereign and loving God to use this for the increase of His kingdom, and to take care of the hurting hearts involved.

I do not deny the presence of evil and sorrow; it is the natural result of sin. We deserve the punishment. The amazing thing is, God wants to rescue us from this dark world, but it is just that: a rescue. He is the hero; we are not required to first earn His favor. "While we were yet enemies, Christ died for us."

Quite the opposite of the motivation for doing good in the "cycle of karma", we respond to God out of gratefulness. We do good because we love Him and our delight is to please Him. We also accept what comes with gratefulness, knowing He can be trusted: "He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also along with him graciously give us all things?"

The sovereignty of God is not an easy doctrine to explain or accept. But it does not ask its students to earn their own way or to trust their lives to random happenstance; it is instead abundant and free and disproportionately gracious. "How great is the love the Father has lavished on us! That we should be called the children of God, and that his what we are."