Jesus Only, Part Two
You have sung the song. Most of us have, so many times the words go by without landing.
Jesus paid it all. All to Him I owe.
We sing it with our eyes half closed and our minds on where we parked. And then we walk out of the building and start trying to pay a bill the song just told us was settled. There is a strange thing in the human heart that can sing “paid in full” on Sunday and spend all week counting out change at the counter, sure that the debt is still open, sure that God is still tallying.
So let me say plainly what the song says. The cross was not a down payment. It was not the deposit that holds your place while you finish the rest on your own. It was the whole thing. Paid. Done. And the trouble most of us have is not that we do not believe Jesus paid. It is that we cannot believe He paid it all.
There was a man dying on a Roman cross who said one word about your debt. Just before He died, John tells us, “He said, ‘It is finished!’ And bowing His head, He gave up His spirit.” (John 19:30)
That word in the marketplace of His day was a word you stamped across a bill when the last coin had been handed over. Paid in full. Nothing owed. The account is closed. Jesus did not say “it is begun.” He did not say “it is mostly done, now you carry the rest.” He said finished, and then He stopped breathing, because there was nothing left to do.
Hold onto that picture and watch what happened to a group of churches a few years later, because it is the same fight we are still having.
Paul planted churches all through a region called Galatia. Ordinary people. Farmers and merchants and slaves and women who ran households. They heard that Jesus died for them and rose again, and they believed it, and the Spirit came, and there was joy. It was that simple. Believe and be saved. Just like the jailer.
Then some men came through behind Paul. They were sincere. That is the part we forget. They were not villains twirling a mustache. They loved God and they loved the Scriptures and they had spent their whole lives keeping a law they believed came from the mouth of God Himself. And they looked at these new Gentile believers and something in them could not accept that it was this easy. So they said what sincere religious people always say.
Jesus, and.
Jesus, and you also have to be circumcised. Jesus, and you also have to keep the calendar, the feast days, the food laws. Believe in the Messiah, yes, wonderful, but you are not really in until you add these things. Until you clean up. Until your paperwork is in order.
And Paul, who was gentle with a lot of things, was not gentle with this. Read Galatians sometime and feel the heat coming off the page. Because he saw exactly what these sincere men were doing. They were taking a bill that Jesus had stamped paid and writing a new balance at the bottom.
“A man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ.” (Galatians 2:16)
And then the line that should stop us cold. “I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died in vain.” (Galatians 2:21)
In vain. For nothing. Paul says that if you can add one requirement to the cross and have it mean anything, then the cross meant nothing. Those are the only two options he leaves on the table. Either Jesus paid it all, or Jesus wasted His life. There is no version where He paid most of it and you cover the tip.
Here is where I have to be honest, the way I promised at the start of this series.
We are all Judaizers. Not about circumcision. We found newer fences. But the instinct is identical, and it is alive in the most Gospel-preaching churches in the country. We say grace with our mouths and then we build a quiet list of the extra things that make you really saved. The right conversion story. The right political home. The right music. The right position on baptism, the right translation, the right amount of visible transformation on the right timeline. None of these are the Gospel. Some of them are good things. But the moment we make them the price of admission, we have done exactly what the men in Galatia did. We have picked the pen back up and written a new balance under the word finished.
Paul has a word for that in another letter. He says God took “the handwriting of requirements that was against us” and He wiped it out, “having nailed it to the cross.” (Colossians 2:14) The list of everything you owed, the ledger you keep running in the dark, He drove a nail through it and hung it up on the same wood as His Son. That is what happened to your debt. It did not get reduced. It got crucified.
So what do we do with the song?
We stop singing it like a memory and start believing it like a fact. Jesus paid it all. Not the down payment. All. When the accuser comes at two in the morning with the ledger, and he will come, you do not answer him with your track record. You will lose that argument every time, because he is not wrong about the debt. You answer him with one word off the cross.
Finished.
You cannot add to a finished thing. You can only insult it by trying. The grace of God is not a discount that leaves you scrambling for the rest. It is the whole price, paid, by the only One who could pay it, while you were nowhere near able to help.
Grace plus anything is no longer grace. It is a wage. And a wage can be lost.
So put nothing after the plus sign. There is no plus sign. There is only Jesus, and He already paid it all.
Next in the series, The Gatekeepers. We hired ourselves as bouncers at a door Jesus already opened, and we get very good at deciding who does not really belong.
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