Dear Friend,
You've held one of these. A hard plastic head on a stick—some cartoon character, some superhero, maybe a snowman around Christmas—with a hinge at the back of the neck. Tilt the head back, and a little brick of sugar clicks forward into your palm. Nobody has to explain a PEZ dispenser to you. You feed it, and it hands back exactly what you fed it, one click at a time.
I've been thinking about that toy as a picture of something many believe about how life works, whether we've ever used the word for it or not: karma.
Here's the mechanism, and it really is this simple. Load the dispenser with compressed sugary treats, and every click gives you back a sweet. Load it with a stub of chalk, a compressed piece of sand, a pellet of grit, or—down at the lowest rung—something as bitter as cyanide, and every click gives you back exactly that instead. The dispenser isn't angry with you. It isn't keeping score out of spite. It has no opinion whatsoever about what you feed it—it just returns it, click for click, treat for treat, poison for poison. That's the whole mechanism, and it's also, in miniature, how many assume the universe runs. Karma repays like for like. It has exactly one setting.
An empty dispenser deserves a word too, because it isn't being cruel when nothing comes out. If you never loaded anything in—never put in the study for the diploma, the years for the trade, the attention a marriage needs to survive—the lever clicks and your palm stays empty, and that's not injustice. That's simply what an empty dispenser does. Karma doesn't owe you a treat you never fed it, and neither does life.
Scripture doesn’t dodge this the way I sometimes wish it would. Paul told the Galatians plainly: "Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap" (Galatians 6:7). Read that fast, and it sounds like karma made it into the Bible after all. Slow down, though, and look at where Paul actually points it. He isn’t describing how a person gets right with God. He’s describing how a person already walking with God either sows to please the flesh or sows to please the Spirit, and reaps a harvest to match, in this life. The relationship between sowing and reaping is a real dynamic. It governs the crop your daily choices grow—your habits, your character, the kind of person you’re becoming, one choice at a time. But it has never once been the mechanism by which anyone gets saved.
Because if salvation ran on karma, none of us would want the machine to notice that we existed. "For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 6:23). Wages. That word alone tells the truth about what I’ve actually fed into my own dispenser over sixty-plus years—plenty of chalk, plenty of sand, some chunks I’d rather not list here. If the machine simply clicked back what I’d earned, I know exactly what would land in my palm, and it isn’t sweet.
That isn’t what landed, though. "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast" (Ephesians 2:8-9). Grace doesn’t click back what I fed it. Grace reaches past the dispenser altogether and hands me something I never loaded in, never earned, and could never have afforded on my own.
God didn’t force a loophole into the karma machine; He built an entirely different one, in His Son, and it cost Him everything. "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Corinthians 5:21). Christ took the ugliness my dispenser was stocked with—every pellet of it—and handed me back what only His obedience had earned. My sin traded for His righteousness, on a cross, once, for good.
I still catch myself some days, before I was fully aware, trying to feed the machine better—more discipline, more service, more good days than bad—as if enough compressed sugar might eventually tip the scale in my favor. It won’t, and it doesn’t need to, because the scale was never how I got in. If you’ve been running the same internal math, tallying your own treats against your own chalk, grit, and worse, hoping the ratio comes out in your favor someday, I’d ask you to stop weighing it. You were never going to be saved by what you put in. If you will be saved, it will be by what Christ put in for you, and He isn’t handing it back click by click. He already gave the whole thing, once, and it’s yours for the taking.
Grace & Peace,
Pastor Neal Letteney <><
The Pastor's Hearth
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Before you leave the fire, I invite you to sit with these three questions:
Where have I been expecting karma from God without ever saying so—assuming my bad days are payback and my good days are payout?
What have I been trying to load into my own dispenser, hoping enough good would eventually outweigh the bad?
Is there someone in my life who still needs to hear that grace, not karma, is available to them too?
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Who would've believed that Pez is such a good metaphor!