Think of your life as being like a bank account. You make deposits into your account (credits) and you withdraw money from it when you write checks (debits). Your bank will not pay a check if it exceeds the balance in your account—that is, unless you have overdraft protection. Any money in your account is an asset. But if your overdraft plan has paid checks over and above your balance, you owe the bank money and consequently have a liability on your hands. All this activity is reflected on your bank statement and becomes part of the assets and liabilities on what the business world calls your Balance Sheet.

But what if you discovered that an extremely large deposit—a credit of many millions—had been deposited to your account by another party. Say your brother died and made you the beneficiary of all his wealth. I think you can imagine that you would never lack funds for anything you wanted in life, provided of course that you weren’t too reckless. But this gift would be of benefit only if you believed that the money was really there, and then acted accordingly. If for some reason you couldn’t accept the reality of the gift, you would simply go on living according to the same old rules of self-generated credits and debits.

Well, this is precisely what Paul is describing in Romans 4:21-22, when he says of Abraham, “with respect to the promise, he…grew strong in faith… Therefore it was also credited to him as righteousness.” In the Greek, the term credit literally means to “take into account—or metaphorically, to put down to a person’s account.”

What is it that was credited to Abraham? Righteousness—imparted through belief that God would do what He had promised. And the Bible teaches that this gift of God’s righteousness does not apply to Abraham alone, but also to each and every one of His children.(Romans 4:24-5:1) Through Christ Jesus, God has made this huge deposit of righteousness as a free gift to the account of all those who believe.