Normally, you only receive an inheritance after the giver has died. Though you may be, in that sense, in debt to the person who has left you the bequest, they are by definition no longer around to receive your thanks. But when it’s a matter of inheriting, from God himself, our stewardship of the whole new creation, we are (Paul strongly implies) in a perpetual state of happy indebtedness to him. As the chapter goes on this turns out to be, as my teacher George B. Caird used to say, a debt of love that only love can repay.
