I’ve heard the following words more in the last four months, one hundred times more, than I had ever heard them previous to these four months: “quid pro quo.” I heard them so much because of the impeachment of the President of the United States. They are Latin words, which mean, “a favor or advantage granted or expected in return for something.” I decided to look up the use of the term previous to 2016 to see if they were used in the realm of the foreign policy of the United States. They are used thousands and thousands of times. One stark example was the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Atlantic reports:

Khrushchev replied that he would agree to withdraw the missiles if Kennedy would guarantee never to invade Cuba, Kennedy accepted the condition, and Khrushchev announced plans to pull the missiles out of Cuba. The crisis was over. (The deal to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey as a quid pro quo remained classified for several years.)

Quid pro quo is normal in these things, but I want to make a spiritual application. Much of our life is quid pro quo. We grant God our temporal human lives to Jesus Christ as Lord in return for eternal life. There is way more to salvation than that, but it is a crucial component to the reception of the plan of salvation as presented by God in scripture. Much of what we decide to do after we are saved comes to whether we think that the future outcome as guaranteed by God is favorable or an advantage to us. It is.