Forever In Your Debt

          Two words can be your finical ruin: Minimum Payment. As many Americans struggle with making ends meet some have been tempted to “save” money by only making the minimum payment on their credit cards. The common thinking is that it might take you longer but you can eventually pay them off, but in fact, the math just doesn't work out.  If a person has the average amount of credit card debt ($10,679) with rate around 24% (a common rate for those with a bad credit) after ten years they will have paid $26,930 yet still owe $11,790, even if they haven’t put anything else on the card! After 50 years of paying, they still would owe $17,515 although they have paid $165,729. If you lived for a 1000 years and never missed a payment, you would have forked over $5.1 billion to the credit card company, yet still owe them $212 million. You will never be able to pay off your debt!

          As bad as that kind of consumer debt can be, we all face a worse debt. Sin has placed us in the hole. The rate of return on sin is death (Romans 6:23). We can’t afford to pay off that debt (Romans 3:20). We may be able to make a “minimum payment” that holds off the debt each year but it will never be enough to completely pay it off (Hebrews 10:2-4). No matter how much we work, what we owe will be larger than what we can pay. You can get out of a hole by digging your way out.

          However, God has given us a hand to pull us out of the hole. Jesus is able to take away our debt (Colossians 2:14). Only he has the “capital” to pay off so large a sum (Hebrews 9:23-28). By his gift, we are able to escape the crushing debt of sin. We must be wise enough not fall back into the behavior that got us into the problem in the first place (Hebrews 10:26).

Anyone that has found themselves in a finical debt knows the feeling of relief to get out from under what they owe. You can thru hard work, sacrifice and a better rate escape finical debt. But the only way to escape our sin debt is thru Jesus. It still however is a great feeling. Romans 4:7-8 tells us "Blessed are those whose lawless deeds have been forgiven, and whose sins have been covered.  "Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will not take into account."  You don’t have to live under the crushing weight of your sin. Jesus can relieve your debt.