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.
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