Gospel Grace

Recently I bought a blouse and charged it to my department store credit card. Because I forgot to tell the store my email had changed, I did not pay the bill until I was awakened one morning by a call from the collection agency. I ended up paying three times what the blouse originally cost. Debt is like that; it sneaks up on you and, before you know it, you are being squeezed to death.

Just before the pandemic hit, World Bank statistics showed that household debt in sixteen countries, including the United States, China, Australia, and the UK, was greater than their gross domestic product. Talk about spending more than you earn! Then just like an earthquake, COVID-19 hit the world with a vengeance. Death and economic devastation spread across the globe. Millions of people lost their jobs, and the debt that had seemed like just a way of life began to overwhelm the debtors.

In the same way, we can sin and sin and sin some more and think nothing of it. But sooner or later, your sin will catch up with you, or as it says in the Bible, …be sure that your sins will find you out. (Numbers 32:23 NIV) Sin is one of those churchy words that has fallen out of favor in our modern world, so we need to define our terms: Sin is “actions by which humans rebel against God, miss His purpose for their life, and surrender to the power of evil rather than to God.” In other words, sin is living my life my way, meeting my needs, paying little or no attention to God. Since sin reflects the inner condition of the heart, people who seem to be very good and even religious are often the worst sinners. (I should know as I was one of them!) Whether you are a blatant sinner or a hidden one, sin always leads to death: For the wages of sin is death, but the gracious gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:23 NASB) As Pastor Timothy Keller often says on his Gospel in Life podcasts, the message of the Bible is, “We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”

Most people today don’t realize they owe a debt to God. He created us and He simply asks us to put Him first in our lives. But we ignore God, say He doesn’t exist, or try to manipulate Him to get what we want out of life. Once we realize we are indebted to God, we often become afraid, thinking He is vengeful, ready to send out thugs to cap our knees or bury us in cement. But God is both just and loving. His justice means He cannot simply ignore our debt of sin, yet His love compelled Him to find a workaround. We owed God more than we could possibly pay, so He became a man and paid the debt Himself. As He was dying on the cross, Jesus cried out, “Tetelestai!”—it is finished—literally "Paid in full!" Jesus’ death completely wiped out our debt to God and what’s more, His resurrection gave us a new life free from the power of that old debt:

You were spiritually dead because of your sins and because you were not free from the power of your sinful self. But God gave you new life together with Christ. He forgave all our sins. Because we broke God’s laws, we owed a debt—a debt that listed all the rules we failed to follow. But God forgave us of that debt. He took it away and nailed it to the cross.

(Colossians 2:13-14 ERV)

If you want to live debt-free before God, why don’t you accept Jesus’ death as payment in full for your sins? You can express this desire through a simple prayer:

Dear Lord Jesus, I know I owe a debt to God that I can never pay. Thank You so much for dying in my place to pay that debt fully. Thank You for giving me a clean slate, a fresh start in life. I turn over my life to You and give You the first place in it that You so richly deserve.

1World Bank. (2021, February). Total household debt as share of GDP in selected countries worldwide in 2019. Statista.com.

2Butler, T. C. (Ed.). (1991). Entry for ‘Sin’. Holman Bible Dictionary. https:// www.studylight.org/dictionaries/hbd/s/sin.html. 1991.

Written by Leecy Barnett