Americans are drowning in debt. The average household carries nearly $8,000 in credit card debt. College graduates leave school owing about $40,000. Our national debt has climbed past $38 trillion.
The allure of debt is that it allows you to have right now what you can’t afford right now. The problem with debt is that eventually you have to pay... with interest.
Have you ever personally felt the burden of debt? Your credit cards are maxed out. You’ve gotten yourself mixed up in payday loans, and they keep calling your house to collect. Maybe you’re teetering on the edge of losing your home. Maybe you’ve had to consider declaring bankruptcy.
If you have, you know the stress and worry and embarrassment of drowning in debt.
I recently found a website called USdebtclock. org. It’s a running, up-to-the-minute tally of the US National Debt, and it’s constantly growing, every second of the day.
What if there was a website where you could watch an up-to-the-minute tally of the sins in your life?
Where would you be right now? One hundred? A thousand? A million? More?
Every single day, our debt with God grows. Every moral failure, rebellious choice, every little sin added to the tally - a constantly growing debt.
The debt we have before God is unfathomable. You have gotten yourself into a debt you can never repay. And unlike the bank, God cannot simply overlook it. The payment for our ever-growing, insurmountable debt before God is an eternal debtor’s prison.
Jesus once told a parable about a king who had a servant who owed him a debt of ten thousand talents. A talent was roughly 70 pounds of gold. Ten thousand talents would be the value of 700,000 pounds of gold. In today’s world, that would be $57 billion.
In the story, the king represented God. Do you know who the servant that owed the debt represents?
You. Me.
But do you know what the king in Jesus’ story did with the servant’s $57 billion debt? When he looked down on his servant, trembling on his knees, drowning in a sea of debt he could never repay, the king had compassion on him and forgave him the entire debt.
This week, Christians around the world will go to church and hear the story of Jesus’ crucifixion. We will see him suffer. We will hear his cries of agony. We are going to hear him say the words, “It is finished.”
Paid in full. The King paid your debt. The King died your death. The King suffered your hell.
Trust in him. You can stop checking the clock.
Your debt is paid.
Pastor Andrew Schwer has been a pastor for over 25 years and is currently serving at Redeemer Lutheran Church in Edna, Texas. You can find his latest books, “364 Days of Thanksgiving ” and “364 Days of Devotion,” on Amazon, com.
