Living Debt Free

Every act of kindness, every good deed, every right action we take in this life could be said to be worth something. Let's measure in terms of money. Let's say that we could earn as much as $5000 a week in good deeds and righteous living.

For 52 weeks a year... well, let's say 50 weeks a year, that's $250,000 a year for being good. If we lived to be 100, we might have $25,000,000 worth of good works saved up. In today's economy that's really something.

Oh yeah, what about today's economy? Did we have a mortgage to pay off; were there costly sins in our lives? Ooops! Our sin debt is massive.
How massive?
Well, for the moment let's just look at what we call "petty sins."

Perhaps each white lie costs 50 cents. How many of those do we tell in a day? ("You look very nice." What is that hideous outfit? ... "No, really I love it. Thank you so much." I've always wanted a scented candle that smelled like puke.) Maybe an average of 10 a day.
Gossip might cost $1 for each person we repeat it to.
Bitter feelings, jealousy, or anger we don't even look at the price. Just put it on the credit card and charge ahead with animosity or resentment.

With interest rates set at 10% like tithing, and each unforgiven debt (sin) compounding annually.... by my calculations just 7 years of little white lies alone would use up $1,225,565.83. It only gets worse each year after that, and that's not accounting for any gossip, anger, lust, or moral decay. Then there's theft, adultery... One count of "taking without leave" might cost $2.5 million, and you don't want to know what a compounded interest will do to that debt. Put in monetary terms, sin debt looks something like a dollar sign in front of an infinity sign. There's no way to pay it off.

Even if we could be good enough that our good deeds paid off our bad ones (which we can't but let's pretend for a minute), how much does it cost to buy an all expenses paid trip to the cheaper side of heaven? Well, to quote a lady I know "If you have to ask how much it costs, Honey , you can't afford it."

So who can afford heaven, then? Well, there was one truly wealthy guy who lived a long time ago... You saw this coming didn't you? But it's true, His name is Jesus Christ and He said He'd be willing to pay off our debts and buy our ticket to heaven. We even have it in writing (the Bible). All we have to do is ask. We have to each go to Christ and admit our poverty, our sins, and ask Him if He will help us.

He will.
He will forgive our debts caused by sin. He uses this thing called Grace, it's debt forgiveness at it's best. And then He gives us a personal, non-transferable ticket to heaven, first class.

Are you living debt free?