Debts Cancelled Series

Now, why dwell on this? Why talk about our sin debt. Here’s why. I want to suggest two reasons. One is to battle self-righteousness.

I don’t think most believers would disagree that before they were converted & regen-erated by the Holy Spirit they were in sin & in debt to God. We believe that. But over time a believer can start to think that because he or she is now performing the deeds of the Christian life, they are now meeting the requirements of God, that they are not contributing to that debt very much anymore if at all. & this leads to being self-righte-ously critical of others who do not appear to be performing at the same level they are.

But an awareness of God’s actual requirements and of our failure to meet those requirements for even 5 minutes humbles us. It teaches us that at every moment we are in need of God’s grace and God’s forgiveness. The last entry on our record of debt was not the day before our conversion. We are continually adding to it. We are in need of forgiveness even on our best day.

And that is humbling. We don’t wallow in that fact, but we do need to acknowledge it if we would defeat self-righteousness.

That’s the first reason to dwell on this debt. The second is this: when we understand the crushing weight of the debt our sin creates with God, we’re in the right position to be affected by the news of the payment of that debt.

And that is what we turn to next.

2. HOW DOES THIS DEBT GET PAID?

Well there are two ways to pay off a debt.

The first way is to actually pay what you owe. You give that which you are legally obligated to give.

If we’re talking about money, it’s pretty obvious how you pay the debt. If you borrowed $10000, you get $10000 and give that to the bank or financial institution that you borrowed it from in the first place. Maybe it takes a while, maybe it takes years, but you work and save until you can pay it off.

That was my experience with my college loan. When I graduated in 1986 I think I was about $17000 in debt. And as a graduation present from the lending institution, I was given a coupon book (not the kind you can spend in stores!). The coupons showed how much I needed to pay each month to retire that debt. I think it took about 5-7 years, but I finally got it paid off, one payment at a time through working and saving.

Can we do that with our debt to God? Can we pay God the obedience that we owe him, which we have withheld from him every time we’ve sinned? Can we put in overtime and extra good behavior on weekends, and somehow store up some obedience merit points that we can use to pay down this debt of sin that we carry?

No, we can’t do that. And the reason we can’t is because God’s requirement, what we are obligated to give him, is 100% perfect obedience all the time. We are to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. If we never sinned again for the rest of our lives from this moment forward it would only be what we are already required to do. The only thing that would do is not put us further in debt. It would not work off a single act of disobedience in our past.