Escaping The Bonds Of Debt

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ESCAPING THE BONDS OF DEBT

Well, hello everyone and welcome, once again, to The Journey. We are so glad that you are here. For those of us here in Manhattan, we welcome you and then I want to welcome those of us who are joining us from Jersey City. So a big welcome to those of you in Jersey City. Glad you are joining us by video. As we get started today, before we dive into the message, I want to take a moment and just share some personal news. As most of you know, back on June 19, Kelley and I had our first son. His name is Alexander. I look forward to you meeting him one day soon. I brought pictures, as a proud dad should. I brought some pictures for you to see, but they are kind of hard to see, so I’m going to put them up on the screen. This is one of him going home from the hospital. Then here he is in a new little outfit that I picked out myself. And it’s kind of what I sleep I most nights as well. And you know, some babies, I think he’s kind of a cute baby. I’m prejudiced, of course. But you know when they cry and make weird faces, have you ever noticed that about babies? So I took a picture of him crying, and he has the weirdest look on his face on this. That’s kind of freaky. Let’s move on to the next one. Here’s proud dad holding his son. Thank you for your prayers for me and Kelley and baby Alex. So I just wanted to share those pictures with you.

Today we are talking about Escaping the Bonds of Debt. So, if you want to go ahead and find your message notes. We all deal with debt. Debt is common throughout our day. The average credit card debt in America right now, is over $1.7 trillion. That’s bigger than the national debt. That’s just what we owe in credit card debt. $1.7 trillion. The average credit card indebtedness by young adult households in America, is now 24% of their income. In other words, almost one quarter of the income is going to pay down debt. One survey found that debt is causing 14% of adults to delay marriage. 20% to delay having children. And 40% to delay buying a house. They graduated. If you graduated from college this past year, the average college senior, nationwide, graduated with $19,000 in debt. And if you went to NYU or one of other fine metro area schools, you are way above average in this area, because you probably graduated with much more debt than $19,000. So debt is a real issue. The Bible talks about debt, the Bible says that debt is a source of pain. Would you agree with that? That debt is a source of pain. It’s a pain for me. It’s a pain for you. And fortunately, the Bible has a lot to say about how we can deal with this issue of pain. As I often do, let me remind you that the Bible is a very practical book. The Bible is not a book up on a self that is separated from our normal, everyday lives. Instead, the Bible is a very practical book and can be applied to all the different areas of our lives. And since we all deal with money, the Bible fortunately, has a lot to say about money. As a matter of fact, next to love, it’s the most common topic in the Bible. So you can imagine if it talks about money, it talks about human frailty, it is going to talk about debt. And what I want to take you through today, is what the Bible says regarding debt and how we can escape the bonds of debt. But look at Proverbs 22:7. We are going to use a lot of verses today from the Book of Proverbs. It’s a wisdom book and it has these wise sayings in it. So go ahead and find that in your notes, and let’s begin by reading, out loud, Proverbs 22:7. Here we go. “The borrower is a servant to the lender.” And many of us are serving our credit card debt, or our college debt, along the way. And when we talk about debt, unsecured debt, it’s the most common type of debt, but of course, there are other kinds of debt that we may deal with as well. And I want to begin by telling you, personally, this is a very personal message that I want to deal with today. Because, I’ve had to deal with these issues of debt.