How do you feel about debt? Do you like debt? Do you take pleasure in interest payments?
How many of you say, “Oh, Mr. Greenspan, please don’t lower the interest rate again. I want to pay more. I love debt.” Can I get a show of hands? I thought not. You don’t like debt. I don’t like debt, either. But it can be a good thing.
The other day I drove my car into a service station, filled it up, presented the credit card, and signed the slip without even looking. Just an ordinary credit card transaction. But that night, when I got home and was ready to record the day’s business in my computer, I discovered that the clerk had made a mistake, and, although I had bought $22.50 worth of gasoline, he had keyed in only $2.25! Not much of a mistake, right? It’s only a zero! Except that it shorted the gas station by more than $20.00. Well, what do you think I did? After a whoop and a holler about free gasoline, I began to think. That was a legitimate debt, and I owed it. So the next day I took that receipt and a $20.00 bill and plunked them down at the service station, to the great astonishment of the manager. But I knew that if you are in debt, you want to be clear, so you pay. None of us like debt.
I have a friend who was almost obsessive about paying his debts. He would get home from work, get the mail out of the box, and before doing anything else, would go to his desk and write checks to cover his bills. All of that before dinner or even, “Honey, I’m home”. Now that’s not liking debt. But do you know what happened to my friend? He lost his job. Suddenly he didn’t have the money to pay his bills obsessively. In fact, he had to borrow just to get the necessities taken care of. It was hard. But his wife said to me, “This is the best thing that has ever happened to my husband. Now he knows that he is not self-sufficient. Now he understands that debt just means that we are human, that we need other people.”
We may not like debt, but it can be a good thing. Debt can be a very good thing spiritually, because it reminds us that we are connected with others and that we need others. The most important debts you owe are spiritual debts. These debts involve no cash; they are spiritual debts.
I
Paul spoke of being in debt. He thought of himself as spiritually in debt to some very interesting groups of people:
I am a debtor both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish.
Now what does that mean? I could understand Paul saying that he was in spiritual debt to the Jews, his religious and racial heritage. I could understand Paul saying that he was debtor to his old teacher, Rabbi Gamaliel. But debtor to the Greeks? Debtor to the barbarians? What has he received from them?
I hear Paul saying that he has been shaped, and is therefore in debt, to all who have influenced him, all who have challenged him. Paul is in debt to those who confronted him and shaped him. Like Ulysses in the Odyssey who says, “I am a part of all that I have met”, Paul also is a part of all who have bumped heads with him. He is debtor to all who have challenged him. Let’s think about that a little.
Paul says he is debtor to the Greeks, to the wise, scholarly, intellectual Greek world. Paul was truly one of the great intellects of human history. I think even non-Christians will agree with that. Paul had the ability to see clearly and dig deeply. His was the great mind that could grasp ideas and then communicate them with passion. Paul was in debt to the Greek, cultured, intellectual world of his day. It was the Greeks who by their philosophy taught the world to think logically. It was the cultured sophisticates of the Greek world who provided the language in which Paul wrote. When I think of Paul, standing on Mars Hill in the city of Athens, I think of someone very comfortable in the intellectual debates of the day. I see Paul as very comfortable in that Greek world, even though it did not know Christ. He felt at home, and he learned from them. He was debtor to the Greeks.
But then, by contrast, Paul says he is debtor to the barbarians, to the foolish, wild, untamed, uncivilized barbarians. Ancient people used the word “barbarian” to refer to anybody outside their classical culture. Germanic tribes; North African goat herders; middle Eastern Bedouins – if they couldn’t speak Greek or Latin, if they had no laws, no cultural institutions, according to the ancient world, they were barbarians. They were little better than wild animals, they were the scum of the earth, they were nobody’s nothing. But Paul says that he owes a debt even to these barbarians. Even to those who were utterly unlike him; even to those who did not have appreciate his thinking or understand his way of life; even to those who could not have cared less about Christ – even to these Paul was debtor.
Paul is telling us that we are indebted to everyone who has influenced us, the bad as well as the good, the rough as well as the cultured, the negative as well as the positive, the uncomfortable as well as the comfortable. All have shaped us.
You know, for every comfortable person who has shaped me, I think I can name at least one and maybe more than one uncomfortable person to whom I owe a spiritual debt. I owe a debt of gratitude to sweet and godly ladies like Lillian Taylor and Annie Miller, who first taught me the Bible as a child; but I also owe a debt to those ragamuffin six-year-olds who made up my first Sunday School teaching experience and who proved to me that I didn’t know very much. If anybody was a barbarian, they were! But I owe them.
I owe a debt of gratitude to strong role models like Herbert Gilmore, my pastor, and Eric Rust, my father-in-law, who showed me what preaching could be like. But I also owe a debt of gratitude to my organic chemistry professor, a harsh, caustic, profane man, who listened to something I had to say, sliced it to ribbons, and said it was nothing but overdone oratorical nonsense! Barbarian, he was! But I owe him.
I owe a debt of gratitude to the cultured Greeks among my teachers, who taught me how to lead worship and how to encourage spiritual growth and how to manage a church. I had some of the best. But I also owe a debt of gratitude to unpleasant, unvarnished barbarians like the man, in another church, who snarled at the door after worship, “That was undoubtedly the worst sermon I ever heard”! I owe him. I owe the unknown and unnamed young people who sat in the balcony of this church fifteen years ago, when I first came and wrote a note, “Since you are white, we know you’re can’t preach.” I owe them. I owe a debt of gratitude to a choir director at my home church who told me that if I expected to be a pastor I needed to let some personal warmth come out. I owe a psychology professor who grabbed me by the scruff of my spiritual neck and choked me until I saw myself for what I was. Do you see? I owe them, the unpleasant as well as the pleasant, the not-so-nice as well as the nice folks, the negative as well as the positive. I am debtor to them all.
We are debtors not only to the Greeks and their wisdom, but also to the barbarians and their unwisdom. And we will never be all we can be until we acknowledge that debt. We will never be all God wants us to be until we open ourselves to those who challenge us in not very nice ways. We will never be all that God intends until we acknowledge our indebtedness to all who have shaped us.
II
So how do we pay such a debt? If it is a debt, it has to be paid, right? It has to be taken care of. If we’ve been molded into something worthwhile, we ought to give back. But there is a problem, isn’t there? The problem is that I cannot go back and do anything for those who have shaped me in the past. Many of them are deceased, and those who are not – well, this is not the kind of debt we can resolve with a check. Spiritual debts cannot be settled from a bank account. But we are debtors, and repay we must. How?
Paul speaks of paying his debt by sharing his gifts with the Christians of Rome. Now these people were not the same exact individuals to whom he felt a debt. He has not even met most of them yet. They have not, in person, given him anything. But he knows that the best way to pay the spiritual debt, of the things you have been given, is to share what you have with others. Because he has rubbed shoulders with both Greeks and barbarians, with wise and foolish, cultured and uncultured, Paul is now equipped to share with others.
Now I want you to notice that word, “share”. To “share” means to exchange. It does not mean I give you what I have and that’s the end of it. It means that I give you what I have and you give me what you have, and we share. We exchange. We build each other up.
So now watch – we pay our spiritual debts by sharing gifts with others. We offer what we know and have and at the same time we receive what they know and they have. Our spiritual accounts are balanced not because I unload on you a bunch of stuff I think I know, but because you and I together offer each other what we know, and together both of us are enriched. Paul said it this way:
… I am longing to see you so that I may share with you some spiritual gift to strengthen you -- or rather so that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine.
We pay our spiritual debts not just by dumping what we have on each other, but by sharing, together, in what God wants to give us both. Daniel T. Niles, an Asian missionary said that evangelism is one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread. I like that, because it reminds us that we are all needy, and that we all have something to give each other. We can respect each other’s differences, and, when all is said and done, we grow by sharing with one another. It’s not about one of us knowing a lot and the other knowing only a little; it’s about mutual respect, sharing.
Counseling is like that. When someone comes to see me to talk about a problem, I cannot pretend to have all the answers. I cannot and must not act as though “Big Daddy” can say some magic words and make the problem go away. But when we get into a counseling relationship, we listen to one another and then search together for the truth. If I am listening to you talk about your problem and your issue, I find that what you say illuminates my experiences, my concerns. And before long we are making discoveries together. We are having “aha” moments together. It’s not the all-wise padre dispensing pearls of wisdom to a blob of Jell-O sitting in the other chair; it’s mutual search and discovery. I cannot give you a spiritual pill; there is no spiritual Cipro out there. But I can explore with you, on the basis of God’s Word and in the presence of His Holy Spirit, and together we can learn. We pay our spiritual debts with mutual encouragement.
So just as Paul came to live and to share with these Roman Christians, you and I can pay our spiritual debts by respecting and learning from one another – old from young and young from old; black from white and white from black and Hispanic and African and Caribbean. The member with the doctorate has much to teach the one with eighth-grade education; but it goes the other way too. There are some without much education but who know the Lord in ways others only begin to touch. We pay our spiritual debts by encouraging one another.
III
Still, when we’ve done that, the debt is not fully paid. The note is not entirely cancelled. There is still a balance that lingers. Something else needs to be paid if you’ve received any spiritual shaping at all. And it’s urgent.
When we bought our house, we assumed an existing mortgage and took on a second mortgage with the previous owner. For five years we had to pay not only the bank, but also the people who had owned the house before us. Those were a rough five years, let me tell you. But we did it, and breathed a sigh of relief when that second mortgage was paid. I wrote the last check, sent it off, and thought that was that. But a few years later we were applying for a credit card, and the bank checked our history and came back to us, “You have an outstanding lien against your home. Your home is encumbered.” It was that old second mortgage; it had been recorded in the books at the County Courthouse, but no one had ever released us from that obligation. We didn’t own the man any more money; but he had never released us from the legal obligation.
Well, you can bet I flew all over the place trying to get that straightened out. From the Montgomery County courthouse to the lender’s old address in Pittsburgh to his new address in Upper Marlboro, and finally to his office at Metro, I ran just to get him to sign off and release us from that debt. If you have the lingering memories of debt hovering around you, you feel an urgency to clear it up. You feel moved to do whatever you have to do to satisfy even the last vestiges of that old debt.
And so Paul, feeling a spiritual debt to others, became passionately committed to doing all he could to discharge his responsibility. He spoke intensely about what he wanted to do:
--hence my eagerness to proclaim the gospel
My eagerness to proclaim the gospel. You see, Paul’s debt was not only to those who had helped him, but it was also to the future. Paul’s obligation was not only to those who had brought him along the way. Paul also believed that he owed a debt to the future, a debt to those he had never even met, a debt to generations yet unborn. Paul’s intent in coming to Rome was to establish a base from which he could travel farther west, out to the Spanish peninsula. Paul had heard the command of the Lord Jesus to bring the good news to the very ends of the earth, and Spain was that place. Paul wanted passionately to discharge his spiritual debt by giving what he had to the future.
I will never be able, you see, to pay back my debts to my teachers, my pastor, my father-in-law, my professors. They are all deceased. Nor will I be able to pay back my debts to those who continue to challenge me; I don’t know who they all are, nor is there any way to write them a spiritual check.
But what I can do is passionately to give myself to those things that will assure the Gospel for the future. I can vigorously work to assure that this church will have excellent programs, dedicated leadership, sensitive staff, and financial security, for generations yet to come. I can labor to lead us into a building program that will secure our facilities for the coming years. Most of all, I can, with my deepest energies and my best efforts, keep on reaching out to all, to Greeks and to barbarians, to nice people and not-so-nice people, to people with church backgrounds and to people who haven’t got a clue what church is about, to intact families and to those whose lives are a mess. I can pay my spiritual debts by bringing good news to every person I can reach, even to the ends of the earth – or at least to the edge of my influence!
For, in the end, our spiritual debt is to God. We owe others, yes, but, in the end, our real spiritual debt is to God. The debt we owe for our creation, our preservation, and our salvation is incalculable. If God were to present us with a bill that represented what all of that is worth, we would never be able to pay it. I saw a cartoon once in which a young man, having argued with his parents that they owed him a college education, a car, a wardrobe, and spending money, received from his father a bill, identifying the costs of room and board for eighteen years, plus clothing, entertainment, and other costs, amounting to the hundreds of thousands of dollars! If God were to bill us, forget it. We could never pay.
And yet – will you hear this good news? You must hear this. Here is the Gospel. Jesus paid it all. Jesus paid it all. What I owe to God, Jesus paid it all. The wages of sin is paid by the death of Jesus. The price of disobedience is paid by the sacrificing blood of Jesus. My enormous spiritual debt is null and void, so that I can give to others and can share with them the unsearchable riches of the grace of God. My debt is paid; Jesus paid the debt of shame and guilt, so now, since I am free, I can give of my time, my energies, my money so that others may know the good news.
Oh, how good it is today to say with Paul,
I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith,
How good it feels to be out of debt! I am not ashamed, for He has made me free. I am not ashamed, for He has taken my shameful debt and cancelled it. I am not ashamed, for He has taken my burdens away. I am not ashamed, for He has given me what I do not deserve and could never earn. I am not ashamed, for He has borne for me the cost I should have paid. I am not ashamed, for He has offered me life everlasting. And all I owe is the debt of love. I am not ashamed. I am not ashamed. The debt of love.
A few months ago, I was happily working my way out of debt. Some years ago, we had taken on a home equity loan to do some improvements on our home. I was well on the way to whittling it down. But then something happened that I did not expect; the transmission on my car gave out, and we were faced with buying another car. Well, I looked under every mattress, but I did not find $20,000 lying around! So, sorrowfully, I expected to borrow for that car and go deeper into debt. But someone who loves me heard about it and said, “I will lend you the money; and, truth to tell, you really don’t even have to pay it back.” What a joy, and what a relief! My first thought was to take the money, run and buy the car, and don’t look back.
Except that I do look back. I want to pay that debt. I don’t have to, but I want to. It is not a debt of obligation; it is a debt of love. It is a financial debt, yes; but more than that, it is a spiritual debt. And I want to pay it.
Jesus paid it all. All to Him I owe. Sin had left a crimson stain; He washed it white as snow. I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation. Sharing it is the way I pay my spiritual debt.
