The Unpayable Debt

Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body. (1 Cor. 6: 19-20, NASB)

For he who was called in the Lord while a slave, is the Lord’s freedman; likewise he who was called while free, is Christ’s slave. You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men. Brethren, each one is to remain with God in that condition in which he was called. (1 Cor. 7: 22-24, NASB)

THESE days debt is on everyone’s mind – both the governments and our own personal debts. We have borrowed ourselves beyond are capacity to pay and a generalized resentment has overtaken us because we feel like we are slaves to our creditors. The banks own us. If someone were to come along and offer to pay off all our debts, we might jump at the chance, but we would still recognize that, even with no strings attached, we would always be in our rescuer’s debt. Those who have managed to escape the slavery of debt on their own are still haunted by its memories.

On the spiritual level, every one of us has a debt we cannot pay. It is called sin and the payment is death. But worse, like the accumulating interest on a credit card, there is a further payment beyond the payment of death itself. In our lives, we are saddled by the consequences of our sinful actions. Worse, Death itself is followed by a time of endless suffering, what Scripture describes as “weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth.” Then comes the second death.

On our own, there is no amount of good we can do that will offset the sin debt because at heart, “no one who does good, not even one.” (Ps. 53: 3, NASB) Even our hearts cannot be trusted to consider good because “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; Who can understand it?” (Jer. 17: 9, NASB) If we think we can live sinless lives, we only kid ourselves. Our debt accumulates with every passing day.

But our situation isn’t hopeless. There is One who has already paid that debt for us; One who willingly gave up His own life for our salvation. And because He is the only One who could do it, He is the only salvation we have. All we have to do is accept Christ and his sacrifice and the debt of sin is paid – forever.

By accepting that sacrifice we belong to Him just as surely as we would be indebted to anyone who came along and paid our financial debts. Everything comes with a price. We still have to pay some of the interest – there are consequences on earth for things we have done, but Death no longer has a hold on us; the debt of Death itself is paid in full.

But wait! There is more! Not only has Christ paid our debt, He has given us clothing we could never have afforded on our own. He clothes us in His own righteousness so that we can stand before God as free people, no longer slaves to sin. God has adopted us as His own children because of this. We owe everything to Christ.

Unfortunately, there are those who keep trying to pay off the debt through righteous works long after Christ paid it. While Christ expects us to change our lives to model His own, He also expects us to change from within through a changed nature. We cannot do anything of our own will that will compensate for what we have done nor add any value to what Christ has done for us. What we have to do is let Him work within us to “clean up our act” so we no longer have the spending habits that got us into trouble to begin with.

Too often we forget this. We look with contempt rather than compassion on those who are still drowning in sin’s debt when we need to show compassion. Christ died for all though all might not choose to accept his sacrifice for themselves. But unless we show the world the power of Christ’s love, they will never know the choice exists. The world cannot afford for us to forget how and why we became Christians in the first place.