Are You In Debt?

Have you ever felt the overwhelming feeling of being in financial debt? Have you experienced that constant heavy burden hanging on your shoulders? It’s like you know it’s there and you know how much you’re going to have to work to make it go away.

What if that debt was taken care of in a moment? What if it was freely taken care of, and left you without having to pay anything for it?

An overflow of gratitude, joy, and tears would probably be my personal response. Immediate freedom and a lift off the shoulders are only the beginning to being considered “debt-free.”

Now shift your mind with me to forgiveness.

Unforgiveness = debt and Forgiveness = debt free

Unforgiveness

Unforgivenesss is a silent but deadly choice that we can so often make without realizing. It is easy to agree with unforgiveness for so many reasons. We hold people in our lives (usually those closest to us) in spiritual and relational debt to us according to the wrongs they have done. The list continues to get longer of all the things we don’t like about him or her, the longer we are in relationship. If we don’t embrace the pattern of “confession and forgiveness” early on in our marriages, it doesn’t take long for unforgiveness to settle in.

So why is it so hard to forgive? When we hold people in this state of unforgiveness, we are begin to believe there are “benefits” to it.

Tripp lists out 5 reasons why he believes people aren’t able to easily forgive:

1. Debt is Power
2. Debt is Identity
3. Debt is Entitlement
4. Debt is Weaponry
5. Debt puts us in God’s Position

Our eyes remained so focused on the debt we are owed, that we lose sight on true life. We lose sight on what is really good for us.

God has given us the gift of forgiveness to help us live in freedom. It is good for us to cancel the debt on behalf of ourselves and our debtors. There is a reason why it says “forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Not only do we relieve the spirit of our spouse, but we relieve our own souls.

The Choice is Yours

You can choose to keep that list of your spouse going, or you can choose to stop. You can choose to take a risk of faith, trust, and sacrifice of yourself, for the empowering of the other person. You can begin to implement confession of your sin and your own weakness and forgive from a soft, willing, and patient place. Compassion is the perfect place to start with forgiveness. Ask yourself these questions: Have you felt compassion or sympathy for someone else’s sin against you? Have you ever felt that tug in your heart for someone’s humility in their sin? That is the kind of gift that can break chains.

God’s choice is to love us with patience, with freedom, and with mercy. He doesn’t give us what we deserve. Instead He throws our sin into the deepest part of the ocean. “As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.” Psalms 103:12. God’s Son laid naked and bare on a tree. Jesus hung emptied, fully exposed before people who betrayed and rejected Him. He had nothing to cover him before His Father. He appeared weak before the eyes of men. He appeared powerless. But the Power of the Son of God in that divine moment is the power that can break the power of sin, that can make every wrong right, and can turn something broken into something glorious. We have that same power living within us. So now we have a choice to make.

Are we going to continue to keep that wrong list? Or are we going to turn our affections to believing God is working within our spouse and we get to acknowledge them?

Final Encouragements

• Change the way you think about what you see as wrong in your marriage. Change your lens to a lens of seeing a problem separate from your spouse. Leave your spouse out of the problem. You and him/her are a team and are sitting in the same car looking at the same problem. Look at the problem with a set of four eyes sitting on one side of it.
• Buy a notebook. Write down one thing you love about spouse for a year (once a day) and give it to them on their birthday the following year.

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