Love Debt Only

Baby Jesus was born to free slaves.

Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.Romans 13:8

We know what the Bible has to say about debt, yet we play holy-hopscotch with justifying why we enter into serious debt for the holidays. Sometimes, we get smart and save by spending earlier in the year so that the January balance is not so staggering. For what reason? Tradition.

Jesus fully understood our incessant need to spend on the non-essentials:

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.Matthew 6:21

We worry about having enough money that we never consider the distribution of our current funds. If we would commit ourselves to an honest audit of our spending ritual; it would reveal shocking results. Worse would be learning that the main category for most of our spending would be discontentment.

We struggle to be satisfied with our current station in life, so we board the train of debt spending to destination happiness that has no designated spot on any known map. We even designate some places on Earth as the happiest place while spending at least ten thousand for a family of four.

Why? Discontentment and self-absorption! When Jesus says, owe no man nothing, the understanding was that it was an external transaction and not self-centered. He understood the humanistic doctrines of hedonism.

You have to love yourself!

You have to forgive yourself!

Even in the church, we have grafted hedonism into metaphysical healing via self-centeredness. We encourage poor stewards to spend what they do not have, on people, places, and things that they cannot afford. Worse, we shroud this doctrine of selfishness by false piety around the holidays.

We have five different languages of loving ourselves. We literally created a means of indebting our spouses to a lifetime of unrealistic expectations of satisfying us. We commercialized discontentment and created days around the year to get our ungrateful itches scratched.

We figured out a way to become beneficiaries of our own benevolence. False? Consider the concept of gift receipts. The idea that we have too much of something to keep. Or, it is the lack of desire to appreciate the thought that counts materialism-driven grace extended to us.

If there ever was a reason to not to enter the season, gift receipts demonstrably prove that Baby Jesus wasn't/isn't the reason.

There is nothing wrong in showing kindness. But if our kindness is sown with the hopes of reciprocation then it wasn't selfless, it wasn't sacrificial, it wasn't Christ-like. When we get into debt for the appearance of being thoughtful, we were not doing it for the right reasons.

When Visa and Mastercard (mammon) become our masters, God is nowhere on our radar to serve because we're too busy serving ourselves.

When Visa, Mastercard, and Satan Claus gets more credit than God; we're not indebted to God; we're indebted to man!