Proverbs 22:7, “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.”
The Hebrew word that is translated as servant is actually the word ebed. Ebed very literally means a servant. It means a slave. It means bondage. If you are in debt, you are a slave. You are in bondage. The vast majority of Americans are in financial bondage. We are slaves to our finances. And there are reasons for it.
The problem is the majority of us as Americans have bought into some financial lies. For example, how many of you hope that your children end up better off one day than you do. The challenge now-a-days is for our kids, when they become twenty-five, they try to obtain the same lifestyle that their parents took thirty years of adulthood to obtain, and they will do it with debt. They will leverage themselves out the wazoo now to live like their parents lived after thirty years of progress.
Other lies that we buy into besides thinking that we deserve that, is we think that there are certain things that without them, we will never be happy. I know people today who honestly believe, without a flat screen plasma HD television, they won’t be happy. We’ve got to have two flat screen televisions or one in every room. People believe that they have to have certain things to be happy. It’s a lie.
The funny thing is, the very thing that most people want, that they believe will make them happy, think about it, wasn’t even around five years ago. The iPad, the latest iphone 4S, the very things that we think we need to be happy didn’t even exist five years ago.
Other lies. There’s millions of them. One of them is, you are always going to have a car payment. You just have to accept that you are always going to have a car payment. The truth is, if you believe it, that will be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it doesn’t have to be true at all. It is one of the most foolish places ever to leverage yourself on a depreciating asset that drops twenty percent when you drive it off the lot.
What happened is, businesses for years have been very successfully marketing debt, and they have succeeded at convincing a generation of Americans to feel good about being in bondage. “Got another credit card in the mail. Praise God.” God didn’t send that credit card! I don’t know about you, but it makes me mad. I am honestly sick and tired of seeing great people, God’s people hurting, fighting, miserable, buying more, thinking that will bring happiness, when they are just cutting their throats even more with financial pressure. I’m sick of it. Makes me mad.
The HUGE problem is that most of us are not mad . You are not mad. You are just thinking this is normal. You’re not mad. Just normal. Just another day. You know what normal is? Normal is a student loan payment. That’s normal. Normal is credit card payments. Normal is car payments. Normal is house payments. I’m sick and tired of normal. I am mad that the church of Jesus Christ hurts, hurts financially. Can’t give generously, not just at church, but everywhere. Can’t make decisions with freedom, because it’s all financially related. Makes me mad. I hope you get mad. I really do, because that the only way you will be motivated to do something about it.
(To hear the rest of the story on this subject go to this link and listen to “Minding The Business”, http://relaxedchurch.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=57.)
