And We Think We’re Good People…

Posted by Lorren on July 17, 2008

I was just reading my Bible this evening, and I ran across this verse:

The wicked borrows and does not repay, But the righteous shows mercy and gives.

~Psalm 37:21

Most of us like to think that we’re pretty good people. But I bet if we compared ourselves to our great-grandparents, we’d be very ashamed.

Our country likes to live off credit cards. Some people don’t have credit cards (I don’t any more), but then they have auto loans. Cars are so expensive… even a reliable used car, that it’s hard for people to dig out of that trap. We have a car that we own free and clear that we paid cash for… $1400… but I’m always scared driving it. Right now it likes to shake a lot when it’s accelerating. I pray when I get in the car that I’ll make it to my destination and back safely. But we have another car that we have a loan on… that one is more reliable, but unfortunately we ended up driving through a river-puddle during a recent monsoon downpour that ended up shorting some sensors and now it needs some work.

You have the occasional rare soul that doesn’t have credit cards, and managed to save up for a reliable car (or drives an unreliable beater that they saved up for)… but how many of them still have a mortgage? Unless they’re old and already paid for their house, probably quite a few.

You have very, very few that have been able to live debt free and own a house free and clear. Dave Ramsey. Some of his listeners. But then what happens if they have a health problem and insurance fails to pay? Or they can’t afford insurance?

We don’t know the future. Perhaps that’s why there are so many bankruptcies. I’m sure most people intend to pay off their debts… but we don’t know what’s going to happen three years from now. People don’t know if they’ll lose their job. People don’t know if they will become handicapped and can’t work any more. Even those that have large stock portfolios don’t know whether the stock market will crash or not.

We live in a society where people borrow a lot of money. They can’t always pay it all back. The Bible says that those that borrow and don’t pay it back are wicked. That’s a lot of us. We think we’re good people, but even those of us that strive to live moral lives can get tangles up into the web of debt, and sometimes we run into difficulties where we can’t pay it back. Another reason that debt-free living is something to strive for.