Faith for Faith

If I have ever been on the verge of a faith crisis, I am there now. The Big Move, or as I self-righteously call it, The Journey to Unindebtedness, has taken its toll on me, and I feel that I could snap at any minute. Financially we are a wreck, and the list of expenses that is involved in selling our house and moving to Wendell seems to be mounding exponentially.

And just when things seem that they could not get worse, they do. And it seems to get worse daily. Whether it is the heat pump that needs to be fixed or replaced ($1600-$5000), the new carpet that must be installed ($800), Uncle Sam demanding his due by April 15th ($1100), or the seemingly daily emails that report that our home value estimate has dropped yet again when we were already set to lose money six months ago, etc., etc., the bombardment of negative information has me groping for answers. “Are we not on the path that is honoring to God?” “Will God provide so that we can honor him by honoring our debts?” “Is God really in this at all?” All these questions and more continually pop into my mind and heart, and with each passing day they seem harder and harder to answer.

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Posted by D. Matthew Brown under Miscellanies | No Comments »

It is settled. The first step on our journey to unindebtedness is complete, namely we, with the help of relatives, have closed on a piece of property for a great price just a couple miles from where our church gathers, our family lives, and closer to both our places of employment. God is indeed gracious and good. And thus it has been proven that land can be purchased through Craigslist.:)

The seemingly ironic part of this is that we are actually more in debt now than we were before. Therefore the next step is to figure out how we are going to sell our home in Raleigh so that we can free up our credit to settle onto our newly acquired property. And this step is possibly more complicated than the first, though that did not seem to be the case before we closed on the land.

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After much going back and forth with our potential lender–submitting documents and submitting more documents–it finally seems as though everything is going to go through on the land loan. And I thank you all for your thoughts and prayers.

We have signed pre-disclosure statements with the lender on the loan, and we are simply waiting for an appraisal to be done on the property and for a title search to be done by the attorney. If all that goes well, we are well on schedule to close on the land before month’s end.

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Posted by D. Matthew Brown under Unindebtedness Journal | 1 Comment »

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

While the interpretations of the apostle’s command to the church at Rome, “Owe no one anything, except to love one another,” are many, his purpose can be surmised in the verses that follow his exhortation. And though it is wise not to owe any man anything at all, e.g. lent money, etc., and to pursue such lack of indebtedness is a godly pursuit, that particular debt is not what the apostle is speaking about chiefly, though it cannot be discounted totally.

The debt about which the apostle is speaking particularly is the debt of sin or transgression. For the apostle’s command, “Owe no one anything,” is fulfilled by the command, “Love one another.” This is the same debt that Christ speaks about in his model prayer where he says, “Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Mt. 6:12). The idea is the same as that which the apostle presented in the previous section of his discourse, namely that we as Christians have an obligation to our fellow men to obey the law, be it God’s law or a government’s law, and we are to pay our debts according to the law, be it taxes or honor (cf. Rm. 13:7). Therefore, the Christian is a debtor in this life to the laws under which he finds himself.

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Posted by D. Matthew Brown under Fridy Night Bible Study | 1 Comment »

I had not planned on adding another entry into the journal until something a bit more significant had happened, but not to include the struggles that we have had thus far would not be a truthful representation of our so-called journey to unindebtedness.

Because of our past decisions–most of them foolish, some of them not as much–we have incurred a great amount of debt when compared to our present income. Because of this, we have been denied a loan twice with just mine and my wife’s name on the loan, and to get approved for the loan we are going to have to add a more financially stable co-signer to the loan, namely my father-in-law.

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It has been three weeks since my last entry in the Journal (thus rendering it not a “journal,” but I digress), and little that is concrete has happened as of yet. However, things (it seems) are being set into motion, and, on the surface, the Lord appears to be paving the way for us to go forward with our plan.

I, my wife, and my father-in-law met with a loan officer at a local bank in Wendell on Thursday, and we applied for a lot loan with them to secure the land that we contracted to buy. We have not heard anything from the bank as of yet (we are expecting to hear something on Monday), and we are praying, as we have been throughout, that the Lord will make his will known to us and that he will close doors where he does not want us to go.

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Posted by D. Matthew Brown under Unindebtedness Journal | 2 Comments »

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord” (Rm. 12:19).

The heart of vengeance is the feeling of a debt being owed that was unjustly taken. The debt might be wounded pride, a great loss incited by evil, or any number of things. The natural man, when a loss is exacted upon him by unjust and evil means, seeks in his heart to right that wrong by exacting an equal blow to his debtor thinking that he can, by his own hand, balance the scale of justice. It is a flawed method of justice, for sin can never be righted by the acts or suffering of men, therefore an avenger will never be satisfied in his heart that his debt has been repaid while he lives, and his desire for vengeance will consume him the rest of his days.

For this reason, the Christian is admonished by the apostle not to seek retribution for himself, but to let God be the righter of all wrongs. For God alone can settle the record of sins, and he will do so swiftly and justly. For no act of sin will be hidden from Lord’s eyes on that Day when he judges the deeds and secrets of men by Christ Jesus (cf. Rm. 2:16). He will render to each according to his works (cf. Rm. 2:6) and will inflict eternal tribulation and distress upon those who oppose him and his people (cf. Rm. 2:9).

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

Though the above-mentioned verse may be taken out of its context for my purposes intended, I do believe the concept of living a life free of financial debt is a biblical one. For the Christian, as long as he owes debtors on this earth, he is a slave to two or more masters–to the Lord and to those whom he owes. And while one is indebted to financial lenders, he is under obligation by the law and the Lord to be faithful to those debts, though those debts may inhibit him from serving the Lord in a free and zealous way.

Through years of my own stupidity, I have enslaved myself to many masters. For I bought into the culture that declares that all should be able to partake of the luxuries of this world, and have, for several years, lived a life that’s luxuries have far exceeded my means.

For this reason, my wife and I, after many discussions, prayers, and pouring over of the heart of God revealed in the Scriptures, have decided to do something about the tremendous debt that we have. We have looked upon the world’s remedy (which is to finance things for thirty years or more), and have decided that that remedy is not the best way for us to serve and honor the Lord. Therefore, we are seeking, by God’s grace, to figure out a way that we can, as Christians in America, rid ourselves of our debt-masters in as short amount a time as possible, and live within our means the rest of our days, being ready to pick up and leave at a moment’s notice, if the Lord so desires.

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Posted by D. Matthew Brown under Unindebtedness Journal | 2 Comments »