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.

Up till now, I have answered these questions to myself and to those who care enough to ask by saying that God will glorify himself by making our situation as impossible as possible so that when all things are brought about and reconciled, he alone will receive the glory for it all. And while I continue to entertain such a notion in my mind, my heart has begun to waver. Sure God is God, and the thousands of dollars that we need to shed this awful burden from our backs is nothing to him, yet I cannot see anything on the horizon. Doubt seems to be growing maliciously on me like a cancer, and I am left wondering whether I will be healed or left to die.

If one thing is for certain, I have become praying man as of late. And most of the time, those prayers seem to be pleas of desperation from a man who is grasping onto the last thread of a rope, dangling over a cliff of the Grand Canyon. Will God be my salvation in this time? Will he wait to grab me after that last thread has finally snapped? I do not know, but I know one thing for sure: whatever the outcome, I will never be the same.

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.

We were treated to dinner last night by Haley’s parents to celebrate the closing on the land, and we discussed at length what would be our next step. The two options we spoke of then were either, one, sell the house while we still lived in it, trying to keep it clean and free from the smell of dogs (which is nigh onto impossible), or, two, to figure out how to get the funds to buy a trailer and move it to the land and then move there ourselves and sell our house (which also is nigh onto impossible). And so it seemed that we were, as it were, up the creek without a paddle.

Last night laying in bed, it occurred to me that there may be an option that is a hybrid of the two, namely that we, with the hospitality of our relatives, might move out of our house ourselves, taking everything out but our furniture, and move in temporarily with a relative while we sell our house. Doing this, we could keep our home clean while we try to sell it, rid it of its doggy smell, and do so without having to worry about moving our furniture immediately. And by doing so, we would not take up extra living expenses, and we could potentially get our house up on the market quickly and, by God’s grace, be ridden of that burden quickly.

I believe this is the option that we may go with, and you could pray for wisdom for us as we do this. It may not be the way we go, but it seems like the best option at this point. And as such, we may begin setting things into motion immediately, which would help get us more quickly onto our path to unindebtedness. Thank you for your continued 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.

Our next step is on hold until that time, and we are not sure exactly what that step is. Ideally, we would be able to put a mobile home on the property and get it ready to move into, so that we can get our present home ready to sale. That is the ideal scenario, however the limited nature of our funds might prevent us from doing things the ideal way. There are a number of expenses that come along with making the mobile home livable, and I am sure that there are some which we have yet considered. The problem is that things always seem to be more expensive than they appear on paper, and we will have to figure out how to make those things happen without getting ourselves into a bind. So your prayers for wisdom and God’s gracious hand throughout this would be greatly appreciated.

That said, the first step (barring some unforeseen complications) is nigh onto completion, and we are excited and a bit scared at the bigness of the undertaking. However, when by God’s grace all this is said and done, we will be well on our way on our journey to unindebtedness having cut our housing expenses by more than eighty percent and its term by twenty years.

If you wish to pray for us, you can pray for us in this way: that the land will be closed on in a timely and unhindered manner, that we will find a mobile home (which we believe we already have) to put on the property and will have the resources to make it livable sooner rather than later, and that when we put our present home on the market, that it will sell quickly and for an amount that will at least pay off present mortgage. Thank you again, and may God bless you for your thoughts and prayers.

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.

But one will object, “We are not under law but under grace.” And this is indeed true. And the apostle does exhort, “Owe no one anything, except love.” However, in God’s ordinance, the debt of love is not disjoined from the law, but it fulfills the law. For the apostle writes:

For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

For the salvation that Christ brings is not freedom from the commands of law so that we might not fulfill the law, but it is to bring us under new ownership, as apostle intimates earlier in his letter, “You also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from dead, in order that we may fruit for God” (Rm. 7:4). Our death to the law through Christ is not so that we can cast aside the law, but so that our ownership might change. For our death to the law has taken us who were once under ownership of sin and death and has placed us under the ownership of Christ so that “the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (Rm. 8:4). For, the apostle writes, “While we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now, we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code” (Rm. 7:5, 6). For the law has not changed, nor has its righteous requirement, but the means by which we fulfill it has changed from our former fleshly inability to our new Spiritual ability (cf. 7:14-25; 8:1-8).

Therefore, the law is to be fulfilled, but it is not to be fulfilled by negation, e.g. “You shall not commit adultery; you shall not murder, etc.” but by the positive fulfillment of “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” For, as the apostle writes, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.”

For this reason, we who are of the Spirit are to pay the debt of love to our neighbor, and, by paying that debt of love, fulfill the righteous requirement of the law. For if we love our neighbor as we love ourselves, we will do no wrong to our neighbor. And we shall do this by the power of the indwelling Spirit alone.

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.

For this reason, we have had to learn to be patient when waiting to hear back from lenders, and not to be discouraged and not to desire to simply give up and accept the status quo that characterizes our present life.

It also has caused me to meditate upon what is the Lord’s will (hence yesterday’s post), and how we are to respond when things do not go as smoothly as we think they ought. For when things do not go smoothly, it is natural to think that God may be preventing it and that it might not be God’s desire for us to go forth with our present plan. And while that may indeed be the case, it may very well be the case that Adversary is seeking to supplant our desire for simplicity and unindebtedness, and his obstacles are being tossed into our paths to test just how dedicated we are to living a life that is pleasing in the sight of the Lord.

Therefore, we have found (as Scripture also declares), that knowing God’s will from his Word is fundamental to perseverance. And though human judgment and wisdom must take God’s timeless truths and apply them to particular cultural contexts, his truths are timeless nonetheless. And though we know that God could very well have another way for us to live out his will in our context, we have yet to see this other way, and we have not yet exhausted the means by which we can make our present plan a reality.

Therefore, we are presently busy about exhausting our means to make our present plan come about. Yes, two doors have been closed thus far, and that has been slightly discouraging at times, however we have been encouraged to press on knowing that our heart’s desire in this is to glorify God and to obey his commands.

For this reason, if you think of it, we would be thankful if you would pray for us, that a door would be opened up for us so that we can demonstrate, sooner rather than later, that God is our greatest treasure by the way we live our lives. For that is the desire of our hearts and the design of our present plan, and we know that God is faithful to make his name great through his people. Soli Deo gloria.

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.

Our acceptance for the loan is rather iffy granting our present high debt-to-income ratio, so it would almost seem to be a special work of God if I and my wife were accepted for the loan on our own. If you would be so kind, you could pray for us, that the funding would come to us, if the Lord so wills.

Another part of plan is seemingly coming about, and it is coming about much more quickly than we would have planned or anticipated. Our primary concern was to secure the land and to take our time to move on it. However, it has come about that the best friend of my father-in-law has a single-wide mobile home that he is selling, and he appears to be wanting simply to get it off of his land. We are going to go take a look at it today, and if it suits our needs, we will practically be able to get it for next to nothing. If that is the case, it is a possibility that (granting that we are able to buy the land) we could have a livable structure on the land within the next couple of months. That is much quicker than the six months to a year that we had originally planned, and if it works out, praise be to God. And if it does not, praise be to God as well.

Therefore, our two immediate concerns are securing the land and this mobile home that we will be looking at today. If both work out, we could have a place to live for less than $20,000, which is far less than we would have ever hoped or dreamed. If you think of it, you can pray for us and our dealings–that God would be glorified in them, that he would work them out as he sees fit, and that we would be content in his will and work. Thanks, and God bless.

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).

Therefore, in this life, we as Christians must live our lives with a continual fixation upon the End, so that we might be like Christ, who sought not vengeance for himself while on this earth, but, despising the shame, endured the most heinous of debts–the cross–for the sake of the Joy that was laid before him (cf. Heb. 12:2). We, instead of seeking for vengeance, must rather seek to love our enemies, for in doing so we will demonstrate to them our hope in the Final Day and will heap upon them the burning coals of God’s certain Judgment.

For if we endure our debtors in this way, we know that one of two things will happen: one, the person will compelled by our love and generosity and will believe in the Gospel of Christ and the debt owed to us will be cast upon Christ, or, two, the person will be hardened in his sin and will pile upon himself the wrath of God which he will eternally endure. In either case, our debt will be repaid, and we should be content in either case in the light of our own forgiven debts by the great grace that has been demonstrated to us.

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.

We have decided that the best way to accomplish this is to simplify the way in which we live. We have started this journey by looking at ways by which we can drastically cut back our expenses in this life and then pursue those ways by faith.

The first way is our mortgage. Me being foolish, and banks being even more foolish, chose to purchase a home a few years ago when lenders were desirous to give any and everyone a loan, even without a down payment. Thus I was sucked into a situation where most of my earnings go to pay for the home in which I live, leaving my wife and I living paycheck to paycheck.

For this reason, we are seeking to first rid ourselves of our mortgage and to find a way to live in a home that is a fraction of the cost of the home we are in now. We, for this reason, have contracted with a seller of a lot of land in Wendell, North Carolina–a lot which we were able to get for a very reasonable price. We are seeking to sell our present home in North Raleigh, and to place upon that land in Wendell a cheap, mobile home (one which someone is simply trying to get rid of), and to live in that while we pay off our debts with the money that is freed up from our not having a mortgage.

We are, however, very early in the stages of doing this, for we have yet to discover where the funds for this land is going to come. We are trusting that if this is the Lord’s will, the funds will become available, and we will eventually, despite the market, be able to sell our home. Please pray for us and our dealings with lenders on the land, with our preparations for selling our present home in the not so distant future, with our finding a decent mobile home for practically nothing, and for our hearts in the matter. I will keep everyone updated with future journal entries.

Thank you for your prayers, and may God be glorified in our lives.