Avoiding Debt

There have been a series of commercials running on television, I'm sure you have seen. I think there are three of them that are quite well done. When you see a good commercial, you like to see it over and over again, and with YouTube and all the other venues, you can do that. The three that I'm referring to are the advertisements, the commercials for Nextel Communications. There are a series of three, at least, that I've seen, and they are running under the title, If So and So Ran the World.

There's one for firefighters, If Firefighters Ran the World. The second one is If Delivery Men Ran the World, and If Roadies Ran the World. How many of you know what a roadie is? Everybody know what a roadie is?

A roadie is the group that sets up all the live concerts for all of the performing artists that travel and set up at Conseco and all the various locations around the country. A roadie, they pack the truck, set up the stage, and the commercial is if roadies ran the airlines. It's quite humorous because these are kind of long-haired, tattooed, bare-chested guys who basically run things in a no-nonsense way.

They know that when that performance hits, it's got to go. Everything has to be ready and go. So if they ran the airlines, all the luggage would be there. You would leave on time. They've got one guy telling everybody to kind of buckle up or take off. That's basically the instructions to get ready for liftoff of the jet plane. The one with delivery men is also very good. If delivery men ran the schools, and it opens with a classroom of students, and a delivery man is checking off the roll, and there's one student, Callahan, who's missing.

Where's Callahan? So he gets on his next tell machine, and he starts trying to run down Callahan. He's not in the hallway. He's not in the cafeteria. Callahan is spotted playing hooky. He's walking down the sidewalk eating an ice cream or something, and two delivery trucks sandwich him in. And he says, we've got a 20, which is a location on Callahan. Send him straight to detention. And, you know, clockwork, because delivery men have to deliver packages. If packages get lost, there's no excuse. You know how it is. Same with the roadies. If they don't get that equipment working and running at eight o'clock on the night of the performance, it's their responsibility.

Their heads can roll. Everybody's there. They pay their money. The show's got to go on. They can't afford for something to go wrong. The one with the firemen is probably the best, because they have the firemen in a congressional legislative situation, and instead of senators and congressmen out there, they're all firefighters, with their hats on and their coats. And their chief is up at the podium, like here, and he's reading off all the work. You know, who wants a balanced budget? Everybody raises their hands. Tax forms.

One page. Everybody raises their hands. And he's got this big manuscript, he starts clinging through it. He says, a lot of paper for clean water. He shuts it and kind of throws it off. Who wants clean water?

Everybody raised their hand. He throws the gavel down. He says, dismissed, you know, sessions over with. Business gets done. Moves along. There's probably an element of truth to every one of those, especially the last one, in regard to how things should be run, could be run, to get things done. You know, firefighters know that they've got to work on time. Everybody has to do their job.

Everybody has to work together as a team for the good of the whole. If, when firefighters go out to an alarm, one person doesn't do their job, somebody gets hurt. They can't afford to make any mistakes. They have to work together as a team. So there's a lot of lessons in each one of those commercials, when you really look at it, and it's why they're so well done. And it got me to thinking, what they are illustrating is that very successful businesses, very successful businesses like FedEx, like a fire department, they work at executing a core strategy, a core sequence of strengths, talents that makes their job perform to the optimum.

They execute on their strategy very, very well. They are very successful. And that's an important principle. They execute better than anyone else. FedEx executes better than the United States Postal Service. Or at least they used to. USPS has improved a great deal, but they've had to because of the competition. They execute on their core strategy. And things work, things get done, and work about as well as you could expect, given all of the factors of the economy, human limitations, technology, and what's available to each of these areas as they do their job.

There could be others that could be singled out in that way as well. But it got me to thinking. These companies, these professionals, do their job and they do it well because they execute on one central tenet of their strategy. And they get it done, and they do it well, and they make money. And I got to thinking about that principle on a larger, different scale. If the world obeyed God's laws, if the world executed on God's way of life, how much better would life be? I think we all can let our minds develop that thought, and we could appreciate very much how that would be.

I've heard sermons over the years on that topic. I've heard sermons even better when you drill that down to just take one point of God's law. I've heard several very effective sermons over the years. If you took one point of God's law, and that was what everyone in the world lived by or executed on, what a difference it would make. Just take stealing, for instance. If no one stole what a difference there would be in the world, Rick Zimmerman would be out of business. He wouldn't have it. He had to retrain for a new job. You could do that, but any one of God's laws.

I'd like to take one area today, because I've been thinking about it because of some things that are in the news this week. Let's take one area today and talk about how this applies.

It's the area of finance. It's the area of debt. We, as we all recognize, are in quite interesting times financially. We've been fighting for nearly a year, because it was just a year ago in September last year, about the middle of the month, when everything started really going south on Wall Street just in the last weeks of Bush's administration. In fact, looking back, they figure that, if you remember where things were, about a year ago is when John McCain introduced Sarah Palin as his running mate, and he jumped ahead of Barack Obama by several points in the polls, and they thought that they would sprint to the finish, and the Republicans would win.

And that was going along for the first couple of weeks until the crash hit, and the economy tanked, and it turned everything around. It turned the election around, because it was a Republican crash, as they would say. And it probably did play a significant role in the final analysis in November of last year. But in the meantime, we've been living with the effects of that. It was building for several months. Many who knew the signs on the wall understood what was coming down, and saw that things were not... I've been reading for months and months of the problems, that the subprime lending crisis had been going on for some time, and it finally hit Wall Street.

And we have been reeling ever since. One-third of the value of Wall Street just evaporated completely off the books, years and years of accumulated wealth. As we all know, as we looked at our 401s, 403s, or IRAs, we've seen it all disappear, and along with a number of other major, major bankruptcies and other problems. And when we look at that, and we're still living with the aftermath of it, there are signs that we may be coming out of that, and we certainly would hope so, but no one really seems to know for sure. We may come out of it a little bit. Some say there's going to be another drop because of other factors. I find what... as I read the various economists and prognostications about where the future lies, I find that those publications or writers who didn't see the signs in advance are the ones who are predicting a rosier outcome, and that we're starting to come out of problems. It's the ones who predicted the problems, saw the difficulties, who are the least optimistic about the next few months, and you know, next six to 12 months for the economy. They are more pessimistic. So I don't know who to believe. I don't have any recommendations for stocks or other investments in that sense. That's not my job. We'll just have to wait and see where it goes. But if you look at debt and the problems that have been outlined as a result of the problems of the last year, at least, there is a great deal to learn.

When we look at the Bible, there's also a great deal to tell us about finance, economics. There are larger principles. If you looked at the principle or the law of the Jubilee in Leviticus, that's a large macroeconomic principle that determines the whole progression of an economy over a 50-year period and many other aspects of life. If you look at tithing, that's a major law as well, and that has a significant impact upon society and people, as that impacts in God's law.

If we took another part of what the Scripture teaches us regarding matters, we could narrow that down even further and just look at debt. And that's what I've been thinking about because of the headlines this week and the problems that have been at the heart of the financial crisis, both on a large scale as well as an individual level.

Debt, debt, debt keeps coming up. Too much. Personal debt, consumer debt, national debt, international debt, subprime lending, nations getting into expenses and getting into expenditures that they just could not afford. What the Bible says regarding debt is very instructive. If you will, turn over to Deuteronomy chapter 15. Deuteronomy chapter 15.

This is just one smaller aspect that I want to focus on this afternoon.

Deuteronomy chapter 15, and let's look at verse 6. He says, For the Lord your God will bless you just as He promised you.

You shall lend to many nations. And this is in a major address to the nation of Israel, and it is speaking to a financial management, if you will. But he's saying really to Israel as a people, as a way to run things, he said, You will lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow.

You shall reign over many nations, but they shall not reign over you. You shall lend, but you shall not borrow. An interesting statement. How does that apply? How do you break that down and make that policy on a national level, on your level, on my level?

Well, looking at what it says, we can look at where we are in the world today. And, as I've said, see that debt is in our current economic crisis a great deal. Just this week, the government came out and said that the debt coming up and coming due over the next 10 years is worse than what they thought it would originally be. Instead of $7 trillion, it's now going to be $9 trillion, so they say. There were two articles on the headlines, and this just really struck me on Wednesday. The Wall Street Journal had a front page article that said, a decade of debt, $9 trillion. Do you know how much a trillion dollars is? I don't either. Some of you are shaking your heads. Let me tell you, a trillion dollars is a thousand billion dollars. Now, see, doesn't that make it easier to understand? And now you can put your arms around a thousand billion dollars. That's how much a trillion dollars is. I don't even know what a billion dollars is, much less a thousand billion dollars. But that's what a trillion dollars is. A billion here, a trillion there, pretty soon you're talking serious money. But $9 trillion in debt. Let me just read a little bit from the article. Plunging tax receipts, soaring spending, and a sluggish recovery will push the nation's deficits dramatically higher over the next 10 years, creating new complications for President Obama's domestic agenda, which we all know is basically national health care. The deteriorating budget picture detailed Tuesday, White House and congressional reports, comes just as Congress is about to resume the battle over Democratic plans to spend a trillion dollars overhauling the nation's health care system. The numbers, including a White House forecast of $9 trillion in additional debt over the next decade, could affect Mr. Obama's efforts to increase spending in a host of areas from education to foreign aid.

Some budget experts also reiterated their belief that tax increases may need to hit families that the president has vowed to protect. So basically, if these numbers come to pass, which all the government experts feel that it will, there's going to be, because of the sluggishness in the economy, there's going to be a sagging tax revenue. And the only way that they can begin to try to address that is to increase the taxes on those who make under $250,000, which has been the pledge thus far that they would not do. Except for some of us, you know, one or two of us in this room, I think under $250,000, fits just about everybody in this room. Now, it increased taxes. In other words, the promises that they will not impact us will likely have to go out the window in order to try to somehow get a handle on matters. The Financial Times had a front-page headline, U.S. says debt outlook worsening, as they reported this. They mentioned that this news presents a bleak picture of America's deteriorating debt position. If you include the administration's fiscal plans, this implies a deficit increase, way in excess of $10 trillion over the next decade. The numbers are deeply alarming, said one leading economist.

How that translates out is quite troubling. It will impact the value of the dollar, the trust, the confidence that other nations, particularly China, has in our dollar. And if it will continue to increase the calls for the decoupling of the American dollar as the world's reserve currency, which this is something that you and I don't want to see happen for, because that will skyrocket prices completely through the ceiling. But thus far, the American dollar has resisted any efforts or pulls to no longer be the world's reserve currency, which is a favored status because it allows many transactions around the world to be denominated in dollars. It allows you and I to go to the feast in Italy, England, or wherever else overseas and still be able to afford it, but to bring it down to some practical applications.

It allows China to continue to buy our treasury bills and our debt so that we can finance cash for clunkers. I don't know, did anybody take advantage of cash for clunkers? It's none of my business, none of our business either. That's come and gone now, but it gave a little infusion of cash into at least the automotive industry. You know that we'll pay for that. If you got $4,500, it's just taken from one hand to give to the other because we're all going to have to pay for that anyway, but that's the way economics are done today. For that program to happen as it did in any other stimulus that comes along in the future, we have to be pretty well guaranteed that other nations will buy our treasury bills. In other words, buy our debt.

And as long as they keep doing it, Gordon Brotholke can keep selling appliances.

We can keep buying our iPhones and our toys at a reasonable price, and things kind of go along basically normally. I mean, that's essentially how it comes down. But as debt increases, that confidence erodes, and somewhere along the road, things could change. And when and if they change, we wake up some morning and the dollar is no longer the world's currency, it will be a different day in America. Quite a different day. I hope that doesn't happen soon. I don't know when it will happen. I think that the only thing that ultimately is keeping it up is the fact that God's blessing in His hand is still upon this nation. I think that's the only, only real guarantee that we have today, and really the only one that we have ever had. I was reading something recently, and it made the comment that there were in all of American history, from 1776 to present day. There have only been two periods when America as a nation was not in debt. In other words, we were in the black. And the only one I can remember being was in the 1830s during the Andrew Jackson presidency. There was a brief period then, and Jackson was a very strict economist in many ways when you understand Jacksonian democracy. But there was a period in the 1830s under Andrew Jackson when America was free of debt. There's been one other time, I think that was in the 20th century for a short period of time, other than those two periods we have always been a debtor nation. Now you look at this promise in Deuteronomy 15 and verse 6, and you wonder, well, how does that square? Well, on the macro level of national and world economics, a lot of laws that impact you and I individually get suspended. If we'd lived our entire life in debt, we'd be in bankruptcy. America can do that through our lifetime, and it doesn't go into bankruptcy. In fact, the economy keeps going along. We went through the 1980s and the 1990s, and we had boom years. It works like that on a national or international level, and it always has for empires, for great powers. But the story and the lesson of history is that eventually 200, 300, 400 years down the road, things change, and those nations, those empires, those great powers eventually decline. Rome declined. Britain declined. America will inevitably decline.

Again, with an understanding of God's Word and Bible prophecy, I think I can confidently say that the reason it has worked for us is because we have had in our history and because of who we are, the blessings of Abraham have jettisoned us into a stratosphere of wealth and prosperity that we have all been the recipients of. Even in spite of the national debt that has always been a part of our national economy, in contradiction to this particular principle and many others in the Bible that talk about debt. Because of the way world economies work, debt can be handled or managed in such a way that you can still put your card in the ATM machine, get your dollars out, go to the grocery store, buy whatever your heart's desire, and plan your estate, and just keep on living. It works that way. But we should never lose sight of the fact that the reason it does, at the level that it has for us in this country, is because of the blessings of God.

And when the day that is pulled out from under us, it will be different.

When that will be, I don't know. But I get scared over some of the headlines that I read, like this one. And there was one that I pulled off of the Yahoo financial page on the internet.

This week, they were interviewing an economist, and this was a pretty blunt guy. His name was Howard Davidowitz. He was on the Yahoo website. And the headline was, In the Tank Forever.

U.S. consumers and retailers in a death spiral. This wasn't World News and Prophecy. This was Yahoo. This was Howard Davidowitz. He summarized some of his one-liners. He said, on retail, he said, The retail business is terrible. It's almost all negative. We're going to close hundreds of thousands of stores. On the consumer, which is you and I, he says, they're still over-leveraged. They're losing jobs. Their credit has been cut back, which may speak to many of us. How many of us have delayed purchases of big ticket items, not knowing whether we'll have a job or perhaps thinking it's just better to put the money in the bank, hold on to it for a while, and tell things we see a little bit better what things are going to be like down the road. But that impacts Best Buy and Target and Broccoli TV and Appliance and everybody else. He said about On America. This was interesting. He says, We are in the tank forever. As a country, we're out of control. We're in a death spiral. Pretty negative. On the stock market, we're in terrible shape. That's what the fundamentals tell me, and I can't explain the stock market. He went on to say his biggest hope were in stores like Dollar General. That cheap line of stores, he said, they're doing well. He mentioned Kohl's. The department store was doing quite well as well because they're able to control costs.

Businesses that are able to control costs are doing quite well. Those are dire headlines.

I could go on and on with them, but it's not my intent to do that here this afternoon with various prognostications by economists and leaders as they look at the world economy, and they look at particularly what's taking place in the United States. I want to bring this down to what the Bible tells us and how that impacts you and I and a principle for us to learn through this sermon. Because as we look at this, like I said, a trillion dollars doesn't tell us anything in one sense. In a few years it will, but we go along blissfully ignorant in one sense over these matters and not necessarily understanding what is going to take place. And we do so at whatever level when we ignore the principles of the Bible on economic and financial matters, and especially when it comes down to your budget, my budget, the way we handle our credit cards, our transactions, and the decisions that we make. And the margin of error, I can say, for you and I is a whole lot smaller than it is for the national government.

We miss a payment or two or three on our car, and we know that we can wake up one morning and it's not going to be in front of the house. Some guys come by about four o'clock in the morning, hook the tow truck to it, and it's gone. We miss a few house payments, and a sign goes up in the front in foreclosure, and we lose it. Our margin of error is much smaller.

To the degree we understand and practice the principles from the Scriptures, the better off we will be. We're here in Deuteronomy 15. Let me just go back to verse 1. It begins to talk about the forgiveness of debt in this on the seven-year cycle, which is an interesting thing just to note. This is a larger scale, but again, it's speaking to the problem of debt and how it can be managed on a national level. I think I brought out about a year ago when Wall Street was going into its problems. There were several calls at that time to just wipe off the debt and forgive the debt of the banks and financial houses. What they were calling for was something along the principle of what God instituted in his seven-year debt cycle and the 50-year Jubilee cycle of just forgiving debt. Here in verse 1, it says, At the end of every seven years, you shall grant a release of debts. And this is the form of the release. Every creditor who has lent anything to his neighbor shall release it. He shall not require it of his neighbor or his brother because it's called the Lord's release. If you remember the Jubilee cycle, this went on for seven cycles of seven, which was 49 years. And then there was an additional year tacked on in the 50th year called the Jubilee year, in which basically all the land ownership reverted back to its original owner. And a number of other matters kicked in, which had a dramatic effect upon society.

What that did was to manage economies in a managed style over a 50-year period where you didn't have the deep swings of recession and boom and bust like we see within any 50-year cycle of our own economy. God's system managed the economic cycle through a 50-year period to keep the extremes from happening and people from suffering. And when you looked at it every seven years, there was the opportunity on an even smaller scale for every seven years a person to get a restart. If they had gone into debt because of mistakes in judgment or other problems, health issues or whatever caused them to have to default and they went into an economic slavery, they could look forward to seven years later or six or five or wherever they were in that cycle of something of a debt release taking place. Verse 3, it says, "...of a foreigner you may require it, but you shall give your claim to what is owed by your brother, except when there may be no poor among you. For the Lord will greatly bless you in the land which your God has given you to possess as an inheritance, only if you carefully obey the voice of the Lord your God to observe with care all these commandments which I command you today." And so this seven-year cycle was part of God's commands, his law. It was an economic law, but it made sense and when practiced it worked. And to one degree or the other, the seven years has been the part used by countries down through the years, but this is a method of debt management. And it allowed people to get a second chance, maybe a third chance or whatever. It kept poverty from being ground into a family and creating bitterness, resentment, and systemic poverty and the resulting problems from that. Because if one generation made a mistake, the next generation could pull out of it. They would not be stigmatized by their father's mistake or by their grandfather's mistake. It also taught people to be generous. It taught people to avoid covetousness. It taught people to look to God, trust and faith in God. There are many, many very deep spiritual elements that are embedded in this financial law of the seven years or the jubilee year that really speak to the way people treat one another, not just the way they treat things.

And that's a much deeper, broader subject. But when it comes back down to our level of debt, it does have an application. Because so often, the reason a person winds up in debt is because they lust after things. And they don't know how to handle things. Whatever those things might be. A car, a house, a stereo, a 200-inch television screen, or whatever it might be. Things get us into trouble. And our value of those things get us into trouble. The inability to handle these little pieces of plastic that we carry around in our wallets called credit cards.

And not knowing when to keep it in the wallet and in our back pocket, rather than keep pulling it out and putting it down for whatever we want at that particular time.

Debt and managing debt is a very, very critical matter. And the Bible has a great deal to say about. Proverbs chapter 25. Just to pull out one reference here from the Proverb.

It speaks to this. Verse 26.

Do not be one of those who shakes hands in a pledge.

One of those who is surety for debts. In other words, you cosign. Somebody else's note.

You make good. You tell the banker, the lender, that if they default, you'll pay it. Or you put up your property for that. I don't know if any of you have ever been asked to do that.

For son or daughter. Or whatever. There may be a time to do it. You need to be very, very careful when you do it. This principle here is, be very careful about shaking your hand in a pledge like that. Verse 27 says, if you have nothing with which to pay, why should he take away your bed from under you? Well, if they default, then you can't repay your home's going on the block. Whatever it was, your collateral that you put up is going to go. So they'll be taking your bed, your possession, away from you. So it's a principle to not let yourself get caught up in that unnecessarily. There may be a time when you would do it, and it might make sense to do it, but one should be very, very careful.

Very, very careful. I remember one time getting a phone call to put up a...actually, it was a bond for someone who was in jail. I was being asked to put up bond for somebody who was in jail.

And, you know, that'll make you stop and think to whether or not you would do that. You've got to think about who is this person, and I will tell you the whole story on that, but, you know, I have been asked to do that before. Maybe you have as well. You don't want to just jump lightly into it. Debt has to be repaid. Debt, when it's incurred, is not something that's going to go away. And unless it's forgiven, bankruptcy, or whatever else, it's going to have to be paid with interest.

In Luke 12, Luke 12, verse 58, Luke 12 and verse 58, he says, When you go with your adversary to the magistrate, make every effort along the way to settle with him. Lest he drag you to the judge, the judge deliver you to the officer, and the officer throw you into prison. I tell you, you will not depart from there until you have paid the very last night. You could be drugged before the court or the creditor in a situation.

If you take this and apply it to what we're talking about here this afternoon, I would take this one principle where it says to settle with him along the way as an important key to understand our time today. Because the principle is settle with him. How do you settle with a person or a creditor? Well, you pay the debt. You pay what's owed. That's how you settle so that you stay out of proceedings. You get tied up in proceedings. You've got court fees, you've got lawyer fees, you've got time, frustration. You've been down that road, you know exactly what you get into. You shudder when somebody bumps into you in your car. Or you bump back into somebody else's car. First thought goes into my mind is, oh, no. Insurance, phone calls, estimates, possible lawsuit. I mean, the list goes on and on as to what that little bump in the parking lot or on the street could eventually cost. It's horrible. Settle along the way. Take this principle down to what I think is a very important lesson that we're really being told in today's economy.

The financial crisis problems that is an ongoing issue and what is happening around us today.

There's one thing to learn. I get, look, most of us really don't care what happens to the president of General Motors unless you're retired from General Motors. We don't really care what happens to the financiers on Wall Street. We really don't. They lose their jobs or, you know, because of mismanagement or whatever. We're really more interested in tomorrow in our life.

What's in our checkbook and can we make our payment and are we going to have a job? What's our future going to be like in that sense? So the big things that are swirling around us, a trillion here, a trillion there, there are lessons for us to learn individually that's important. And when I look at this verse here and bringing us down to our level, Settle with him in the way. I think one of the things we are being told as we look at the headlines, as we look at the stories, we look at what is happening with big businesses, it's a big lesson is to reduce your debt. Three words. Reduce your debt. Settle in the way.

Reduce your debt while you can. Don't get into debt if you don't have to.

Manage the debt well that you have. Reduce your debt. Settle in the way.

Lest we get into a sticky situation where we are required to make additional payments, inconveniences, or other problems. Settle with your debt. Reduce it. Manage it. Be careful, not to take on any more than is necessary. Businesses are learning this right now.

There are two stories of two big businesses that we all know about that I have been reading about recently who have survived the downturn. They've not laid off. They've not cut back. Their earnings have soared. One of them is Cisco Systems. Cisco Systems is a big internet people. We go on the internet and we search a site here or there. Whatever we're doing is probably coming back to us over a system or a network owned or managed by Cisco. They're big in communications. They have kept on going. They haven't laid off. And the reason given by their CEO in the article I was reading, they got cash. They built up cash. They saw things coming. They reduced their debt two, three, four, five years ago. They learned from the 2000.com bubble burst. And they reduced their debt. They built up their cash. And they've been able to survive in this downturn. Another company that I was reading about recently is one we all know about because we go there to eat.

Panera Bread. Panera Bread is opening stores. They're not closing stores. They're opening stores. And why? They got cash. They've reduced their debt. Not too many restaurants especially are opening stores at this particular time. I think a big lesson that we are being taught, if we're willing to look at the headlines, look at what's taking place, and again apply biblical scriptures is to settle in the way. Reduce our debt.

If we do that, we can manage our own affairs and we can survive. We can get through and we can expect the blessings of God because we are following the principles of God's Word. We're executing on a strategy quite well. That is a fundamental strategy that we can see in the Word of God in terms of financial management that is on our level something we can do, something we can manage with decisions that we will make tonight, tomorrow, Monday morning, by next Friday in our own life. Now, it's not my intent this afternoon to really get into a episode here on managing your personal finances. We have a booklet on that. But there's also some very, very good works and books and websites out there for you to take advantage of with some very, very good advice and competent counsel from people like Susie Orman or Dave Ramsey or who's this guy on the radio here locally every night. Clark Howard, I think, is another one. These are all competent individuals who give some very good financial advice. And if you're fortunate enough to have a good financial advisor with a brokerage firm that manages your 401 or your IRAs, you want to keep in touch with them and they can offer you some good advice as well. That's not my purpose here today. There's all kinds of techniques to reduce our debt. I showed you one. If you can't handle the American Express card, then by all means leave home without it.

And if that's not far enough, take a pair of scissors to it and clip it. Cut them up. How many times over the years have I given people that advice who come to me needing assistance, needing help? They need more than a monthly bailout. They need some good advice. I have many times with people that when we've looked at their financial spreadsheet, one of the things I've said is you better clip those credit cards because you obviously cannot handle them. Credit card's a wonderful thing. Credit card? Wonderful thing. Can't rent a car without it. Can't check into most good hotels without it. There may be one or two in certain parts of town you wouldn't want to really live in or stay in that you could pay cash for. A lot of things you cannot do without a credit card. So when you have it, manage it. Basically, don't put anything on it that you can't pay off in 30 days. If you can't pay it off in 30 days and not without paying interest, don't put it on there. In other words, don't buy it. I learned that lesson the hard way, as I think many of us have over the years. Back in the days when you could deduct interest, credit card interest on your tax refund, I didn't make anything of it in my early years until one year I finally added it up and realized how much I was deducting and what I was really getting back, which was not much.

I realized what I could have bought with that money that I'd been paying out in interest.

And that cured me. I went cold turkey from that day forward and paid it paid off every month.

You have to know how to use credit. And the Bible is not down on debt. There's a way to manage and use debt. The Bible is not against going into debt for capital expansion that you can afford, that you can manage. And the way our system is set up today, look, none of us can pay cash for a house. We've got to take a mortgage out. Same with most others for a car. Unless we're really, really astute savers or we drive clunkers all the time, we're going to have to have financing for some of these big ticket items. It's the consumer debt that we get in trouble with. But that gets beyond what I really want to talk about. Obviously, the habit of saving something out of each paycheck is an important principle as well. You should have learned, we all should have learned that.

In kindergarten or before from our parents with a piggy bank or whatever form of savings that we were first into in order to manage something. So I don't want to really get into all of that and many other principles. And I say you can find all the books and the websites and the experts out there and they do a much better job than I could. But I do want to give you and leave you with one principle today. That really undergirds everything else you will read, study, or do with regard to financial management and the management of debt. One principle that is a spiritual principle that if we don't get a handle on it, we will repeatedly get into trouble financially and have to be bailed out. What do you think that is?

What is the one principle that we must manage, an overarching spiritual principle, to deal with money and avoid the pitfall of excessive debt?

Give up.

Try the 10th commandment.

Number 10. Thou shalt not covet. Let me just read it to you. I had to do Exodus 20 verse 17.

You can turn to it if you will. I'll read it to you. Number 10. You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor his car, nor his riding lawnmower, nor anything that is your neighbor's. I was reading it again this morning and I looked at that. Don't covet your neighbor's house. You might put in there, stop watching HGTV and lusting after all these bigger homes that they can't afford and you can't really afford either. And what have we seen with the subprime housing situation? People into mortgages that they couldn't afford. The lenders knew they couldn't afford them, but they did it anyway and they are the ones that are on the block. And if you've got cash or the means to do it, you can snap up some bargains. Don't covet anything. Now coveting is a... this particular commandment, by the time you get to this one in the 10, you march to this one, you're into some big time territory here.

The word covet means to desire what belongs to another or what you don't have. You desire what you don't have, you think you deserve, you think you've earned, or you desire what someone else has and you think you should have it too because they have it. And they're your friend and they've got a big house, you should have a bigger house. They've got a new car, you should have a new car.

And it becomes a matter of desiring something very strongly. And it's a very strong desire for material possessions. The word covet comes from a word that at its root meaning implies to boil, to boil, or to move violently, which is what boiling water does. It's moving violently. And you stop and think about it when you get to the point where you and I are coveting something. We're emotionally involved. We really want it and we got to have it now.

And we're churning. We can't think of anything else. We can't move off anything else.

Covetousness takes root when we allow strong emotional desires to develop in our hearts.

They come to the surface with actions and decisions that really, quite frankly, lose all sense of godly perspective. And that's what's at the heart of that principle.

The Tenth Commandment covers the essence of the spirit of the law because it deals with the thoughts of our mind and what we want. It strips away surface Christianity. It really shows whether we've surrendered to God's will or not. Covetousness is defined in Scripture as a major, major spiritual problem. In Colossians 3.5 it even equates covetousness with idolatry, which is really almost the number one sin. You want to label sins in one sense. But it says covetousness, which is idolatry in Colossians 3.5 because we put that material object and our desire for it so high in our evaluation scale that it supplants God or God's principles or God's teaching and advice such as the one on debt. We have to have it even if we can't afford it.

Now you fill in whatever that might be. Housing, a car, clothing, a trip, right on down the list. And we could run our stories back and forth. Here in Luke 12, if you're still there, there's a classic teaching from Christ on the subject, Luke 12. Let's look at verse 15. Luke 12 and verse 15. He says, Take heed and beware of covetousness, for one's life does not consist of the abundance of the things he possesses.

This is why I say, master this principle and then any other financial advice you set down and try to learn and implement will be that easier, much easier to do. Filling out that budget sheet, living by it, executing on that strategy of X number of dollars each month into this IRA, this 401, the savings plan, whatever it is that you do and investing for your future saving will be easier to do because you'll have made a fundamental spiritual decision about how you value things. Get that right and then the advice from Susie Orman, Dave Ramsey, your dad, your mom, anyone else will be easier to do and you'll be better off. But until you and I get a grip on our ability to covet and our own desires, we won't listen to what we read in the book or what we hear on the radio talk show or what the financial advisor is telling us. Take heed. Your life doesn't consist in the abundance of the things he possesses. Then he spoke a parable to them.

The ground of a certain rich man yielded pleniphely and he thought within himself, saying, what shall I do since I have no room to store my crops? Bumper crop. Sales went through the roof this year. Tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank, crops in this case, translate that into whatever's in your checking account or in your wallet. He says, what will I do? How am I going to store all this? What am I going to use this for? It's just laying around. It's going to deteriorate and in one sense, it's true. Money that's not invested will deteriorate. Corn that's not used is going to eventually rot. So he said, I will do this.

I'll pull down my barns and build greater and there I will store all my crops and my goods.

And I will say to my soul, this is how he begins to think, soul, you have many goods laid up for many years. Take it easy. Eat. Go out to dinner every night.

Learn to enjoy gourmet foods. Drink. Learn the value of vintage wine.

Not this cheap screw cap stuff. The good stuff with a cork in it. Eat, drink, and be merry.

His attitude was one of hoarding and it was valuing things more than people.

Valuing things more than God. God does not condemn the goods that a person makes. He's condemning in this parable the attitude that is created within the individual.

The example is in verse 19 because he says, I've got it. I don't need to work hard any longer.

I'm going to enjoy life and that's going to be my pursuit. That's going to be my idol.

That will be my God. But God said to him, Fool, this night your soul will be required of you.

Then whose will those things be which you've provided?

So is he who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.

Not rich toward God, but the wealth becomes consumed upon the individual.

That's covetousness. What he has does not honor God.

There was a story that I had clipped out of a paper 10 or 12 years ago and I couldn't find it. I must have cleaned it out in one of my bursts of energy one afternoon.

It was about a building contractor somewhere in the Midwest. I think he was in Illinois.

And this took place in the mid-1990s. He had a successful contracting business.

Not one of the big large ones, but in his community he was successful in the homes and buildings that he put up. And he built a business over with our 30-40 year career. He got to the point where he wanted to retire. So he was going to sell everything and retire.

And he sold his company, made a lot of money, and then he did an unusual thing.

He took what he felt was his out of it for his time in labor, which wasn't a lot.

And then he divided it up among his employees based upon the number of years of service that they had given to his company. He recognized that his secretaries, his carpenters, his managers, had helped him build that wealth that he came into when he sold his business.

And so he actually started knocking on their doors after he had sold out and giving out checks.

The story kind of reminded me of the old television series, The Millionaire, this guy going around giving out money. But he had knocked on the door of some of his employees and he gave them a check. Unexpected. 10,000 for some, 20,000 for another, dependent upon their time and service. He gave back. And the testimonials there, people just couldn't believe it. He didn't owe it. They weren't owed that.

It was his company. His name was on the sign out front. But he recognized the value of the people, and he invested in people rather than in things. I'm sure he saved enough back for his retirement, and I hope the man's doing well if he's still alive today. And he retired to Kiba Skane or Boca Raton or whatever. I wish him well. He probably kept enough to manage his retirement in his later years, but he didn't have to give the rest of it away. But he did.

There was an interesting article on Bill Gates in yesterday's USA Today. Some of you may have seen it. I think most of you realize that he started the foundation a few years ago, and his father, who's in his 80s, manages the foundation. And essentially, the foundation exists to give away his billions. Now, he took a hit, too, during this downturn. He lost a few billion, but he's still got many billions remaining. But he's giving it away through his foundation and charitable works, basically trying to eradicate malaria and disease in the developing nations, particularly in Africa. And the way it's all set up, they're giving away each year far more than they are required to give away by law as a foundation. And it's set up that after the death of his wife for himself, that the remainder of his estate will be doled out within a 10 to 20 year period. It will be completely liquidated through the projects and will not survive him for more than 10 or 20 years beyond his life. Of course, he's enlisted Warren Buffett, the second richest man in the world, to be a part of his humanitarian efforts as well.

And it's an interesting story of how Bill Gates has managed what he's trying to do with the wealth that he has. He could live on his pocket change in pretty good style just on that alone, but he's giving away billions of dollars. So the lessons that we find for ourselves here are very, very important. Down in verse 33, Christ goes on and he says, sell what you have and give alms.

Provide yourselves money bags which do not grow old. I read that and I was reminded of the scripture back in Haggai chapter 1 where God said to the people in Israel in Haggai's time, you've put your money into bags with holes in it. As I said in a sermon recently when I was going through that verse, pretty well described the last year and what happened a year ago.

The money we thought we had socked away or was in a pension or a retirement fund developed a big hole, didn't it?

And the pensions and the benefits have all been readjusted and may go through further readjustment.

My 403 account got cut by a third. Big old hole in it.

Things beyond our control do that. Christ says, put your money in bags that don't grow old, that don't wear out and get a hole in them. That's a whole other subject for us to think for another time and talk about.

A treasure in the heavens that does not fail where no thief approaches nor moth destroys.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Reduce your debt. Avoid unnecessary consumer debt.

Learn the value of delayed gratification. Remember the old phrase, this too shall pass?

Determine the save up for it and pay cash.

And by the time you do, your strong covetous desire may not be there.

This too shall pass. Pretty good advice even when it comes down to debt.

Get a grip on this issue of covetousness and it will impact and help you and I in our own personal lives. If we as a nation could get a grip on that, it would help and change things dramatically.

Just imagine if this country had lived and developed an economy for over 200 years that has been in existence based on that one principle in Deuteronomy 15.6, to be a lender, not a borrower.

How much greater would be our strength and our wealth and our power?

How much better shape would we be in today? How much more of the blessing of God could we have endured?

Those are principles. Those are laws that do not change.

Covet God is the final thought. Covet God more than things and then use things to honor God.