When I opened that document from our former loan company, the kids were asleep, and I actually had time to reflect, which is rare these days. I saw this document as a gentle reminder to commit to memory the many lessons we learned through our two year trial given that I can be so quick to forget God’s grace in my life; I can be so quick to repeat over and over the very same mistakes. As I sat there reflecting back on the last two years and the tremendous amount of money we would need to pay the bank just to sell our houses prior to the short sales going through, an image of the cross came to mind. In the same way that we had an impossible debt to pay regarding our homes, we also had an impossible debt to pay regarding our sin. However, in the same way the short sale cleared our mortgage debt making us right with the bank and thus debt free; Jesus also cleared our sin debt completely on the cross making us right with God. He not only cleared our sin debt but gave us his perfect record. He took my ugly sin record and put it on Himself giving me His spotless record, so that when God looks at me, He sees perfection; He sees Jesus.
I plan to frame this
document as a remembrance of a time in our lives that God met us in the most
unusual way. I do not want to forget
the many lessons we have learned about money.
The Bible actually speaks to
keeping a record regarding the ways in which God moves within a heart or
situation. An important part of
Israelite history in the Old Testament was the laying of memorial stones. In Genesis 28, when Jacob ran away from home
to escape the wrath of Esau, he placed a certain stone near his head as he
slept. As he was sleeping God spoke to
him, 13“I am the Lord, the God of your father
Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on
which you are lying. 14 Your descendants will be like the dust of the
earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to
the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring.[b] 15 I
am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back
to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised
you.”(Genesis 28:13-15 NIV) As a result of
this encounter with God, Jacob anointed this stone with oil and made some promises
to God. Later in Jacob’s life, God
actually referenced this incident and stone, “I am the God of Bethel, where you anointed
the sacred stone and made a vow to me.
Now leave this land immediately and return to your native land.” (Gen
31:13 NET)
What we see from this
passage is that God and Jacob had a personal history together; they shared a
common memory and they both could reference it. By God referencing this event, He in a sense
was reminding Jacob that He was faithful, and even though that promise had been
made many years prior, it was as good as if it was made today.
This letter from our former
mortgage company, that will soon be framed, is my memorial stone. I want to remember it; I need to remember
it. The biggest lessons we learned as a
family can really be summed up in Psalm 127: 1 “Unless the Lord builds the
house, its builders labor in vain.” Some
people make an idol out of spending money and some out of saving money. Neither is good. We err on the saving end. If we invest in real estate, if we invest in
…., if we save, then we are secure.
Those are some of the idols, some of the lies, that we bowed down to and
gave much of our effort to in our early married years; and without God’s grace
in our lives, those are the lies that we will continually believe. We gave the tithe and maybe a little more,
but our hearts were not cheerful givers.
We may not have said it out loud, but how we lived our life up until
recently showed that we believed it was exclusively our job to make our life
work out right. After walking through two years that seemed
like ten years watching our savings dwindle trying to keep two houses afloat
and facing the fact that all the money we used to fix them up plus the 20% down
we put in both houses, we would never see again, God began to break us. We now know after a very hard but gracious
and needed lesson that God truly is our provider, that it is much more blessed
to give than receive, and that if God does not build our house, we truly labor
in vain. It must be noted that when I
say something, I cannot say everything, so please do not get me wrong. Saving money is wise and we are called to be
wise with money; however the issue is the heart. God always looks at the heart. What I now know is that when I try to be
frugal and save so that I can reach earthly security, I am not trusting God to
be my provider. Neither spending
frivolously nor hoarding money is trusting God.
Everything we have is His and we are called to be good stewards of
whatever He entrusts us with. We are
called to both enjoy what He has given us, using it to meet our own needs and,
secondly, to lavishly give it away. It
is not the amount of money we give as we see in Luke 21 when the widow gave out
of her poverty; it is the spirit with which the gift was given.
I know our struggle will continue to be to hold firmly to the things Jesus has so kindly given us, and I know so much of our desire to save and be wise is great... but it is so freeing and nice to know that we can admit that many times the very Godly and Wise choices the Turners make, are not so wise and godly after all... they are calculated ways we try to protect ourselves and not trust our Savior. I am thankful we know a God that is so patient and merciful to us Turners!
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