Applying God's Word to Your Life
Tom Shrader walks through Ephesians 4:17-24, contrasting the futile, darkened mind of the unbeliever with the renewed mind of the Christian, and drawing on Romans 1 to trace the progression from spiritual ignorance to moral callousness. He then applies the passage directly to the growing practice of strategic mortgage default — walking away from a loan one can afford to pay — arguing that followers of Christ are called to honor their contractual obligations even when it is financially disadvantageous. Shrader concludes that obedience in such moments is not merely a legal or financial matter but a testimony issue, and that trusting God in hardship opens the door to His provision in ways that pragmatic self-interest forecloses.
“Christ did not die to make you a better person. He died to make you a whole new creature.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Ephesians
Recorded: 2010 at East Valley Bible Church
Duration: 49 min
Themes: obedience, integrity, financial decisions, testimony, renewing your mind, moral compromise, trusting god, honoring commitments, struggling with financial pressure, facing mortgage crisis, homeowner in debt, new believer, questioning obedience, navigating ethical decisions, adult breadwinner, feeling tempted to cut corners
Scripture: Ephesians 4:1, Ephesians 4:4-6, Ephesians 4:12, Ephesians 4:17-24, Ephesians 4:25-32, Galatians 2:20, Ecclesiastes 1:2, Romans 1:18-32, Colossians 1:21, James 4:4, James 4:13, 1 John 2:15-17, Matthew 6:24-33, Matthew 11:29, Proverbs 22:26, Romans 13, 1 Timothy 6:8
Theological Themes: sanctification, becoming holy, noetic effects of sin, darkened mind, Romans 1, Ephesians 4, biblical ethics, renewed mind
Full Transcript
Introduction and Context in Ephesians
If you have Bibles, open them to Ephesians chapter 4. If you go about two-thirds of the way back, you will get to the New Testament, then go to roughly page 152. Today we are going to look at verses 17 through 24, and this all flows as a section — verse 17 of chapter 4 through verse 32. We are going to spend three or four weeks working our way through this section, really working on understanding what it says and then applying it.
When we get to chapter 4, we arrive at verse 1 and see it begins with a "therefore." Chapters 1, 2, and 3 are very doctrinal, perhaps summarized in chapter 1 verse 3: that you have been blessed with every spiritual blessing in heavenly places in Christ. Chapter 4 is the application part. We want to spend the time to understand what the text says and then apply it to our lives.
In chapter 4 verse 1, Paul says, "I implore you to walk in a manner worthy of your calling." Paul is saying that if you are a follower of Christ, you ought to look like it — it is going to produce in you a whole different way of life. He goes on to describe characteristics you will have: humility, gentleness, patience, love, and peace. In verses 4 through 6 he talks about the body, the singleness of it, and then the responsibility of the body, which is ultimately, in verse 12, to equip and encourage the saints.
Walking No Longer as the Gentiles Walk
When we get to verse 17, Paul says, "So this I say to you and affirm together with the Lord." Paul is saying it is not he alone who is saying this — he is moving the pen, but it is the Holy Spirit. This is what God says: that you walk no longer as the Gentiles walk. He is giving an example of how you ought not to think, and significantly, that is where he starts — with the thought process, with the futility of their mind.
When Paul speaks of Gentiles here, this is not about the Jew-Gentile distinction. It becomes representative of all non-Christians, all unbelievers. We might use the word "pagan," though that word may lose its meaning if you picture someone praying to a rain god or a sun god. It simply refers to someone who rejects Christ.
A New Creature in Christ
You are a new creature in Christ. There are two Greek words available for "new." One means new in type; the other means new in kind. Think of an airplane: "new in type" would be the 757, while "new in kind" was the plane the Wright brothers had at Kitty Hawk. One is a remodel, a makeover, an improvement. The other is an entirely new invention.
When it comes to you and me in Christ, we are not a new type. We are not remodeled. We are transformed. Christ did not die to make you a better person. He died to make you a whole new creature. It is a whole new beginning, a whole new person.
John MacArthur writes this: "Salvation is not a matter of improvement or perfection of what previously existed. It is a total transformation. The New Testament speaks of the believers having a new mind, new will, new heart, new inheritance, new relationship, new power, new knowledge, new wisdom, new perception, new understanding, new righteousness, new love, new desire, new citizenship, and many other new things."
The old things have passed away, and you are a new creature in Christ. Galatians 2:20 says, "It is no longer I that live but Christ that lives in me. The life which I lived in the flesh I now live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and delivered Himself up for me." That is how we are supposed to live.
The Transformation Begins with the Mind
The old way was futility of mind. Paul begins there, and he will get to actions — but it is important to note that this transformation really starts with a change of mind. We looked at this a couple of weeks ago: have the mind in you that is also in Christ Jesus. The song says, "Lord, change me from the inside out." Lord, deal with my mind.
Futility carries with it the idea of emptiness. When Solomon writes in Ecclesiastes, he says, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." Life is meaningless under the sun. What he is saying is that apart from the wisdom and insight of God, life makes no sense — it is empty. That is the whole book of Ecclesiastes. It is not the testimony of a loser by the world's standards. Solomon was arguably the richest man who ever lived. He had all the things the world says should make you happy, and at the end of the day his conclusion is that it is all empty. It does not matter how much you accumulate. All those things the world says will make you happy will not.
Darkened Understanding and Separation from God
There is a flow that moves through this passage. Paul describes futility of mind, and then in verse 18 he speaks of "being darkened in their understanding." The tense in the Greek is a continuing condition. It speaks of spiritual darkness and implies ignorance and immorality of thought. They are separated from God. Their understanding is darkened. They are excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them.
of Ephesians. The natural man, the unbeliever, is futile in his thinking, darkened in his understanding, separated from the life of God, hardened in heart, calloused in conscience, and the inevitable result is that he gives himself over to sensuality, impurity, and greediness. What we believe affects how we behave. Paul starts with the mind and walks us through the whole process.
The Condition of the Natural Man
God is not in the natural man. The Spirit doesn't dwell in him. The unbeliever, the pagan, the Gentile — he doesn't get it. He is darkened, and it is even more than that: he is hardened in his heart. The idea there is literally rock-hard — you cannot penetrate it.
The reason for this hardness is that he is separated from the life of God. Going back to Ephesians chapter 2, verse 1, Paul reminds us: "You were dead in your sins and trespasses." That is the natural condition. Hardness of heart leads to callousness — the idea, medically speaking, of a hardness of a joint or dead skin. You have those callouses, and you literally don't feel anymore.
We used to do that as kids — put pens in the callous and rip the skin open, and there was no pain attached to it because it was dead. You don't feel anymore. That is precisely the picture Paul is painting of the spiritually calloused person.
There are a couple of criminologists and sociologists who wrote a book called *The Criminal Personality*, and they spent three sections dealing with an issue titled "The Thinking Errors of the Criminal." Here is what they write: "It is remarkable that the criminal often derives as great an impact from his activities during non-arrestable phases as he does from the crime. The criminal's thinking pattern operates everywhere. It is not restricted to crime. Sociological explanations have been unsatisfactory. The idea that a man becomes a criminal because he is corrupted by his environment is proven to be too weak an explanation. We have indicated that criminals come from a broad spectrum of homes, both disadvantaged and privileged, within the same neighborhood. Some are violators; most are not."
It is not the environment that turns a man into a criminal. It is a series of choices that he makes starting at a very early age. It starts with choices. It starts in the mind. And from there, darkness sets in, separation from God begins to manifest itself, hardness of heart follows, and callousness takes hold.
From Calloused Hearts to Corrupted Behavior
What would you expect of someone who is futile in their mind, self-centered in their thinking, operating in ignorance, absent from truth, and spiritually and morally calloused? You would expect it to manifest itself in behavior. What we believe affects how we behave, and so Paul appropriately starts with the mind and takes us through the process.
He arrives at Ephesians chapter 4, verse 19. They have become callous, and they have given themselves over to sensuality. That is the idea of total license — an absence of moral restraint, no limits or boundaries anymore. They give themselves over to license, to sensuality of practice, which carries the idea of an enterprise. And to impurity — that is a catch-all for all immoral behavior — and to greediness, which is unbounded covetousness.
The Same Pattern in Romans 1
Keep your finger there and turn to the book of Romans, chapter 1. Paul takes us through a very similar process in Romans, and perhaps this one is more familiar. Look at verse 18: "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth." They are dead. They are calloused. The word "suppress" means to actively hold down the truth in unrighteousness.
He continues: "because that which is known about God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse." They had all of this evidence. Even though they knew God, they did not honor Him and they did not give Him thanks.
So what does it take to be ungodly and unrighteous? The answer is nothing. You simply fail to give Him thanks. You fail to give Him honor. And the result is that you become futile in your speculations, and your foolish heart is darkened. You hear the same language as in Ephesians.
Paul expands on it a bit more. He says in verse 22: "Professing to be wise, they became fools." And then a bargain is struck. They exchange the glory of the incorruptible God for the image of the form of corruptible man, of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.
God Gave Them Over
Then in verses 24, 26, and 28 — a phrase Paul repeats, and it is worth boxing in your Bible — you see the words "God gave them over." God gave them over to the lusts of their hearts. God did not push them that way. He simply said, if that is what you want, go get it. He gave them over to the lusts of their hearts, to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them.
They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and now they worship the creation rather than the Creator. For this reason, God gave them over to their degrading passions, and Paul lists what some of those are. He arrives at verse 28 and says they did not see fit to acknowledge God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do the things which are not proper.
Then he lists them: "Filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, gossip, slanders, haters of God." And he summarizes it by saying it was not even enough that they did these things. Verse 32: "they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, and they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them." They are saying, come on and join us in this.
So here is what Paul is saying, both in Romans and now as we return to Ephesians.
Walking Worthy of Your Calling
In Ephesians, Paul is laying out a process. Here is how a non-Christian, a non-believer thinks: they are futile in their mind, and then they are darkened in their understanding. They are separated from God, so there is a hardness of heart. They are callous, and they are given over to all sorts of sensuality, all those impurities and greediness laid out in the book of Romans. So Paul's charge is this: walk in a manner worthy of your calling. That is how an unbeliever thinks and then acts.
Verse 20 says, "But you did not learn Christ in this way." This is not what you learned about Christ, not what you learned about what it meant to be in Christ, to acknowledge Him as Lord and Savior. "If indeed you have heard of Him and have been taught in Him, just as the truth is in Jesus, then in reference to your former manner, lay aside the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lust of deceit." The old self is who you were — that is not who you are anymore. There was a point in time when that was where you were, but when you came to Christ in repentance and faith, you became a brand new creature — not new in type, but new in kind.
So walk in a manner worthy of your calling. Do not act and think as the Gentile did. Lay that aside. Verse 23 continues: "Be renewed in the spirit of your mind." Where they were futile in mind, your mind is now filled with Christ. You have set your mind on the things above, and you think and therefore act in a totally different way, with an entirely different value system.
Colossians 1:21 reinforces this: "Although you formerly were alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds, He reconciled you." You are now in right relationship with Him. You have put off the old.
Put Off the Old, Put On the New
But putting off the old is not enough on its own. If you simply stop, you have created a vacuum, and something is going to fill it. Paul says put off the old, but then in verse 24, put on the new. He begins to illustrate this in verse 25: lay aside falsehood, do not lie anymore, but speak the truth. Be angry, but do not sin in your anger — there is a righteous anger — and do not let the sun go down on it. Do not give the devil an opportunity.
Verses 28 through 32 continue the illustration. Do not steal any longer, but work. Watch the way you speak — wholesome talk, speaking in a way that is ultimately edifying according to the need of the moment. Do not grieve the Spirit. And then this thoroughly practical word: "Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with every form of malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, just as in Christ, God has forgiven you."
Do Not Think Like the World
This is what Ray Stedman means when he says do not think like the world — do not adopt the world's value system. James says it plainly in James 4:4: "You adulterous people, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God." He is not talking about the planet or about people; he is talking about the world's value systems. That is futile — a darkened mind, dead and callous.
John writes in 1 John 2:15-17: "Do not love the world or the things of the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world — the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life — is not from the Father but is from the world. The world is passing away, and also its lust, but the one who does the will of God lives forever."
A New Person, Not a Better Person
What Paul is saying seems to come together clearly. Do not do that, but do this — act like one who knows Christ. Eugene Peterson paraphrases verses 23 and 24 of chapter 4 in The Message this way: "Since then we do not have the excuse of ignorance, everything — and I do mean everything — connected with the old way of life has to go. It's rotten through and through. Get rid of it. And then take on an entirely new way of life, a God-fashioned life, a life renewed from the inside and working itself out in the conduct as God accurately reproduces His character in you." Jesus says in Matthew 11:29, "Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me."
This much is clear: Christ did not die to make you a better person. He died to make you a new person. And it begins with a worldview, with a thought process. You are no longer futile in your thinking. You now have the potential for the mind of Christ within you. You have the Spirit that allows you to look at the world and begin to sift through things. You can look at a book like Ecclesiastes and see how the world values things — what it says is significant, what it calls important, what it defines as success. But the question is whether that matches God's definition of success.
The Word Taught and Applied
One of the things heard regularly — in Connect classes, from people who encounter East Valley Bible Church, and perhaps most tellingly from people who do not attend here — is this: the reputation of what happens on Sunday morning in terms of pulpit teaching, and throughout the week in all of our venues, is that the Word of God is taken, taught, and genuinely handled with a desire to understand what God is saying. Then the effort is made to ask: so what?
There seem to be two schools of thought in teaching. One is almost entirely void of application. That school of thought says it is the Holy Spirit's job —
Introduction: How This Topic Came Together
The Holy Spirit applies the Word and speaks to us through application and illustration. That is our reputation — we teach the Word of God and we apply it. I spend more and more time with men who want to be pastors, and they will primarily say they want to be teachers. They ask me all the time, "How do you prepare a lesson?" It is really simple. I read it, I make notes, I see what I get out of it as I look at it, and I read it in different translations and paraphrases — all the time asking God, "Show me what this means, and show me what it means to us." Then I try to put it all together and make sure we have an application point and that we are connected.
Part of the job we have — and Jerry used a great phrase — is that these men will start to smell like sheep. What he was not saying is that they would have an odor about them, though one or two of them may. That is not the issue. The issue, for elders, is that they spend time with sheep. And part of being with sheep is understanding what sheep are going through and what they need.
Staff members came to me this week and said, "Listen, there is something you need to talk about. We are running into it everywhere — with our volunteer staff, in our own lives, in small groups. You need to talk about this." When you ask how God puts a lesson together, that is one of the ways He puts it together. He provides a passage that says to put off the old way of thinking and put on the new, and then He provides the need of the sheep.
The staff came to me and said they wanted me to deal with this issue. I then went to the leadership midweek — it was not a scheduled meeting — and said I was hearing this from different people. They said they were hearing it too. I asked whether they thought I ought to talk about it, and they said, "Does it fit?" I said it fits right within the context of where we are, and they agreed I should address it. Neil mentioned to me that this issue had just been dealt with on *60 Minutes*, so I went to YouTube, found the clip — ten minutes and thirty-two seconds — and I am going to play it today.
Defining Strategic Default
Let me set this up, because it could so easily be misunderstood. The term we are introducing is **strategic default**. It is where a borrower who has the ability to pay makes a decision to no longer make payments on a loan, primarily because the value of the property is less than the loan. By the time I sit with you and watch this clip, it will be the sixth or seventh time I have seen it, and I want to make sure you understand what we are saying.
We are talking about people who are in a position to make a loan payment and choose not to. Some of you have been forced into situations — I understand that, and I think the clip takes the clearest and most straightforward of all situations. The operative phrase is: here are people who have the ability to pay on their homes but choose not to. We are examining this now in the context of the old self and the new self. Does God speak to this? What would God have His people at least discuss?
My goal is not to hurt anyone's feelings. My goal is to encourage. A young lady came up after the first service and said, "Thank you so much — we bought our house for $110,000 and it is worth $39,000, and everybody is telling us to get out of here. We have four kids and two bedrooms." And she said she was doing fine until she started talking to other people. It is like not even knowing that world is out there — the way I did not know there was a New York when I was in Davenport, or the way I remember the first time I saw Las Vegas and thought, "This has been here the whole time."
So if you are in one of those really difficult situations — if you have been through this, or if this is picking at a scab — I want you to hear compassion from me and from us. But when the staff comes, as they only do once in a while, and says, "Here is this issue, you had better deal with it because we are seeing it everywhere," I believe that is significant. So take a look at this clip.
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*[Video clip from* 60 Minutes *begins]*
Despite some indications that the economy is recovering, the housing market remains a disaster area. Currently, about seven million homeowners are behind on their mortgages, and that number is only getting worse. Banks, with the help of the government, are offering some relief to homeowners who have lost jobs and simply cannot meet their payments. But there is a growing number who can pay but are simply walking away from houses that are now worth as little as half of what they paid for them. It is called strategic default. People have done the math and decided that making those monthly payments is just throwing money away, leaving the mortgage holders — the banks — as zookeepers of an ever-growing parade of white elephants.
Among them, Chris Diener and his wife Dana of Sun City, Arizona. West Foothill Drive has become a street of shattered dreams. When Diener, an auditor for a local university, bought his three-bedroom—
Applying God's Word to Your Life
He bought his house in 2006 for $262,000 and thought he got a bargain. First-time homebuyers often don't know that houses are overvalued. They only know they need to get in before prices keep rising. Then the balloon burst. How much does he think he could get for that $262,000 house today? About $142,000. That is a drop of over 43%.
Diener and his house were, as they say, underwater. With a mortgage of about a quarter of a million dollars and a home worth less than $150,000, he has one very expensive lemon. He tried to talk his bank into renegotiating his mortgage, but because he earns enough to keep paying, the bank refused. They told him it was going to affect his credit and that they were going to take his house, and he told them to go for it. He could afford to stay, but he chose not to. He is walking away, and that lemon of a house is now the bank's problem.
Because Diener, like many Americans, only made a 10% down payment on his home, walking away is a lot easier. By law in Arizona and nine other states, the bank cannot go after any of his other assets, though his credit rating will suffer. When asked whether he fears getting a reputation as a deadbeat, he says that with the money he will save over four to six years, he is confident he will have enough to buy his way into a house if he wants. He says he feels not even a twinge of guilt, especially after dealing with his lender and trying to contact them.
Walking Away from the Obligation
Neither do Gene Ellen Shulick and Danny Kuhn feel guilty. They bought their Phoenix bungalow three years ago for nearly $400,000, and the bank now values it at $85,000. Even though they can afford the mortgage payments, they felt they were trying to bail out a boat with a bucket. As Shulick put it, no logical business person would do anything other than walk away.
There was a great deal of soul searching involved. She describes crying because she was in love with the house, and every day she would redo the math hoping they had missed something. But they had not. The house was dropping anywhere from $5,000 to $8,000 a month. So Shulick and Kuhn decided it was time to walk away.
They do not see themselves as villains. They argue they fulfilled the parts of their contract with the bank and let the bank know what they were doing. It is all legal, and while it is not anything they ever expected to do and it does not feel good, they believe it is the right thing to do. They acknowledge that an empty house brings down the value of everyone around it, and they understand their neighbors will be upset. Yet they are hardly alone — Shulick notes the number of co-workers who have approached her asking how she is doing it because they need to do the same.
The Scale of the Crisis
The Southwest has become what some are calling an inland ocean of bad mortgage debt. In Arizona, a full 50% of houses are underwater. Next door in Nevada the situation is even worse, with 65% of houses drowning and the water still rising. And it is not just the Southwest — more than 11 million homeowners across the country are underwater, and it is estimated that number could double in the next year. That would mean nearly half of all American mortgage holders owe more on their homes than those homes are currently worth. As one observer put it, this country has been through an event none of us have ever experienced since the Depression.
To try to stem the tide of foreclosures, Commissioner of the Federal Housing Administration David Stevens says the Obama administration has set aside billions to give banks the incentive to help struggling and underwater borrowers with their mortgages. However, banks have been slow to modify the terms of those loans. Stevens explains that these programs are designed to affect those most at risk — those who are unable to make their payments — and they do require the investor and the servicer to participate.
The Spreading Trend and the Moral Question
The decision to walk away from a sinking home is spreading like a virus. When one person on a street does it, the next-door neighbor begins to ask what they themselves are doing and why they are putting all their money into an almost worthless house. The concern for anyone considering that move is that they must be so deeply in negative equity that they are willing to damage their credit and their financial reputation going forward. Walking away from a mortgage one could have afforded will follow that family for years to come.
Brent White, a law professor at the University of Arizona, argues that the moral issue is beside the point. In a controversial academic paper, he wrote that government and the banks exploit people's sense of shame to keep them from defaulting. White says more people should be walking, pointing out that there has never been a time in history where this many Americans were underwater on their mortgages, or where this many people's homes were worth half of what they paid for them. He calls these unique times where things are simply different.
One voice pushes back from personal experience: as a child of the Depression, one commentator says the most shameful thing that could happen to you was to lose your house. White's counter-argument is that people actually feel too much shame about letting go of their home, and that people might in fact be better off making economic, rational decisions in their own best interest.
When Businesses Walk Away
White points to the fact that big businesses make such bottom-line decisions all the time. Morgan Stanley walked away from five San Francisco office buildings they had bought at the height of the boom. Real estate developer Tishman Spire defaulted on the massive $5.4 billion Stuyvesant Town apartment complex in New York City earlier that year when its value fell by nearly half, making it one of the biggest walkaways in real estate history. It is a trend the banks fear could catch on with average homeowners. Already the CEO of Citibank's mortgage division had begun to take notice.
Strategic Defaults and the Question of Conscience
One out of every five borrowers who default on their mortgages are able to pay. If that number rises, it could jeopardize any economic recovery. No bank contacted would talk publicly about strategic defaults, but all indicated they would be unwilling in most cases to help underwater homeowners who cannot afford to keep up their payments. Commissioner Stevens agrees with the banks: "To simply allow anybody who just decides they don't want their home anymore, who signed a contract to purchase a home, to walk away and get some sort of write-off with a program backed by the administration or a financial institution creates a whole new set of standards that will live with us for years to come." The question is: who pays that bill?
For now, that bill is being paid by people like businessman Tom Hanson of Scottsdale, Arizona. He bought his dream house on Goldust Avenue five years ago. Much of the gold has evaporated and he is left with a pile of dust. He paid a million two for the house, and its value today is eight hundred and fifty thousand — if you can sell it. While his friends are urging him to unload that monkey on his back, Hanson cannot bring himself to do it yet: "I just would not be comfortable walking away, and so maybe at some point in time I will walk away, but right now I'm not." When asked whether it comes down to conscience, he said, "I think it does."
The Deaners, by contrast, stopped paying their mortgage five months ago and plan to stay in their house for free until the bank forecloses in July. With all the money they save, they plan to rent a nicer, cheaper house for a few years while his credit recovers. When confronted with the concern that if everybody did what they were doing, the country would be in even bigger, deeper trouble, the response was, "If that starts happening, that's for the professionals to figure out."
When asked how he used to feel about people who walked away, he said, "I thought initially it was immoral. My family raised me to believe that you should take care of your contract liabilities and your debt. That's how I was brought up to be — live within your means." Yet when asked whether he felt any responsibility, he said, "Unfortunately, no, I don't." And I would agree — unfortunately, no, he doesn't.
An Isolated Situation — or Is It?
I want to be really clear. I don't want you to misunderstand. We are dealing with an isolated situation where a person says, "I have the ability to pay." Take that young couple — the one in the middle, the worst case — the house was worth four hundred thousand and is now worth eighty-five thousand, but they can still make the payments. It was their dream house, so live in it and die in it. That is not callous. Her line was, "No logical business person would do this." She said she was grieved — and why was she grieved? Interestingly, because she loves the house.
When you talk about futility of mind and the old self, a new way of thinking does not just make logical business decisions. There is a professor saying we should make rational decisions that are in our best interest — no logical business person would do otherwise. But I want to be clear: this is not just a hypothetical situation. At some point, followers of Christ make different decisions than the world makes, and it may not be the smartest business decision. It is also worth noting that one out of every five homes being foreclosed on could have had their payments made — and one commentator described it as spreading like a virus.
What Scripture Says About Debt
I think this is biblical. I believe I can make the argument from Scripture that if you borrow money, you should repay it. I remember teaching that in a class one time and my father said it seemed like a waste of time — that anybody would understand if you borrow money, you should repay it. Proverbs 22:26 says, "Do not be a man who strikes hands in pledge or puts up security for debts; if you lack the means to pay, your very bed will be snatched from under you." Romans 13 says, "Give everyone what you owe him: if you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect."
Here is the Message paraphrase of that passage: "That's also why you pay taxes — so an orderly way of life may be maintained. Fulfill your obligations. Pay your taxes. Pay your bills. Respect your leaders. Don't run up debts, except for the huge debt of love." I wrestled with this. I was very nervous about addressing it because I know how hard it is and how easily it can be misunderstood. I spent the last two or three days going through it again and again, and even this morning sat with Neil using him as a sounding board.
This Is Real Life
We often use the text "do not let the sun go down on your anger" and illustrate it with examples about people cutting you off on the freeway. But this is real life. Somebody told me there was a huge article in the paper this morning on this very subject. For you and me, as new creatures, this is not simply about scriptural restraint — it is bigger than that. It is your testimony. We are to be salt and light, and much of what we do will not make sense to the world.
Can you imagine sitting down with your banker, having him tell you that you can pay, and responding, "I know that"? Can you imagine being the person who has lived in a house for five months without making a payment, planning to stay until July when the bank finally gets to them — and the lesson learned is not one of conviction, but rather the realization that they can get a nicer house for less money? At some point, followers of Christ must be willing to sit down with a banker and say something very different.
Applying God's Word to Your Life
There is a meaningful difference between the person who walks away from a financial obligation simply because it is inconvenient and the person who honors a commitment even when it costs them. Consider two scenarios. The first is someone who walks away from a mortgage, hands back the house, and treats it as a sound financial strategy. The second is someone who says, "I made a promise, I'm going to keep making these payments, and I know it doesn't make sense by the world's standards, but I said yes." I would bet those two people get a very different response if they invite a neighbor to church on Easter.
Paul says to Timothy that if you have food and covering, with those you should be content. Yet we now have advertisements running that say bankruptcy used to be a stigma but is now a sound financial strategic plan. I don't know how to make that any softer, and I hate saying it, but I try to put myself in that position — it is something I fear for myself. I lost a third, or whatever it was, of my retirement, just like many of you did, and I understand the pain.
Don't Walk as the Gentiles Walk
As I studied and prayed over this lesson, the instruction kept coming back: affirm what the Lord says — do not walk as the Gentiles walk. Immediately I think of Jesus using that same phrase in Matthew 6. He says, "You can't serve two masters. You can't serve God and money. For this reason I say to you, don't worry about your life, what you're going to eat, what you're going to drink, what your body, what you're going to wear. Life is more than food in the body, more than clothing." He uses the example of the birds and the fields and their beauty. Then He says, "Don't worry then saying, what will we eat? What will we drink? What clothes will we put on? For the Gentiles think like that."
I get the concern. I get the pain. I understand it. But the call remains: seek first His kingdom, and He will take care of this. That does not necessarily mean He is going to replace a lost house with a brand-new house. You may never get right-side up. But even if you never get right-side up, even if you die in that situation — I mean that sincerely — there is something more at stake than the financial calculation.
It would devastate me if I bought a house for four hundred thousand dollars and it was worth eighty-five thousand. But if you can make the payments, it was your dream house — the dream just died there. When Susan and I bought our house, we said it was a body-bag house. That is how we intended to live in it.
The Legal Argument Is Not Enough
The legal dimension of this makes me nervous as well. I spent time talking to attorneys this week to make sure I was not getting out on a limb with nothing beneath me. What they told me was that the contract does include a remedy — you can give back the house — but that giving it back means you have breached your end of the contract. The remedy for not fulfilling a contract is not the same as fulfilling it.
We would not say that because something is legal, it is therefore right. We do not approach abortion that way. If a mother came to you and said she had a baby she could not afford, you would not simply say, "Well, it's legal to abort it." When have we ever said the law settles the moral question? The two are not the same, and we have always known that.
Someone even suggested to me that walking away could be framed as a stewardship decision — that by saving the money, you could eventually get into a better position. But what I actually heard was: I am not going to make payments for seven months so I can get a bigger house for less. And there was no remorse, not even a moment of, "Do you feel bad about this?" The response was simply, "That's the bank's problem."
There Is No Bottom to This
If we accept that reasoning, there is no end to it. Why not do the same with a car? The minute you drive it off the lot, you are upside down. Why not take a television, stop paying for it, and say, "Come and take it"? This is a bigger problem than any political party or policy debate. If we simply keep handing things back whenever the math turns against us, there is no bottom to where we end up. You cannot spend your way out of this, and you cannot walk your way out of it either.
I will be honest — I can absolutely see myself, in a certain context, saying, "Here, take it back." I could see making a difficult financial decision as a prudent business choice. But you and I are called to be more than people who only make prudent business decisions.
Wisdom from Above
James chapter 4, verse 13 tells us there are two kinds of wisdom. There is one that comes from below — it is natural, it is earthy, it is where there is jealousy and strife. And there is one that comes from above. The wisdom that comes from above is peaceable and pure and gentle and full of mercy. That is the wisdom we are called to seek, and it will lead us somewhere very different from where the world's calculation leads.
We will pick up from here next week.
Trusting God in Financial Hardship
One of the things you do as a follower of Christ, when you begin to act outside of that context, is rob God of the opportunity to work in your life. You don't give God the opportunity to solve the situation, and you therefore miss the blessing of what God is going to do. I have said it a thousand times already: I am not in any way diminishing the pain or the hardship of that. Some of you have situations that are very different from the people on that screen, and I am not dealing with that, not judging that.
But when you are in a situation like those people on that screen — where you can pay and you just walk away — I would be really concerned. I would have a very real concern on a spiritual issue and on a testimonial issue. What about your neighbors? It just seems to me that we are to operate in a different way, and I will not pretend that is easy.
Part of what we must do is ask: what does the scripture mean, and what is the application? It is interesting — people love application as long as it is out there about somebody else. But when it comes into our own life, it becomes much more difficult.
So I want you to know, if you are in that situation, we hear you. That is why people are here at the front, and the chaplain and the conference center staff are available to pray with you. We get it, I understand it. But God says do not worry, be anxious for nothing, pray about everything. Bring your prayer, your supplication, your petition to the Lord, and He will give you a peace that passes all understanding.
Closing Prayer
Father, help us see this truth. My heart aches for people who are genuinely in a position where they have just gotten there — in many instances through no fault of their own — and they cannot make a payment. God, I get it. But if we can make payments, if we can find a way to do it, I think You are calling us to do that, and I know that is really hard.
I pray for those who are in the process of this, who are hurting so much, that they would find comfort. I pray especially for those who are saying they could be doing this but are not, and whose friends are telling them they are wrong to try. God, let them feel that peace that passes all understanding.
God, this is tough, and You know it. We are not relying on the banks, or the University of Arizona, or ASU, or human wisdom, but on Your strength, on Your grace, and on Your mercy. Father, we are hurting, and we find comfort in You and You alone. Will You take this word and apply it to our hearts. We pray this in Christ's name, amen.