God's Accounting System | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: God's Accounting System | Previous Challenge Entry
By Margo McKenzie
02/01/22
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God’s Accounting System

Throughout life we are constantly adding or subtracting from our storehouse. Often that storehouse contains dollars and cents. We learn this principle early with the keeping of a piggy bank. We add pennies and dimes to a piggy bank until we need to burst it to subtract those cents for an object that has captured our lust of the eye, the lust of our flesh, or the pride of life.

Experts have studied our hungers. They know where our weaknesses lie. They know their entry points. Color and motion appeal to our eyes and all that we consider beautiful. We see and get lured in and want to participate in that marketing story. Other objects appeal to our sensory systems and create an insatiable desire for those flavors, tastes, smells and adulations, despite the cost. We will spend our last dime to acquire them or borrow for them with a plastic card.

We are never satisfied. We grow wanting more color, more flavor, more touch, more praise––more, more, more. And what is that yearning for pride of life? Our pride says we should have what costs more, what is more valued, what is more elevated in society. Our pride like helium in a balloon, lifts us away from the rest of creation to which God has connected us. We want the tangible to separate us from the rest of us. We want to put ourselves in a club with strict codes for admission, distinguishing us from them. Those who have more to subtract are welcome. Those with fewer cents to subtract from their storehouse are excluded.

Then Jesus came along, changed the equation and burst that balloon. He changed the accounting system altogether. The one with the least amount to subtract is welcome into his club. So he came first to the leppers and fisherman, the prostitutes and the pauper and said, “Follow me,” “Go and sin no more.” He didn’t go to the leaders of Rome to explain his equation. In fact, he said how hard it would be for those with so much to subtract to even understand his accounting system. In his system, our liabilities will always exceed our assets and equity. Every day, our accounts are in the red: “For all have sinned and fall short,” (Romans 3:23), but he covers for us: “ For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith––and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God––not by works, so that no one can boast.”(Eph. 2:8-9 NIV). I hear the chorus of a classic hymn I used to sing along with the church congregation, “Jesus paid it all; all to him I owe.”

Our worldly ledgers may balance out, but if we don’t apply God’s ac-counting system, we will always fall short. And just the opposite applies too: no matter how often our count falls short, “He is faithful and just to forgive us” (I John 1:9). Through his son, he has established a trust on our behalf, a trust of abundance that can never be bankrupt, no matter what happens on the stock market.

Yes, we all want to experience some kind of worldly, financial stability, and each tax season, we must balance the counting books. I am thankful, nevertheless, for the accounting book established and maintained by the everlasting accountant who came and walked the earth like me and understanding the pull on my meager coffers, he set up the ultimate, a trust fund I can always count on.

Alleluia

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