Lessons from the Heart
Too poor to pay
By Rev. Andrew Paris

Paris

In a Scottish village lived an old country doctor who was noted for his generosity.After he died, when his books were examined, quite a few of his accounts were found to have these words written across them in red ink: "Forgiven. Too poor to pay."

Some months after his death, his widow, being somewhat less generous, insisted that these bills MUST be paid. She immediately took the debtors to court.

After examining one bill after another, the lawyer asked the widow, "Is this your husband's handwriting in red?" She admitted that it was.

"Then," said the lawyer, "there is no court in the land that can obtain the money for you. If your husband has written 'forgiven,' these debts are forgiven and cancelled."

In similar fashion God has written "forgiven" over the entire record of sin of everyone who is His child through faith in Jesus Christ. He has made this clear in His Bible; it says,

"He forgave us all our sins" (Colossians 2:13). "In Christ, God forgave you" (Ephesians 4:32). "The blood of Jesus, His Son, purifies us from all sin" (1 John 1:7).

In fact, this is the central message of the Bible: when Jesus died on the cross for our sins, His Father wrote "forgiven" in blood-red letters across our guilty record.

Our conscience, our human reason, and the unbelieving world may challenge that divine sentence. They may do their best to convince us that the debt of our iniquity has not been cancelled. Christians, who ought to know better, will sometimes say, "I'm not sure that I'm forgiven. You just don't know what I've done in my sinful past. I've done too many bad things."

But we have the word of Him to whom the debt was owed and who alone has the power to forgive. And He has written His assurance in the crimson letters of the fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel's veins: "In Jesus we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins" (Ephesians 1:7). And so we can say with confidence that "sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains" (William Cowper).

The eternal Son of God Himself paid for those who, because of their sins, were "too poor to pay."

"Jesus paid it all; All to Him I owe. Sin had left a crimson stain; He washed it white as snow" (Elvina M. Hall).

Andrew Paris is minister of the Delphi Christian Church. He may be reached at paris46923@yahoo.com.