[407 words]
One of the hardest classes that I had when I started college was accounting. My teacher was a stickler, there was plenty of homework, and class was a fast-paced frenzy of new ideas. It should have been an easy subject, but I didn’t quite get the knack of it at first. It was the whole concept of debits and credits that I could not straighten out in my mind. Once I had it, I would stumble on another problem that would send my back into an accounting tailspin. I excelled in math, but that did not matter if I was not keeping my numbers in the right columns. This had a serious effect on my final ledger, and often affected my grade.
Over the years, I have improved my accounting skills, but it reminds me that we have to keep a close eye on our ledger book of life. We often think that the ledger book of life is broken into the good and the bad that we have done in life. That God keeps every account of every action and weighs them out on a scale to see if they are imbalanced. We do good to offset the bad that we infringe. We help here and there when we have often ignored this and that. We feel like that if we do enough good things in this world that God can see past our bad. Most of the time we just hope to even out the scales. The cold hard truth is that we have racked up a debt that can never be repaid by our actions alone (Col. 2:13-14).
Paul tells us that Jesus set aside or forgave the sins that we committed on the cross. His death made the debt owed null and void, and freed us from the oppression of legality of the Old Law. It was no longer a ledger of wrongs and rights, but a clean slate to do no more wrongs. The beauty is that when we sin against God, we now have an avenue to ask for forgiveness from the Father (1 John 1:9). This repentant heart and forgiveness allow us to build a closer relationship with God that shows His love and mercy to those who are truly sorry. The ledger that we look towards is made red with the blood of our Savior, and that’s why we should keep constant watch of it.
Kyle Macon
Owl Hollow Church of Christ
Winchester, TN