Debtors

“Owe no man anything but to love him,” Romans 13:8.

Debtors by Dr. D. James Kennedy

I am a debtor both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to wise and to unwise.—Romans 1:14

Are you in debt? These days, it seems, who isn’t? But financial obligations are one thing. We also incur spiritual debts. Paul claimed he was a debtor to the Gentiles, the barbarians, the wise, and the unwise. Yet how could this be? What had those people done for him? Nothing at all! At least, nothing good. In fact five times they beat him with forty stripes minus one. Three times they beat him with rods, and once they stoned him and left him for dead. So what debt did he owe?

Just the same debt that pertains to every single person who claims to believe in Jesus Christ. Everyone who has received the gospel of Christ has received it as a steward, responsible to God, who gave it, and to the rest of humankind, for whom it’s intended.

“I am a debtor,” cried William Carey as he launched the modern missionary movement, setting sail for India to bring the gospel to the Hindus.

“I am a debtor,” cried David Livingstone as he plunged for the first time into the interior of Africa to open the dark continent to the light of Christ’s gospel.

“I am a debtor,” cried William Wilberforce as he devoted his entire life to ridding Great Britain of the onerous slave trade. On his deathbed he received word that he had finally succeeded.

“I am a debtor,” cried Florence Nightingale as she went to far-flung battlefields to begin the noble profession of nursing, to bind up the wounded, and to care for the dying.

“I am a debtor,” cried William Booth as he started the Salvation Army to reach the downtrodden of the world.

And how about you, my friend? Are you a debtor? Does the realization of what Jesus Christ has done for you compel you to serve Him and others? Today ask God to use you to share the good news.

That land is henceforth my country which most needs the gospel. —COUNT ZINZENDORF


So, are we as believers debtors to no one but God or debtors to everyone, including God? The point that Dr. Kennedy is making here is that we who have received Christ and the “unspeakable gift,” II Corinthians 9:15, that He gave His life to supply, are indeed responsible for making sure that the good news of life that Jesus gives to us becomes available through our efforts to others who know Him not.

Because “God is love,” I John 4:8, and because it is His desire “that all men be saved,” I Timothy 2:4, the ultimate bottom line of the truth expressed by Dr. Kennedy, is that if we love Jesus as we claim we do, we will serve Him with all our energy, thereby assuring that we will indeed take the gospel “into all the world,” as Jesus admonishes us to do in Mark 16:15.

If we love Him and believe His is the “only name given under heaven whereby men might be saved,” Acts 4:12, we will spend ourselves to make sure that the world knows. As Carey, Livingstone, Wilberforce, Nightingale, and Booth have done before us, we will count ourselves as debtors to the Holy One, striving with all our strength through all our life to deliver the message of God’s love and salvation through Jesus Christ our Lord.