Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honour to whom honour is owed. Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet’, and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’. Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.
Romans 13:7-11
Consumer credit is
not new but its scope and scale are unprecedented in history. From the creation
of the first credit card that took ‘the waiting out of wanting’, to the advances
in information technology and communications that enabled point-of-sale-credit, an increasing number of consumers have been able to buy what they cannot
afford with very little thought. Often, they need only 'click'!
For many,
it is as if money operates on a different plane of existence: it exists like
the spirits that some people believe pull the strings of life from just beyond
our ability to perceive them.
A few far-sighted people
saw this same problem with the introduction of banknotes in the 17th Century.
They realised that if large sums could be spent without the sensation of
handing over a weight of coins that anchored the transaction in the real world,
people would begin to lose control of their spending decisions. Now, debit,
credit and charge cards have taken this disconnection to a new level, with
money as a calculation in sophisticated banking systems that only impacts the
real world on some future day of reckoning that we give little or no thought
to. As a consequence, people spend what they cannot afford and debt is no
longer related to poverty or tragedy but has become the norm for all income
groups.
This is why it is
important to take time to know yourself well – to know what is right for you,
what you really do like and is important to you. It is why you need to make
good choices about how to use your money – and to have the determination to
stick with your choices. In other words, to defend your budget!
I will conclude
this series tomorrow.
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Copyright © All Souls Clubhouse Community Centre & Church and Philip Evans
2013.
Scripture
quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright
© 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by
permission. All rights reserved.
Handling
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