Walking with the Wise #390: Prisoners of Purchase

“Whoever loves pleasure will be a poor man;

he who loves wine and oil will not be rich.”
—Proverbs 21:17

We live in a culture that has become addicted to getting what we want NOW. Whereas our parents’ generation understood that the world owed them nothing, and whatever they got, they had to earn by scrimping and saving over time, our culture has become one that thinks it can and should have now what it took our parents 30 years to get. Credit card companies have helped foster this mindset by appealing to our materialistic impulses, and we have obliged them by filling our wallets with credit card after credit card, racking up enormous amounts of debt in the process.

The Bible describes debt as a form of slavery, it says, “The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender”—Proverbs 22:7. The more debt we run up, the more enslaved we become. It’s no secret that one of the main causes of divorce is financial issues, and our culture has done nothing to discourage this view. But God’s Word calls us to a different life, and that life is antithetical to the philosophy of life that this world advocates, as today’s proverb indicates.

To be a lover of pleasure means living beyond our means, trying to keep up with the proverbial Joneses, and seeking our best life now, rather than finding our satisfaction in the world to come. If we are lovers of pleasure, then we will spend ourselves into large amounts of debt to get that pleasure, only to discover that instead of getting the ever-elusive pleasure offered by the cultural proponents of credit and materialism, we will instead find ourselves in prisons of purchase, bound by the bars of our own construction. The credit card companies may have manufactured the materials of our prison in the forges of finance, but we put them together with each swipe of our credit card in search of promised comfort.

We are to put away our abusive misunderstanding of credit, working instead within the realm of what we have earned, not what we will earn in the future. This will mean a substantial shift in our spending and living. We will have to scale back, putting away our credit cards and endeavoring to live within our means. As the Christian financial counselor Dave Ramsey has said, “Live like no one else, so later you can live and give like no one else.”

Are you enslaved to a prison of purchase? Then run to the Savior who offers forgiveness, and ask Him for the power of His Spirit and the courage of conviction to place yourself under the parameters of His Word, so that you might be able to give to Him and the propagation of His kingdom and experience the joy of doing what delights Him. Amen.