Gary North

I will assume that you have begun to take steps to deal with your fear. I do not want you to begin a program of debt reduction unless you have begun to deal with your fear. That is step one.

The second step in dealing with sin is to identify why you fell into a simple pattern of behavior. Most programs that help people to get out of debt begin with budgeting. Mine does not.

The biggest problem you face is not that you never learned how to budget. The biggest problem is that you have spent more money than you have earned, and you have done this over a long period of time. You may not know exactly how much you overspent each month, or for how many months, but you know that you have overspent, because you are now in debt. You must come to grips with the fact that you have persistently violated a fundamental principle of the Bible. You have spent more than you have taken in.

You may have violated another fundamental principle. You may not give 10% of your income to your local church. You have not tithed. Yet Jesus said a tithe is the minimum that you owe (Matthew 23:23).

By not learning to budget for your tithe early in life, you did not learn to budget at all. You must now learn how -- and start tithing. Yet you are so deep in the hole that your budget does not allow for a tithe. Yet if you are not tithing, you are going deeper in debt to God.

I strongly suggest that you budget for a tithe before you budget for paying off debt. This will take you longer to get out of debt, other things being equal. But God, in His grace, may intervene to arrange things in your favor. Pray that He does.

The Bible is not completely opposed to all forms of debt. But the Bible does say that the debtor is servant to the lender (Proverbs 22:7). There are times in your life when you should become a servant to someone else for a specific reason. People used to become apprentices to skilled craftsmen. They would sign on for seven years of grunt work, but they would be promised by the craftsmen that he would show them the basics of the craft. This was a reasonable exchange. It was a position of servitude, but the servitude was designed to enable a person to become a productive member of the community.

There are times when a person should go into debt for education. He should not go into debt if he can buy the education without going into debt. The fact of the matter is, most people can earn a bachelor's degree from an accredited university in three years for under $15,000. They just don't know this. I have written about this here: http://www.garynorth.com/public/729.cfm.

If you have consistently spent more money than you have taken in, then you have consistently placed yourself in a position of servitude. The Bible says that when a master offers a slave the right to go free, the slave should take the offer (I Corinthians 7:21). You, on the contrary, were invited by a master to enslave yourself, and you took that offer. Now you want to get out. You are quite correct in wanting to get out, but you have got to find out what it was in your psychology or your motivation that allowed you to succumb to the siren song of debt servitude.

You fell into sin. Why did you do this? I want you to sit down with a piece of paper and a pencil and write down what you think was your primary motivation for getting into debt. You may have had more than one. Fine; write them all down. But you must identify the primary motivation that led you to go into debt, expand your debt, and refuse to face the reality of your debt.

When you have that down on paper, you will be able to begin to deal with your real problem, which is the desire to own things even though you cannot afford to buy them. There is something driving you to buy things that you cannot afford. Unless you were buying medical treatment or something of comparable importance, you did not need the things that you bought. Furthermore, the things that you bought depreciated by 50% the moment you walked out of the store. You do not need them, but you borrowed money to buy them.

It may be that you really did spend the money on things you needed. Some families get into such a fine financially that they begin to buy necessities with credit. But somewhere in their budget there is an expenditure that keeps taking place that is not simple food, basic shelter, and used clothing purchased at the Salvation Army.

Your deliverance from debt will begin when you identify the temptation that led you to spend more than you made. You have got to decide, once and for all, that you will stop spending more money than you make. You've got to go beyond even this. You have got to spend less than you make, because the excess income has got to be used to pay off your creditors. You have got to run a surplus. Don't pretend that you are the United States government. You cannot run a deficit indefinitely without suffering terrible consequences. Of course, the government is going to suffer terrible consequences, which means you and I are going to suffer terrible consequences, but that is out of our control. What is within our control is the ability to spend less then we make.

When you have the list of your temptations completed, say a prayer. The prayer should be specific. Ask God for assistance in getting control over your spending. Ask Him to enable you to see where you are overspending, and to have the self-discipline to reduce your level of spending. As surely as an alcoholic prays to God to be delivered from the sin of drink (and initially, it was a sin), so should you pray to God for deliverance from sin of excess spending.

If you are not willing to say a prayer that asks God to intervene in your life to help you get control of your spending, you will find it almost impossible to cut your expenditures, pay off your debts, and stay out of debt for the rest of your life. It can be done, but it is very difficult, and most people do not succeed.

When you have done this, you will be ready for the next step in your deliverance from debt.

For Step 3, click here.