Getting Real With Our Debt and Increasing In Love

“‘A certain moneylender had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he cancelled the debt of both. Now which of them will love him more?’ Simon answered, ‘The one, I suppose, for whom he cancelled the larger debt.’ And he said to him, ‘You have judged rightly.’”

— Luke 7:41-43 (ESV)

The goal of the Christian life is to be so humble that we become increasingly aware of how great a debt we’ve been forgiven. To be free is to be constantly in awe at how much Christ has done for us… and to be increasing in love.

When the topic of God’s love comes up in church, the tone is usually focused on the greatness of God’s love. The Bible is clear that God’s love is completely unconditional and God-initiated (1 John 4:19). So it is interesting that in Luke 7, Jesus talks about different measures of love.

Jesus does not speak in riddles when he says that those who are forgiven more will love more.

Consider that as we contemplate the unending, unchanging, and unconditional love of God, we are only confronted with how temporary, fickle, and conditional our love is. Jesus is showing us in Luke 7 that the only way to increase in love is to increase in humility.

Luckily for the man with the extremely high debt, the grace shown to him was enough to shock him into gratitude. His appreciation for the act of forgiveness made love almost impossible to ignore.

Yet the man with the “smaller” debt was not much better off; he still had a debt to pay and was still the recipient of grace. Yet in the context of the story, Jesus seems to be implying that the man with the smaller debt had forgotten his burden by becoming distracted by someone else’s crisis.

Jesus told the story to flip the cultural narrative in a scandalous encounter at the house of Simon the Pharisee:

One of the Pharisees asked him to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee’s house and reclined at table. And behold, a woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that he was reclining at table in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster flask of ointment, and standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head and kissed his feet and anointed them with the ointment. Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, 'If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner.' And Jesus answering said to him, 'Simon, I have something to say to you.' And he answered, 'Say it, Teacher.'

Luke 7:36-40 (ESV)

Simon quickly judged the woman, but in doing so, he downplayed his own sinfulness. Everyone could see that the woman was out of place, least of all Jesus. But Jesus was willing to extend forgiveness and recieve worship from the woman, while the religious and well-established positioned themselves toward Jesus socially and politically.

When Jesus cuts back with a story of forgiveness and love, he is telling Simon that while the woman may be more openly sinful, no one in the room was debt-free.

The sting in Jesus’s short parable was the accusation that Simon had a love-deprived heart.

Jesus was not pointing out that the woman had a greater debt to pay. He was showing Simon that the woman knew her debt was great, and that the rest of those gathered were blind to their need for Jesus.

The woman received forgiveness, and most of all, she got love. Simon got a rebuke, but worst of all, he missed grace.

I think Simon and his guests were interested in Jesus, but they had a false view of religion. They thought that greatness was about having no debts, so they saw the woman and judged her. Jesus said that greatness is about getting real with our need for God, and putting all our debts—every last penny—at his feet.

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Reflect

1. Who are you in the story? Challenge yourself to let the Holy Spirit show you where you’re forgetting your debts and missing out on love.

2. Do you trust that Jesus is ready to show you grace? Take some time to pour out worship in your own way. Come to the feet of Jesus in humility and trust.

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Waiting On God

“The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.”

— Lamentations 3:25 (ESV)

Waiting Is Hard

When my family moved back to Kankakee in 2022 from our haitus to Ohio, it seemed like all we were doing was waiting. We had reasons to move back, but we moved on what was basically blind faith. God had given us a runway of about two months to have a place to stay, an exciting opportunity, and a few amazing friends, but otherwise, we had no idea what would come next.

Waiting is hard, but it’s even harder when the odds start to stack up against you. It gets challenging to hold onto the promises of God when the realities of life seem to be getting in the way of what you need most.

Yet God knows the difficulty and complexity of every challenging situation we face. Waiting is only an invitation from God becasue life consists of starts and stops, wins and losses, progress and setbacks. Lamentations 3:25 is a comforting verse about trusting God, but it’s tucked in the middle of prayers of lament. Worry, frustration, and uncertainty surround the promise to wait on the Lord.

The same is true of other passages about waiting on God. Psalm 37 is one of my favorite psalms because of all the amazing promises of God’s faithfulness tucked within, but the premise of the psalm is: “Fret not yourself because of evildoers; be not envious of wrongdoers!” (Psalm 37:1).

At first, it might seem discouraging that so many of the sweetest promises in God’s word are really cries of blind faith amid difficult circumstances. Do we have to suffer in order to understand hope?

In some ways, the answer is yes. God forms his character in us through suffering—both in understanding the love and heart of Jesus and in refining the sinfulness within us. That’s one of the main reasons that James tells us to be joyful when we face trials (James 1:2-4). But I think something else is on display in these lament/hope companion passages.

A Clear Invitation

God doesn’t deny the reality of trouble. He doesn’t leave out the fact that humans can’t see into the future, struggle to give up control, and worry all the time. Instead, the word of God gives space for the honest place of human hearts. And in that uncertainty comes the clear invitation to wait on the Lord.

One of the most well-known verses about waiting is Isaiah 40:31 (ESV), which says: “But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength.” Have you ever experienced that?

Isaiah is showing us that waiting is not just about pausing. It’s about resetting the source of our hope and strength. That’s why Lamentations says, “The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.” It’s not that God is only good to people who seek him, but that when we wait and seek the Lord, we discover and step into God’s goodness.

As much as I hate the waiting, I can hardly think of a place where I’ve experienced more of God’s divine strength and goodness. Maybe you have had the same experience. Maybe you are at a point in your life where you can either keep pressing on in your own strength or you can stop and rest in God. You’re invited today to receive the goodness and strength of God simply by waiting on him and putting your trust in his presence and plans for your life.

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Reflect

1. What keeps you from waiting on the Lord? How could you flip that barrier into an opportunity for God’s grace?

2. What areas of your life do you need God to move in? Get specific and bring those things to God. Spend a moment waiting on him, then go through your day looking for his strength and trusting him with the outcomes.

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Keep Praying

“And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart.”

— Luke 18:1 (ESV)

• Read Luke 18:1-8 ESV

  And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’ For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.’” And the Lord said, “Hear what the unrighteous judge says. And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

A Parable About Persistence

In Luke 18:1-8, Jesus tells the disciples a parable about a widow who found justice through persistence. Although the judge seemed unwilling to help her, he relented because she simply would not stop. Jesus doesn’t always explain his parables in the New Testament, but here he tells us outright that the story's purpose was to motivate the disciples to pray and not lose heart.

In matters of justice and deliverance, persistence is key. We do not know when the dam will break or when the door will open, we only know how to pray and how to seek.

It reminds me of what Jesus said in Matthew 7 and Luke 11. He told his listeners to ask, seek, and knock—to persist in leaning into the kingdom of God and reaching out for answers. It came with a promise: “For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened” (Matthew 7:8 ESV).

There’s no promise that God will give us whatever we want, but that doesn’t stop Jesus from extending the invitation. If we only fixate on the outcomes of asking, seeking, and knocking, we might miss that Jesus is first inviting us to a posture of anticipation. God is a giving God, so positioning our hearts in a place of asking with expectation helps us to align with his will.

The widow in Jesus’s parable faced a judge who “neither feared God nor respected man” (Luke 18:2). She needed justice, but arguments, reason, and evidence were not on her side. Jesus elevated the persistent widow because her behavior modeled something Jesus wanted his disciples to get: those who stand in the truth have the freedom to be persistent.

One of the enemy’s main attacks against prayer is discouragement and hopelessness. Jesus teaches us that no opposition should keep us from pressing into the truth. We may have a vision in our minds for how God will answer us, but God’s answer is often better and more creative than ours. When we live asking and expecting, we have eyes to notice and celebrate all the ways God is responding.

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Reflect

1. What holds you back from prayer? Where have you allowed discouragement and resistance to keep you from seeking God?

2. Take a moment and pray for something you stopped praying for, pushing past the voice of opposition.