We are in deep debt to him, and we have got nothing to pay with. There is not the tiniest contribution we could possibly make to atone for our sins. We don't have the character, the righteousness, the decency, the holiness which God requires of us; we are just bankrupt souls and so we need to be freely graciously forgiven. We need to see our sin as a debt to God. There is a God in heaven: he is righteous, he is holy, he is our Creator, and here are we fallen and sinful and out for ourselves. And we have taken our lives; we have stolen them from him, and we want nothing to do with God, and our sins and guilt are like a great mountain between us and God. But it is like a debt.
That debt must be paid by someone. To illustrate this, there is the story of a woman and her husband. They were very poor and she would do the shopping week by week, and there was one thing that her husband couldn't bear and that was debt. But she couldn't manage as well as her neighbours, and she would be tempted sometimes to buy just the odd small thing which was just a little more than she could afford. This couple needed to go very strictly according to their meagre income. She had lived in the district many years, and the shopkeeper in the village allowed her to build up a small debt, and then it became a larger debt, and this began to frighten her, and she began to be terrified that one day her husband would go into the shop and the shopkeeper would call in the debt and then there would be serious trouble. So when she began to go to that shop she would tremble, and wonder what was going to happen. She would constantly make her excuses and put off paying the debt. But there was one time she wanted to pay a small amount off. She couldn't afford much, and she wondered what the reaction would be. She went into the shop to pay a little, but the owner of the shop was not there. It was an assistant and he opened the debt book on the counter, and there was her name and her debts, and to her astonishment written through the whole lot was a large line and it was indicated that the debt was cancelled and there was nothing to pay. Well she couldn't understand it; she couldn't understand how this could be; this had been worrying her for so long. When she got home she just blurted it all out to her husband, and she said, ‘I didn't tell you; I was frightened to tell you, but I built up this debt, and it went on and on and I tried to pay just a little off, and I didn't know what would become of us. You will never believe it, but it's cancelled.’ And the husband said to her, ‘Well, who paid it? And she said, ‘Nobody paid it. It doesn't say anybody paid it. I've seen the book it just said that it's cancelled.’ And he said, ‘Somebody paid.’ ‘No, no, nobody paid.’ ‘Somebody paid’, he said, ‘even if it's the shopkeeper that paid. If he writes it off, then he pays, but somebody pays. The debt has to be paid.’ And the debt of sin has to be paid. There is absolutely no way God can just let the debt of sin, everything we have ever done, just disappear. If we come to him for free forgiveness and for mercy there is only one way he can give it to us. He must pay the debt himself by writing it off, as it were. It means the Lord Jesus had to come from heaven and suffer and die on Calvary and take himself the full penalty and punishment for all that sin. Debt must be paid by someone even if it's the creditor. Debt must be paid and it must be painfully paid. So here is the Lord Jesus teaching Simon the Pharisee that we are in debt and we have nothing to pay and we must be freely forgiven.
We have got this debt of sin and what can we do to pay the Lord? What do people do when they are in debt? Down the centuries, preachers have explored the different things that debtors have done. They do the most extraordinary things. One things people do is simply forget about it. ‘One day I'll deal with it. I can't stand thinking about this, so I'll just push it away into the distant future as though it wasn't there.’ We see that in our debt-ridden society.
You can't say, ‘Oh I'll give some money to charity, I'll try and do something.’ There's nothing you can do. The only way that sin can be atoned for, or dealt with, is by punishment. According to God's word every single one of our sins deserves to be punished by everlasting banishment from the presence of God, and we have got hundreds of thousands if not millions of sins and some of our sins are with us all the time; they cling to us. Sins like pride, sins like deceitfulness and laziness and selfishness – they never leave us. If there wasn't absolute mercy from the Lord, there would be no hope.
Other people – if it is a debt within the family – might think, ‘Aunt Floss lent me that money, and she is kind and generous, and she has got lots of money; she won’t worry if I don’t pay her back.’ This is what some do with the debt of sin to God. They think, ‘It's true that I am a sinner and I owe God this enormous debt, but I cannot worry about that. God doesn't mind all that much. He is an infinitely wealthy God, and somebody told me once he is full of love, so maybe it will all just get forgotten about. Surely he's not concerned about me and my wrongdoing.’ But he is, because he is a perfect God, and a holy God, and he has made us and warned us that he is going to hold us all to account. He does not deal with us on the basis of some limited liability, so that we pay just a few pence in the pound, or even nothing at all, so that I can just do a few good things, and God will overlook all my debt of sin. He won't. Your debt of sin towers over your few good deeds.
We cannot get help elsewhere either. Just like those debtors, they couldn't put their hands in their pockets and find the money nor could they persuade their brothers and sisters and friends to help them. We too are like that. We can't get the currency to pay off our debt of sin from anywhere. Now some people think they can. Some people think for instance you can go to certain churches, and they will say, ‘Yes, we've got a remedy. We can give you some religious duties to do, to pay off your debt.’ Or they say, ‘We have a fund of righteousness, and we can give you some merit from our fund which you can use to pay off your debt.’ But God will only accept perfect righteousness, and the deeds of even the best of men are mixed with sin.
Nor is it any good finding a priest who claims to be able to forgive your sins. If you are in business, and you develop a large debt, is your friend going to let you come and pay a small fee to cancel the whole debt? That won’t work. Why not? Because you don’t owe money to your friend; you owe it to the bank. There is no means of getting out of the debt of sin to God. There is no means, unless God himself cancels the debt. No priest can forgive you your sins, because you don't owe that debt to that priest. You owe it to God, and he has not given any other the right to forgive on his behalf. If you never find the Lord, then at the end of life you will face the loss of life in the body, the loss of liberty and freedom, and you must begin to pay the price for your debts, your sins, eternally.