I’ve had a couple of people say to me that of course you can give (money) whilst you are in debt, but I’ve kind of had my doubts about whether this is what God would want. The thing is about debt is that we enter an obligation to pay it back even though we don’t know whether we will be able to do so or not (simply because we do not know the future). It occurred to me that it would be good to pay back debt if you are able to do so, because you would be meeting your obligation and it might mean that you don’t default on your debt and fail to meet your obligation.

Also, it’s not even your money to give, really it belongs to the person who lent you money.

So there seemed to me good reason to not give money away whilst you were in debt. But then I was faced with the argument that then we would have a giving crisis in the church and everyone would stop giving. However, today I gave this point some further thought…

… I realised that if you pay off your debt sooner rather than later then you have to repay less money (less interest that is) because of the reduced period over which you were having to pay interest. Thus, over your lifetime, if you did not give whilst you were in debt but rather repaid your debt more quickly, you would be able to give more. You would be giving the lenders less of your money which would mean that you could give more of your money away. So it would appear to be in the interest of all for us to pay off our debts quickly, even if it meant stopping giving whilst we were in debt.

Of course the risk is that if you quickly pay off your debts, therefore ending up with more money you might just spend it on yourself or choose to take out another debt thereby stopping your giving again!

I can’t say that I find voluntarily owing somebody something an overly attractive situation to be in, I can only imagine that it restricts your options in life.Wah-Wah buy