Sarah L. Kanz | October 18, 2024
Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay
The Problem Is … Math
I’m not a numbers person. It’s the biggest irony of my life that I work for an accountant. But my job involves shuffling papers and computer files, not calculating numbers.
I do love paper. And digital files. And organizing.
Another irony of my life is that I manage seven (!!!!!!!) bank accounts: two family, two business, and three personal accounts. I keep four separate budgets and books: our household, two businesses, and my personal expenses.
Reconciling all of these accounts is my least favorite task that I must do at least once a month.
As much as my brain dodges numbers, if I approach accounting as a confident organizer—and throw in some Color Accounting to make it look pretty—I can muddle my way through.
Eventually.
Organizing My Accounts
This week I needed to reconcile two accounts. To nobody’s surprise, my accounting was off. According my books, my primary business account had more dollars than the current bank balance showed, and my primary personal account had less. So, I downloaded my bank transactions as a spreadsheet and started organizing.
First, I cross-checked my most recent transactions against the bank’s records. Right away I spotted the issue with my business account: two sales transactions were the wrong amount, copied from a previous transaction of the same type but a different amount. I changed the numbers, and the accounts reconciled. Boom. Neat and organized. And totally not math.
Even though my balance now matched the bank’s balance, I was tempted to continue checking past transactions. I know I transpose numbers and type the wrong keys all the time. There were probably other entries that needed correcting.
No, I reassured myself, the account is all up to date. It’s reconciled with the bank. I don’t need to do anything else with it.
I made myself close the spreadsheet and move on to my personal account.
Again, it only took a minute to see where I had failed to add two recent refunds. Bingo! Just like that, my balance matched the bank’s.
I hesitated. This is too easy, I thought. Should I continue looking for other past errors? Is it really all taken care of?
Yes, I assured myself, the accounts are fully reconciled. I am free to move on to other things.
I exited my accounting software.
Spiritual Accounting
Then I got to thinking about reconciliation and what it means to be reconciled with God. Reconciliation is an amazing gift of God in Christ. Yet we who feel the need for it hardly know how to receive it, or what to do with it once we have it.
For instance, popular Christian thought says, “I have done such horrible things in my life, and I know God has forgiven me. What I really struggle with is forgiving myself.”
This is a lie the enemy uses to hold us in bondage to our sin. He is planting doubt and dissatisfaction, and we are believing him more than the Word of God.
The Bible says if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (I John 1:9). Total forgiveness is the trusted balance shown in our spiritual bank account. “All unrighteousness” is the Lord’s guarantee that He will do the thing thoroughly. We confess. He forgives. Done. (And no tricky math required.)
“It is finished,” Jesus said as He died on the cross. We can’t do any more than He has already accomplished.
Christ has reconciled us to God. By all means, we should make restitution to people we have wronged, if possible. But we don’t have to rummage through our past errors to correct the balance with God. Our account is up to date and fully reconciled. If we still feel nagging guilt for our past sins, we don’t need more forgiveness, we need bigger faith. Water your little faith with God’s Word and ask Him to make it grow. Trust what He says, not how you feel.
Come to Jesus and find REST for your soul. Update your spiritual books to reconcile with God’s account balance. He has all the correct figures.
Be reconciled to God.
“But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. And not only so, but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement” (Romans 5:8–11).
“Doth Satan tell thee thou prayest but faintly, and with very cold devotion? Answer him thus, and say, ‘I am glad you told me, for this will make me trust the more to Christ’s prayers, and the less to my own; also I will endeavour henceforth to groan, to sigh, and to be so fervent in my crying at the Throne of Grace, that I will, if I can, make the heavens rattle again with the mighty groans thereof. And whereas thou sayest that I am so weak in believing, I am glad you mind me of it; I hope it will henceforward stir me up to cry the more heartily to God for strong faith, and make me the more restless till I have it. . . .’
“And so all along, if he tell thee of thy deadness, dullness, coldness, or unbelief, or the greatness of thy sins, answer him, and say, ‘I am glad you told me, I hope it will be a means to make me run faster, seek earnestlier, and to be the more restless after Jesus Christ.’
“If thou didst but get this art as to outrun him in his own shoes, as I may say, and to make his own darts to pierce himself, then thou mightst also say, how doth Satan’s temptations, as well as all other things, work together for my good, for my advantage (Rom 8:28).”
— John Bunyan, The Doctrine of Law and Grace Unfolded