Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Why Love Wants to Erase Missouri’s Medical Debt | Keith & Patrick

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to drive across town. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. On today's episode, we're going to be doing something a little different than normal. We want to talk about a way that we at the crossing are trying to live out God's love practically. We're looking through 1st Corinthians 13. It's a passage where Paul gives his kind of definition of what love is. And he shows that love isn't just a feeling. is active. Love does stuff. In 1 Corinthians 134, Paul says that love is not self-seeking. One of the most famous Bible verses is John 316. It says, for God so loved the world that he gave. God is a giving God. And I think 1 Corinthians 13 tells us to spell love, G-I-V-E, that love gives, love serves. And it's one of the founding principles and the founding of the crossing is that we wanted to be a church

Starting point is 00:01:02 that really gave in our community. One of the things that we said from the very beginning is that we wanted to be the kind of church that whether you ever went to the crossing or not, whether you consider yourself a Christian or not, you were glad the crossing was in Columbia because it was making a real difference in real people's lives all throughout mid-Missouri. Once a year we have a special Sunday called Vision Sunday, where we talk about what we want to do as a church in Columbia, how we want to give, how we want to make Columbia a better place. And so, up to this year's Vision Sunday, we had a big question. What are we going to do? How are we going to make Columbia a better place to live in? We wanted to have a focus on what we could do in the

Starting point is 00:01:42 community that everybody would appreciate. And one of the things that's been in the media a lot lately is medical debt. And it's not just something that's out there with other people. It's probably something that you've experienced or someone in your family has. There's this crushing weight of medical debt that a lot of people just can't get out from under, especially those who are in financial struggles already. And so we started just doing some research. Let's take everybody who makes below twice the poverty rate and just say how much medical debt is out there in our county in mid-Missouri. And what we found out is that there is about $12.5 million of medical debt in Boone County, again, for those making below twice the poverty rate. And if you expand that a little bit to the counties that

Starting point is 00:02:28 make up mid-Missouri, that adds another $7.6 million in medical debt. So it's about $20 million total in all of Central Missouri of people making below twice the poverty rate who are living under this crushing weight of debt. So obviously, that's a lot of money. And it's hard to imagine how a church is going to be able to make a dent in a debt as big as $20 million. But we wanted to figure out what we could do, how we could help. But the reason why we wanted to do that, It's not because it was just a humanitarian effort that we think is a really good thing to do. Of course, we think all of those things. There's a deeper reason why we wanted to do it.

Starting point is 00:03:07 So I just want you to imagine for a second. Imagine that one day you go out to your mailbox, you open it up, and inside you find a letter, and that letter tells you that all of your debts have been forgiven. Your school loans are paid off. Your mortgage is gone. You don't have any credit card debt, no medical debt. Everything is taken care of. Can you imagine what that would be like?

Starting point is 00:03:27 like, I know that would be a day, at least for me, that I would never forget, because I'm like everybody out there, I've got a mortgage, I've got different debts that I'm trying to pay off. It would be a huge, extraordinary day in my life. And as crazy as it sounds, something like that happened every 50 years in ancient Israel. Every 50 years, people were set free from all of their debts. They got back property that had been mortgaged away. If they'd been sold into debt slavery, They were freed. It was a day called the Jubilee. It's kind of where our English word jubilation actually comes from because it was such an exciting day that people could be set free from all of their debts. Now fast forward to the time of Jesus. Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of his public ministry enters into a synagogue and he's designated the reader that day. And the attendant hands him a scroll and Jesus goes through that scroll and he selects a particular verse that he wants to read.

Starting point is 00:04:24 And what he chooses is at the very beginning of Isaiah chapter 61. Jesus reads this, The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he's anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. Now that year of the Lord's favor? That's the year of Jubilee. Then after reading it, Jesus goes, sits down, everybody turns and looks at him.

Starting point is 00:04:58 And he says to them, today this scripture is fulfilled in your presence. What Jesus is saying there is that he is the Jubilee. He is the one who has come to cancel debts, to set people free. Now, here's the thing that blows my mind. If you go back like Patrick was saying in Leviticus, what you find is that the day of Jubilee was announced on day of atonement, the day that the people made a sacrifice for the sins of the nation. So I think what Jesus is saying is that through his death and resurrection, he has set us free from our debt that we owed him, from all the guilt and shame that comes with sin. That's what the day of Jubilee

Starting point is 00:05:41 pointed to. So it's precisely because Jesus has set us free from our debt of sin and guilt that we feel called to set other people free, to set people free spiritually but also materially. And that's exactly why when we started thinking about medical debt, this $20 million in our community, we said, you know, we need to do something about that so that our community can see what Jesus has done for us. We developed a relationship with a group called RIP medical debt. Now, they're not a faith organization, but their organization that's committed to helping the poorest people among us get out from underneath all of this crippling medical debt. And the way it works is that a hospital provides some sort of service. Some people don't have insurance and they're unable to pay for it. And therefore,

Starting point is 00:06:30 at some point, the hospital turns that bill over to a collection agency who comes after the people who owe it to them. That debt will end up ruining their credit rating. Sometimes collection agencies go as far as calling family and friends, trying to embarrass people into paying off the bill that they owe. But the reality is that they can't pay it. So since these people can't pay off their debts, it means that their debt is incredibly cheap. So what RIP medical debt does is they come along and they buy the debt from the creditors. They're actually able to buy this debt, again, because it's so unlikely to be paid, they're able to buy this debt for a penny on the dollar. So you're a mathematician, I'm not a mathematician. That means that $1 can buy $100 of medical debt. So when we looked at

Starting point is 00:07:21 our community and we wanted to help relieve the debt of as many people as we could, it was going to end up costing $200,000 in order to cancel $20 million of medical debt. We thought that was crazy that we could ever raise that much money. But we threw it out to our congregation on August 25th, we said to people, what if we partnered with RIP medical debt and in the name of Christ paid off the medical debt for those people in our community who are struggling already financially? Again, if we had $200,000, that'd pay for all of them in Missouri, but no way we're going to do that. Well, it turns out that's true. There's no way we were going to raise $200,000 because God had something bigger in mind.

Starting point is 00:08:03 Through the generosity of the people at the crossing, we raised $431,000. that means that we are going to be able to pay off well over $40 million in medical debt in our area. So we aren't just going to be able to pay off Boone County and surrounding counties. Partnered with this group, we are going to be able to pay off the debt of almost half of all Missourians who make below twice the poverty rate. This has been an incredible act of generosity. God has shown up here in a special way. So what's going to happen to these families? that end up having their medical debt forgiven.

Starting point is 00:08:41 They are going to get a letter that says that the crossing, in partnership with RIP, has paid off all their debt, there are no tax implications, and their credit rating has been restored. Now, imagine that someone gets one of those letters. They open it up and they find that their medical debt that they've suffered under and been worried about and embarrassed over and unsure they'd ever get rid of has been paid by someone else. what do you think they'd going to say to themselves and i bet you at least some of them read that letter

Starting point is 00:09:15 and say why me i didn't deserve this and if we could be present with them i mean we won't be right but but just hypothetically imagine if you were sitting there when they said i don't deserve this what would you say to them you know what i'd say yeah neither do we we don't deserve god's love we don't deserve him sending his son to pay for our sins. We don't deserve any of the blessings that God has given us. Nobody deserves the goodness of God. The Apostle Paul wrote, though Jesus was rich, yet for your sake, he became poor so that you, through his poverty, might become rich. The church, at its best, has always been giving out of the wealth of Jesus' sacrificial love for us. The reason why we wanted to give isn't because we think we've got our lives together,

Starting point is 00:10:08 or because we're just extraordinarily generous people. The reason why is because we've seen what Jesus has done for us. He laid down his life for us. And because he's laid down his life for us, he's made us rich in his love. And when you're rich in his love, it frees you to give away your time, your treasure, your talents. And so giving away your money to help other people in our community,

Starting point is 00:10:31 that's a no-brainer when we've seen what Jesus has done for us. Sometimes Christians don't show Christ's love very well. Sometimes people outside the church look at us and they see anger instead of love or what we're against instead of what we're for. And those are fair critiques. Sometimes people look at the church and say that they're so concerned about heaven that they are of no earthly good. And again, we have to say that oftentimes they are true.

Starting point is 00:10:58 But the people I know that follow Christ that genuinely trust in Jesus, they live radically generous lives. And what we as a church know is that the interests of heaven and earth are not opposed. That when we are burdened for people's material poverty, we're also burdened for their spiritual poverty. That we care about people who live under financial debt, but we also care about people who live under the debt of guilt and shame. We care about those who are physically sick, but we also care about those who are spiritually sick. We hope that today, when people are receiving these letters, that it's going to be kind of like a small jubilee in Missouri. We hope it's going to be a small appetizer of what happens when heaven and earth come together.

Starting point is 00:11:49 So if anyone asks us, why did you do this? Why did you guys give so much? Well, the answer is actually really simple. It's because Jesus died for us. Now he's freed us to give to others. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps others find this podcast more easily.

Starting point is 00:12:11 Also ask yourself who you could share this podcast with. Texting an episode to a friend or family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.

Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Why Love Wants to Erase Missouri’s Medical Debt | Keith & Patrick

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