I’ve been planning a two-week holiday for months. Anna and I were soon off to Japan to catch up with our son, Adam, eat wonderful food, and go places we had not been before.

And then Coronavirus.

Two weeks ago, I contacted the booking agency and was told that it would cost $1000 to cancel our flights. We really wanted to go, and we didn’t want to lose $1000. So, we decided to bide our time and see if the situation improved.

It hasn’t. So on Tuesday, with a heavy heart, after spending twenty five minutes in a phone queue, I made another enquiry about cancelling our flights.

I was put on hold, waited a long three minutes, before being told that the cancellation could be processed in full and it would only cost us $150.

What relief! Finally, amongst all the chaos, some good news. I even smiled. The debt I owed had been almost entirely erased.

Good news. But Jesus offers better news. Our greatest debt, the one that truly weighs us down, is the debt of sin and rebellion we owe before a holy God. As the Apostle Paul says, ‘The wages of sin is death’ (Romans 6:23). It’s dreadful. On our own we have no resources to clear the debt.

And that’s where Jesus steps in. The Son of God came to pay the debt for us, by dying in our place on the cross of Calvary: and there’s no residual fee. All clean. To finish Paul’s sentence above, ‘but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord’.