By Tommy Rush

I’ve always heard there are two things in life that are certain, death and taxes. However taxes repeat and seem to get worst every year. When I was younger, my Dad would help friends and neighbors with preparing their taxes. This was long before TurboTax, TaxSlayer and other computer programs were around. He was not a CPA , but he loved helping friends and neighbors with preparing and filing their taxes each year. I can still hear him telling jokes about paying taxes. He loved to say, “In April, millions of Americans have a long form and a short memory.” He would often say, “If a person uses the short form, the government gets your money and if they use the long form an accountant gets the money.”

I still remember times as a teenager, seeing him at the kitchen table with a friend from church helping them do their taxes. He would jokingly say things like, “You cannot write off last year’s taxes as a bad investment. You cannot claim depreciation on your wife or send the IRS twenty- five cents and say you are going to pay your taxes by the quarter.”
I’ve been taking my taxes to an accountant for years. I’m not ashamed to ask for help because quite honestly I’ve never been able to find what goes on line 7 by taking the lesser of line 2 and dividing it by line 5 then multiplying it by line 3 to see if line 6 is greater than line10. I agree with the man who said, “If the government really wants to simplify the tax form, they need to come up with one that I can color.”

Personally I’m very thankful for people who are good at helping with tax problems! I’m even more thankful for a savior who has helped me with the sin problem that I could not solve on my own. The day Jesus shouted “It is finished!” He was shouting that our sin debt had been paid in full! Unlike our tax debt, our sin debt has always been too massive to pay off. I don’t know what religion you are. It doesn’t matter. No religion on earth can pay it off. It took the perfect, sinless, lamb of God who willingly came and gave everything so that we could have everlasting life.

This is the amazing miracle of the cross. Jesus paid our sin debt in full! There’s no sin He did not cover when He died. But you’ve got to do something with what He did for you. You go to that cross in your heart, renounce your sin, bow before Him and say, “Lord, I ask you to be my personal Savior for my personal sin.” If you’ve never done that, then why not today? There’s two things in life that are certain – death and eternity!

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