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For the debt, the invoice, and the shortcut you are being asked to take. Scripture has more to say about money owed than most people expect.
Choose the prayer closest to your situation. You can pray it as written, change the words, or begin with a single line.
Debt is rarely just a number. It is the letter you have not opened, the call you let ring out, the conversation you still have not had with the person you live with. It comes to work with you and it is waiting at three in the morning.
Some of it may have been your own choosing. Some of it arrived, through an illness, a redundancy, a customer who never paid, someone who left, someone who borrowed in your name. For many people it is a bit of both, and for some it is none of the first at all. Either way, a lot of energy goes into sorting out which was which when what you actually need is a plan and a night's sleep.
The prayers below are short on purpose. Say one and stop. You can come back to the rest.
16 prayers on this page, and 9 Bible passages with notes on what they mean.
The moment you see the real figure, or the envelope you have been walking past for a week. Nothing has been decided and there is nobody to tell yet. These are for the first hour.
Here is the number. I have read it four times and it has not changed. I am not going to pretend to you that I am calm about it. Stay near me, God, while I work out what the next thing is.
God, I have told no one. You know the figure. Sit here with me a minute.
There is a pile of envelopes on the side and I have been walking past it since last week. Give me enough steadiness to open them today, Lord, one at a time, and to write down what is actually true rather than what I fear.
You have been awake since two, doing the same arithmetic. Nothing can be paid, phoned or fixed at this hour. These are for lying in the dark with it.
I am doing the maths again and it comes out the same every time. Nothing can be paid at this hour and nobody will answer a phone. Take the calculator out of my hands. Let me sleep, and give me back to it in the morning.
God, I am awake. That is all. I am not going anywhere.
Father, by four o'clock I have lost the house, the car and everyone who respects me, and none of it has happened. Bring me back to today. Tomorrow will have to wait its turn.
For payroll you cannot meet, suppliers you have worked with for years, and the moment you have to say it out loud to people who trusted you with their livelihood.
Tomorrow I stand in front of eleven people and tell them there is no money. Some of them have young children. Do not let me hide behind a form of words, God. Give me plain speech, and keep me in the room afterwards for as long as they need me there.
Three small firms on that list did the work in good faith and will not be paid in full. I cannot make that right today, Lord. Do not let me stop looking at their names.
God, I am going to ring them now. Steady my voice.
I signed it. Nobody pushed me and I knew what the risk was. I am not asking you to tell me it was fine. I am asking you not to leave, now that I have to live inside what I built.
The invoice that could be rounded up, the figure nobody would ever check, the thing everyone in your trade apparently does. These are for holding the line when honesty is expensive.
I could change one number and no one would ever know. It would cover this month. You would know. Keep me from the small lie that makes the next one easier, and help me find another way through the month.
Doing this properly is going to lose us the contract and I resent it. I would rather be right and paid than right and short. Keep me honest anyway, and do something about the resentment while you are here.
God, let our prices, our hours and our invoices all say the same thing our mouths do.
For a friend who has finally told you, a family member who has not, and for people who are owed money by someone who could pay them and has chosen not to.
She told me last night and I did not know what to say. Keep me from tidying it away with advice she never asked for. Let me be someone she can say the true number to again.
I want the money back and I also want him to admit it, and I am no longer sure which I want more. Do something with that, Lord. Whatever I am owed, keep me from making him small.
God, for everyone finishing a shift today knowing the wages will be late again, and for the ones who cannot afford to complain about it. You have heard cries like theirs before. Hear them now.
What each passage meant where it was written, and what it does and does not offer you now.
The rich ruleth over the poor; And the borrower is servant to the lender.
Proverbs 22:7: read the chapter
This is an observation about how power works, from a collection of sayings, not a verdict on your character. Anyone who has sat on hold to a creditor knows it is accurate. It gets quoted at people to shame them, when what it actually names is an imbalance, which is why the law codes elsewhere go on to restrict what a lender is allowed to do.
In all labor there is profit; But the talk of the lips [tendeth] only to penury.
Proverbs 14:23: read the chapter
Proverbs are general truths, not guarantees, and this one is used cruelly, as though everyone in debt talked their way there. The contrast is between doing the work and merely discussing it. It is not a claim that effort always pays out, and it is not a diagnosis of anyone on a low wage, a failed contract or a long illness.
At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release.
Deuteronomy 15:1–11: read the chapter
Israel's law put an expiry date on debt between neighbours, and the same passage forbids a lender to refuse a poor neighbour a loan on the grounds that the year of release is near. Whatever you make of applying it now, it is worth knowing that the Bible's most detailed debt legislation is about release rather than about extracting the final payment. That is almost never the verse quoted at people who owe money.
And if he be a poor man, thou shalt not sleep with his pledge;
Deuteronomy 24:10–15: read the chapter
A creditor had to wait outside the house rather than walk in and choose what to take, and had to return a poor man's cloak by nightfall so he could sleep in it. The law is protecting the borrower's dignity, and quite literally his rest. If you are being hounded, this tradition is standing beside you, not behind the person doing the hounding.
Do this now, my son, and deliver thyself, Seeing thou art come into the hand of thy neighbor: Go, humble thyself, and importune thy neighbor;
Proverbs 6:1–5: read the chapter
Written to someone who has guaranteed another person's loan and is now caught by it. Notice what it does not say. It does not say wait and see. It says lose sleep over it, get up, go to the person, and negotiate hard and urgently, like an animal working itself free of a snare. Praying about debt is not the opposite of that. It is what you do on the way there.
Be not therefore anxious for the morrow: for the morrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
Matthew 6:19–34: read the chapter
This is not an instruction to feel calm, and hearing it that way just adds guilt about worrying on top of the worry. Jesus says each day has enough trouble in it, which concedes that the trouble is real. Earlier in the same passage he says your Father knows what you need. He does not promise a particular sum by Friday, and neither will we.
For which of you, desiring to build a tower, doth not first sit down and count the cost, whether he have [wherewith] to complete it?
Luke 14:28–30: read the chapter
Usually served up as business advice, and it does describe a real risk. But Jesus is talking about the cost of following him, and the ones doing the mocking in the story are onlookers, not God. If your build stopped halfway, this is not the crowd's verdict on you. It is a call to be honest with yourself about what a thing will cost before you start it.
Owe no man anything, save to love one another: for he that loveth his neighbor hath fulfilled the law.
Romans 13:7–8: read the chapter
Often used to argue that every loan and every mortgage is sin. Read the sentence just before it: pay your taxes, your customs, your respect, your honour. Paul is telling people to settle what is genuinely due, then turning the word owe around to say the one debt that never clears is love. It is a rule about paying up, not a ban on borrowing.
Behold, the hire of the laborers who mowed your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth out: and the cries of them that reaped have entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.
Aimed at wealthy employers who held back the pay of the men who cut their fields. If you are the one not being paid, or paid late by a company that could pay you tomorrow, this passage takes your side and it is loud about it. If you are the one sitting on an invoice you could settle this week, it is asking about that too.
Quoted from the American Standard Version (1901), which is in the public domain. Every reference on this page was checked against the text. Chapter links open the same translation in our reader.
Money verses get used as weapons more than most. Proverbs about hard work gets quoted at people already working two jobs. Owe no one anything gets aimed at someone with a mortgage. And there is a whole industry built on telling people that a gift they cannot afford will unlock the money they need. None of that is care. Debt is not evidence that you prayed badly or believed too little, and nothing on this page is a substitute for a qualified debt adviser or an insolvency professional. Pray, and also make the appointment.
One thing, not ten. Open one envelope tonight, or write the real total on a piece of paper where you can see it. If you have not yet spoken to a free debt adviser, that is the call to make this week. Then put it down and go to bed.
