Credit-Card Giving

As I was listening to a sermon recently, I realized that credit cards have impacted our ability to understand sacrificial giving.

For sacrificial giving, the general thought pattern is: "I was saving up money to buy X, but I now choose to forgo the pleasures and advantages of owning X, and to give that money instead to God."

But in this age of consumer debt, odds are good that we were not saving money, and probably not even calculating the exact monthly cost of purchasing X on credit. Most foolish consumers were instead (at best) making a rough estimate of the monthly pain incurred by adding the cost to our current debt load, or (at worst) just looking for a credit card with that much room left.

I could suddenly see how God gets edged out. I was never in a mode of saving up for the purchase, so there is no fixed amount of money saved and ready to give. Instead, the best I could do is to estimate how much more I would have paid the credit card company every month, and promise to give that amount to God instead, on a monthly basis. Sound likely to happen?