Thursday; October 29
The other day I heard a really good lesson about forgiveness based on Jesus’ parable of the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18. In this story Jesus relates how a man was forgiven of an incredible debt by a king but was unwilling to forgive a lesser amount by his fellow man. In fact the one who’d had his debt cancelled threw his contemporary in prison until he made good on what he owed. As you might suspect, when the original creditor heard what had happened, he reinstated the original debt and had the first man turned over to the “torturers” until the debt was repaid. While this is a great story about personal forgiveness, I am intrigued by the initial interaction that lead into this discussion, “Then Peter came and said to Him, ‘Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.’” (Matthew 18:21-22). As the preacher tied everything into a neat little package, he made a comment that struck me – forgiveness needs to be our default emotion. We shouldn’t have to talk ourselves into forgiving others, it should be something we naturally do. Sure, even when we have this type of perception there will be times when we have to muster up an extra measure of righteousness to forgive some offenses, but having this proclivity puts us in a position to embrace forgiveness. If we are constantly wrestling with forgiving people we are probably going to grow weary (and grumpy) and be tempted to withhold forgiveness, but when it is who we are, we’ll get it right more times than not.