Our home wasn't like this picture. My parents seldom screamed and yelled. Instead there was a constant unyielding underlying tension. Long periods of icy silence. It was more like this:
Daily life was like a rubber band being stretched further and further until you felt yourself drawing up tight with apprehension because you knew it was going to snap at any moment. My childhood heart lived with a constant feeling of being caught in the middle. I loved my mother. I loved my father. And I desperately wanted them to love one another. I agonized over what I might have done to cause their unhappiness. I foolishly assumed false guilt that took a lot of years to resolve. I constantly struggled to find ways to "fix it" so we could be the happy family I wanted us to be. Unforgiveness reigned in our home.
I learned a lot of things from those years of being caught in the middle. I learned a lot of things from watching a spirit of unforgiveness imprison my parents until it affected them physically, emotionally and spiritually. I watched it deal a death blow to their relationship. They thought divorce would set them free. But it didn't.
So here I am today - a LOOOOONG way from my childhood years. But, again, feeling the same caught in the middle emotions as I watch people I dearly love continue day after day "at odds" with one another and allowing a spirit of unforgiveness to reign. I'm recalling those earlier lessons learned and realizing the truth they contain for today:
- Their issues have little (if anything) to do with me.
- I can't fix it for them.
- My job is to keep loving.
- My job is to PRAY.
- My job is to speak truth that points to Jesus.
- My job is to PRAY.
- My job is to guard my own heart from unforgiveness.
- And did I mention, PRAY????
God spoke some powerful truth to my heart this morning through Matthew 18:21-35 where Jesus taught the parable of the unforgiving servant.
I may feel like I've done what God wants me to when I've forgiven someone several times. Oh how we love to pat ourselves on the back for our "godly" responses! How we love to say, "I've done my part. That's enough." Maybe you're not like that. But that's one of the enemy's favorite tools in my life. It's a fairly easy job for the adversary to keep resurrecting my godless pride.
The truth is - Jesus is not telling me I need to make myself a tally board and keep score of how many times I forgive someone until I reach 490. Jesus is telling me that forgiveness needs to be a way of life for me. He is calling me to continually walk in a spirit of forgiveness.
In this parable in Matthew 18 we sometimes overlook how great a debt the king forgave because we don't understand "talents" and "denarii" since we deal with "dollars" in our economy.
I don't know what 10,000 talents would equal by today's standards. But the bottom line is, the amount of money the first servant owed was an UNPAYABLE debt. The man was a common day laborer who could never pay off such a debt if he worked 24 hours a day for the rest of his life. Yet grace flowed from a merciful king and the servant was freed, his debt canceled.
Is this not the equivalent of our being absolutely lost in sin apart from God's forgiveness through the cross of Jesus? Yet grace flows from our merciful Heavenly Father and we are granted freedom that is complete, undeserved and restorative. It reminds me of the chorus we used to sing, "I owed a debt I could not pay. He paid a debt He did not owe ..."
The stark contrast which follows in Jesus' parable is meant to shock us I think. The man who was forgiven a huge unpayable debt refused to forgive the debt of a fellow servant that was only a mere pittance by comparison.
Instead, he threw his fellow servant into prison where the man would have no possibility of repaying his debt. Don't we do the same thing when we react to an attitude or an action that has hurt us by deciding "If that's the way they are going to be, then that's the way it's going to be!" We imprison - or bind up - our present problems or the stress between us and someone else. We refuse to let it go.
In the end, the king came back to the first servant and turned him over to "torturers" (read v.34). When we allow unforgiveness to reign in our hearts it takes a tortuous toll on our lives, bodies, and relationships. I saw that first hand growing up.
God has shown me clearly that I can do nothing about unforgiveness that reigns in someone else's heart. I couldn't fix my parents and I can't fix my friends. But I can make sure unforgiveness doesn't reign in MY heart.
This morning God has me asking myself:
- How do I treat my fellow servants?
- Do I freely forgive as I have been freely forgiven?
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