I have been reading through Matthew and read through that passage again the other day. The passage is titled "The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant". And every time I get to the last verse (v35) I shudder. It says, "So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart." What is it that the Father will do to you? The previous verse says that the master delivered the unforgiving servant over to the tortures since he would not forgive his fellow servant.
A lot of the time I can read through that passage and not even connect with the gravity of what's being said there. I can think, "oh, that doesn't apply to me, I have Jesus." But it does apply. If I don't forgive from my heart I am in danger of the fires of hell. Why? Because if I don't forgive my sister when she sins against me then I am demonstrating that I do not know the forgiveness of Christ. Because if I truly have been forgiven all my sin, then I would recognize the ten thousand talents (about 4 billion dollars) that I no longer owe and would be so humbled that I would not demand the measly hundred denarii (about 9 thousand dollars) that my fellow servant owes me. But if I think that by some chance I deserved to be forgiven ten thousand talents and that this fellow servant does not deserve to be forgiven a hundred denarii, I am essentially spitting on the mercy of God and claiming self-righteousness. And self-righteous people don't go to heaven. Only those that recognize their great need for a savior, even in the mist of being sinned against, truly experience the mercy of that Father.But how do I deal with sin that is really hard to forgive? I'm going to talk about that in the next post.
