This segment will only cover two verses, but they are extremely important verses. This is Jesus’s commentary on forgiveness.
“14 For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: 15 But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will you Father forgive your trespasses.”
That’s heavy and sounds vindictive on the surface. But let’s look at it a little deeper. The Greek word that is rendered forgive, in both the prayer and here in the commentary, is the word that denotes release from a debt. The key to understanding the entire passage from the forgiveness part of the prayer to the end of the commentary is the part of the definition dealing with release. It isn’t about doing a favor for the people who wronged you. The purpose of forgiveness, of releasing the debt, is to clear the books in your own heart to become receptive to the presence and work of God in your own soul.
If you fill your soul with anger, hate, resentment and vengeance, there is no room for God to do His work in you, growing your soul to be like Him. Release is the mechanism by which these negative emotions and desires are eliminated from the heart of a person’s soul. The only way to do it is willfully letting it go. I know from experience, this isn’t easy in the least. It becomes especially difficult when the harm done to you is ongoing and persistent. Healing that harm requires healing the damage to your soul. The anger, hate, resentment and vengeful desires are symptoms of the damage. Alleviating the symptoms will allow the soul to be healed by God and His natural regeneration.
If you chose rather to continue to hate. The damage to your soul is compounded by new damage added to it by your own choice. God cannot release you from the damage of your own errors if you chose to retain that damage. The explanation is far simpler than the execution. The matter is entirely up to your choice. That is why I say God doesn’t send people to hell, they go voluntarily. You make your hell in your own soul by excluding God from your life. God is excluded when you chose to get back at the one who has done you wrong.
Even if God were out of the equation, however preposterous that may seem, forgiveness is essential for the well being of the forgiver. You can’t hold a grudge and shake a hand, your hand is already full. Your heart, that part of your soul from which feelings, reason and volition spring forth, is really not infinite, it can only hold on to so much, and the bulk of the negative emotions and desires is so much greater than the positive ones that they fill the heart faster.
Have you ever seen someone so consumed by hate they can’t make rational judgment about the object of their hate? It scales up rapidly. The problems in American politics are rooted in old grudges and their trunks are the hate borne by the political activists. Does it strike you as strange as it does me that these people see things that are not there and say things that make little sense to someone living in reality? Their whole view of the world is colored by their hate, they are consumed by it.
Releasing that hate would heal their hearts, open their eyes to reality and give them an opportunity to grow as human beings. The word we use to describe that release is forgiveness. To forgive is to let go of the debt of anger, hate and vengeance we record in the ledger of our hearts. Try it for a day and see if it fits. You won’t take it off once you put it on. Dress well for eternity.
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