God’s Constitution, Pt 23: Prayer (d)

Matthew 6:5-15                     5“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 6But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. 7And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. 8Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. 9“This, then, is how you should pray: “ ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, 10your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. 11Give us today our daily bread. 12And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 13And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’  14For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.

Matthew 18:23-35                 23“Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. 24As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand bags of gold was brought to him. 25Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt. 26“At this the servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’ 27The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go. 28“But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred silver coins. He grabbed him and began to choke him. ‘Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded. 29“His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it back.’ 30“But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. 31When the other servants saw what had happened, they were outraged and went and told their master everything that had happened.  32“Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. 33Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ 34In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed. 35“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

These last two verses of the Lord’s Prayer are rather odd don’t you think?  At first glance they don’t seem to fit the rest because of their rather formulaic structure:  ‘If you don’t do this then God won’t do that.’  It makes God seem rather judgmental.  Here’s the thing though: These verses are intended to describe a necessary heart condition rather than a quid pro quo for our own forgiveness.  But forgiveness is a complicated thing for us; it entails everything noble as well as everything base in the human heart.  We are aware of our deep need for forgiveness; our sins well up inside us.  There is a line in the movie The Patriot spoken by Mel Gibson who says, “I have long feared my sins would revisit me.”  We are aware that we do bad things to people, even our friends, and know deep inside that they have a just consequence.  But it takes a strong, strong person of God to resist the primal tendency for retribution when someone else does bad things to us.  Here we see the disconnect between our head and our heart in these matters.

This conflict between forgiveness and retribution indicates a core truth about forgiveness:  It is not a one-way process.  The truth is guys, that when Christ went to the cross to forgive us of our sins, every single one both past and future, we were forgiven a massive debt.  If one studies the two debts in the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant (Matthew 18:21-35) one comes to the realization that the servant was owed a debt 1/600,000th the size of the one he had been forgiven.  To be forgiven the one and not forgive the other is ludicrous.  Having accepted Jesus as our Savior, we became members of the Church of the Forgiven, and if we have any degree of integrity within us we must recognize the hypocrisy of the unforgiving servant.

But that does not mean that functional forgiveness is easy.  It’s easy to say I forgive to someone, often very difficult to actually mean it.  That difference between head and heart is what I mean about functional.  But that 18” transition from head to heart must nonetheless be made.  We are fleshly creatures so to have divine- like unconditional forgiveness is difficult, but not impossible.  Remember, we have Jesus’ help through the presence of the Holy Spirit.  There was someone in my life once who was a hugely difficult person.  That difficulty came to a head one evening when she totally attacked my wife and I in the midst of a home church fellowship.  We were embarrassed in public and angry about it.  I told the woman I forgave her outburst but that she was no longer permitted to attend the group because I couldn’t trust her.  She said forgiveness doesn’t work that way.  Truth is we, can forgive and at the same time not allow a repetition, but she was probably right that my forgiveness was not complete.  I’ve had to go to God to resolve that issue and I think I have done so.

My point in this story is that we don’t have to work through these issues alone.  Forgiveness is very hard, but God is very capable to help us work through it.  The key is to realize that if the offender keeps coming up in our mind, then we are not done.  That’s God reminding us there is still work to be done.  In my case, He had to ‘tap my shoulder’ many times before I finally listened.  But listen I did, and so can you.  Remember this:  in every difficult decision, or struggle, or loss, we have a choice to make.  Are we allowing God to walk with us in this thing?  Believer, is there someone in your fellowship that you trust implicitly?  That person is a resource you can use to process the issue of unforgiveness in your heart.  Sometimes we need another human being, whose pulse we can feel, and whose presence is real, and whose heart will understand.  That person is a gift from God to help your deal with your hurt.  Please don’t let your unforgiveness metastasize into spiritual death.  Go to God directly or through your friend and seek God’s healing.