Matthew 18:35 “This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

Wow! Just this past Sunday I quoted Matthew 6:14-15 in the message, saying that it was a passage that really gave me pause, but here Jesus doubles down on our forgiving people being absolutely essential. Here, He specifies that our forgiving must be “from the heart.” There’s no “wiggle room,” either in Japanese or in English! We can’t just say pious words and then go away unchanged. The parable Jesus tells here illustrates the reality behind this principle. Our debt to our Lord is absolutely beyond our ability to repay, so any debt someone might have toward us is by definition far smaller. The problem is, we don’t grasp just how great our debt toward God is. In the first place, He created us and everything around us, so we owe Him that. However, He doesn’t hold that against us. Where it starts to add up is all the ways we ignore Him and His instructions to us, often enough by deliberate choice of our will. That gets huge very quickly! Jesus is using the illustration of financial debt here because it’s something we can wrap our minds around. It’s not at all that we could financially pay off our sin debt to God! Our problem is perspective. In this parable Jesus has the fellow servant owing the man 100 denarii, which would be 100 days’ wages. To us today, that looks like a big chunk of change, but the man’s own debt was thousands of times greater, because one talent was equal to 6,000 denarii. Even Elon Musk would have trouble with that one! When we realize the gravity of our sin toward God, then what people do to us very quickly becomes trivial.

As I have written before, I seem to have an easier time forgiving people than many do. It may be because of the Lord having shown me my own soul, just for a moment, and I was driven to my knees in repentance. My biggest issue at that point was pride, and that factors greatly into forgiveness. If we think we are morally superior to the person who offended us, then forgiveness will be difficult. God showed me I wasn’t morally superior to anybody, and I will be eternally grateful for that revelation. The thing is, life continues to happen, and I’ve got to keep forgiving those around me in order to stay in the flow of God’s forgiveness toward me. I can’t do it in my own strength, but by God’s grace He makes it possible.

Father, thank You for this reminder. I am irritated by people and circumstances on a daily basis. Keep me from letting any of that fester, but help me release it all, as You have released me. The debtors’ prison illustration in this parable is real. May I have nothing to do with that, but walk in the freedom of Your Spirit, (2 Corinthians 3:17) for Your glory. Thank You. Hallelujah!