But Deliver Us from the Evil One

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Matthew 6:13; Job 1 - 2

Let me tell you something that is going to shock you.  For a book that’s supposed to have all the answers, the Bible does not tell us what evil is nor where it comes from.  Any Bible scholar or theologian who claims to have the definitive answer for either of those questions is trying to sell you something, probably their latest big, thick, laborious read of a book.  Evil and those horrible things like suffering, violence, predation, disease, untruth, etc. are a given in God’s very good Creation and for some reason wherever humans are it’s lurking around every corner ready to lunge and hurt and wreak havoc to whomever, whatever and however it pleases.  

Now, are you ready to have your day ruined?  If we take the Bible at face value, we can’t say God has nothing to do with evil.  God’s hands aren’t necessarily clean when it comes to evil.  God lets and even causes evil happen both when it serves God’s purposes and when it does not.  An honest read of the Old Testament reveals a God who does evil to the wicked because they deserve it and for the sake of the God’s people.  But God also lets/causes evil to happen to those he calls his own both when we deserve it and when we do not.  The rule of karma, what goes around comes around, we would hope to be the case but it is too often the case that the wicked go unpunished and seem to be rewarded while the good pay for it and suffer.  

I suspect this is a bitter pill for us.  We like to think that God is all good, especially that God is Love and that God doesn’t do evil or let it happen.  But, you know, in order to have a full definition of love, that definition has got to somehow involve hate and not simply for the sake of being love’s opposite.  One cannot say “I truly love you” unless it allows for the possibility that the time will come when I have to love you even when you hate me, even when you do evil to me – and that’s assuming a generic definition of evil is what we do to people when we hate them.  There’s also having to choose to love a person even when they deserve your hate and hate is exactly what you feel for them.  Love is more than a feeling.  It is possible to love and hate somebody at the same time.  

There’s something else about evil that we need to note and this is likely going to sound weird to you.  Evil is personal and it gets personal.  In the last verse of the Lord’s Prayer Jesus teaches us to pray “But deliver us from evil.”  There’s a bit of a debate as to whether that should be read, “But deliver us from the Evil One” meaning Satan. It can be translated either way.  Personally, I believe Jesus meant more than just evil in a generic form.  A significant portion of Jesus’ ministry involved casting out demons.  These things have an aversion to Jesus and what God has done in, through, and as him to save and heal us from the disease of sin. 

This topic is something we educated Westerners like to dismiss as antiquated and unscientific.  Regardless, the structure of reality that the Bible presents us with is that in the part of reality that we can’t see, the behind the scenes, there are malevolent spiritual beings and powers that serve to work against the will of God and who like to hurt us because God made us in his image and especially because of our relationship to Jesus.  Just as there are angels, so also, there are demons.  If it adds credibility, even Carl Jung, one of the foremost fathers of psychology said they exist.  Both the Roman Catholics and the Anglicans have priests that are specially trained in the ministry of exorcism.  If you’re brave enough, strike up the topic with some of those folks in the non-denominational world doing street ministries and you will soon be convinced. 

Then there’s Satan.  Jesus was tried by him in the wilderness and it was he who entered Judas and led him to betray Jesus.  In several letters of the New Testament he is spoken of as the behind the scenes enemy of Jesus who is out to destroy the Church and us believers.  He was the serpent in the Garden of Eden who deceived Adam and Eve.  

Chapters 12 and 13 of The Book of Revelation 12 in elaborate imagery portrays Satan as the one who is really behind the persecution of both Jews and Christians.  Chapter 12 describes a Dragon who tries to murder a young woman giving birth to a child but they are swept away and protected.  This symbolized the birth of the Church amidst the Jewish people who for centuries had been oppressed by Greek and Roman invaders.  Chapter 13 gets quite political.  The Dragon causes a beast to come up out of the Sea who is all powerful; i.e., the Roman emperor.  Then he brings forth another beast from the land that is priestlike and it gets the people to worship the beast.  The purpose of this vision was to explain that the reason persecution was happening to first century Christian is that Satan was using the state religion of Rome – Emperor worship – as the vehicle for destroying the followers of Jesus.  When Christians were martyred, refusing to worship Caesar was the predominant reason.  That message continues today.  Whenever religious authorities throw their support and all but make idols out of political authorities, beware and look out for Satan is at play.  This mix of religion and politics is evil and no good comes from it.  

For us 21^st Century Christians in North America it is this Evil One who orchestrates the trials that we go through that threaten our loyalty to Jesus.  I ask you to remember from last week’s sermon in which we looked at the part of the Lord’s Prayer that is associated with what we’re looking at today where we ask God “And bring us not into the time of trial”.  The time of trial is when something takes place in our lives that is so terrible it has the potential of destroying our faith, our loyalty to Jesus.  

Looking at our text from Job, it is this Evil One who smites Job in an effort to crush his faith.  The name Satan comes from the Hebrew Ha Satan – which means “the Accuser” or “Adversary”.  He is one of the heavenly beings whose purpose simply seems to go around searching for faithful humans to accuse of unrighteous behaviour so that he can make them suffer for it.  Oddly, it is God who asks Satan if he has considered Job.  Satan has and he offers that Job is only faithful because God has blessed him with so much.  Satan then wagers that if the blessing was removed, Job would certainly curse God.  God took the bet telling Satan that all Job has is under Satan’s power but he wasn’t allowed to touch Job himself.  So, Satan leaves God’s presence and goes and kills all of Job’s children and servants and destroys his property and livestock.  That didn’t do it.  Job did not charge God with wrongdoing. The good Lord giveth and the good Lord taketh away.

Satan then comes back into God’s presence.  One can sense God’s pride for his servant Job as if God is gloating.  Satan comes back with another wager that if Job himself were attacked with disease he would curse God to his face.  God answers: “Very well then.  He’s yours, just don’t kill him.”  Satan smites him with painful boils.  The only thing resembling comfort for him is sitting in his ash heap, scraping his boils with a broken piece of pottery and packing the wounds with ashes.  He’s lost everything.  His wife tells him to curse God so that God will kill him and this will be over with.  But Job maintains his integrity.  He does not deserve this.  Then his four friends come to see him.  He is all but unrecognizable to them.  They sit on the ground in silence with him for seven days and nights until Job begins to speak.  Job is dysphoric.  “Why was I born?  Why was I even given a taste of joy only to come to this for no reason?  My worst fear has come upon me!”  His friends try to comfort him by accusing him of a secret sin for which God was getting him because in their belief system God smites the wicked and blesses the righteous; no exceptions.  They offer him the false hope that if he would just own up God would restore him.  But Job maintains his innocence and his integrity.  He’s bold enough to say he would like to see God to state his case or at least find out why.

Chapter after chapter of this back and forth goes on.  And then…a deadly desert whirlwind arises and I can imagine Job mustering the strength to stand and shaking his fist and shouting with what little strength he had left, “Death, my only friend!  Bring it on.  Kill me.”  But he doesn’t, although I could so understand if he wanted to die.  Sometimes living is worse than dying.  The Presence of God is somehow in this whirlwind like it was during the Exodus.  A voice addresses Job, “Who’s this wise ass who thinks he knows everything.  Pull up your pullup diapers, boy, and I’ll ask you a thing or two.”  (That’s my paraphrase.)  Animals are fleeing past Job in fear of the whirlwind.  “Did you make all this, all these animals, the sunrise, the stars, the sea.  Can you make the eagles soar?  I’m God and you are not.  Can somebody who sees only fault contend with me?  If you’re going to argue with God, with me, well you just go ahead and make your case, if you can!” Job, realizing whose presence he is in, covers his mouth and says what seems like “Uh oh. I’ve stated my case twice already.  I’m thinking I’d better just shut up about this.”

And God continues on, “Come on, now.  Have some dignity.  Pull up those Depends and answer me.  Are you going to accuse me, you know me, God, the one who in wonder created all this wonder and beauty and even the sea monsters?  Can you fight a dragon?  Are you going to accuse me of wrongdoing just to justify yourself?”  

Job answered, “You are God and I now realize that I am not.  I didn’t know what I was talking about.”  Even though God was letting Job have it, being in the Presence of God was so overwhelmingly good that Job sees he has nothing to complain about.  He says, “Before I had only heard of you, but now I literally see you.  I am unworthy to be in your Presence, but here I am.  I am so sorry.”  God then told Job’s friends that they were so wrong.  Job was right to uphold his integrity.  He did not deserve this.  God would forgive them once Job prayed for them and he did.  Then God restored Job.  The moral of the story: God lets evil happen to his faithful to prove them.  In the midst of that suffering, the faithful encounter God himself.  Whatever the suffering may be however bad it may be, it pales in comparison to the goodness of God’s presence.

And so, Jesus teaches us to pray, “And bring us not into the time of trial, but deliver us/protect us from the evil one.”  To his disciples that was a prayer asking their heavenly Father to keep them from times of trial meaning social and political persecution because of their loyalty to Jesus.  Today, in Canadian Christianity, North American Christianity we are not likely to suffer social or political persecution on account of loyalty to Jesus.  We are no longer a threat to the social or political orders in a culture that owes a lot to Christian faithfulness and that is slowly forgetting the God to whom it owes such a debt.  With the decline of the Church such things like Volunteerism and public service are becoming rare.  Anxiety and depression and addictions are on the rise, particularly addiction to our little devices.  With so much information floating around out there it is hard to determine what Truth is and the unscrupulous take advantage of that.  Lying is epidemic.

As Christians who are white and relatively well off, the trial that tests our loyalty to Jesus more than anything is our comfort.  Comfort allows us to let the God-stuff slide so that we are ill-prepared when bad things happen to us good people.  It becomes easy to blame God for unjustly taking our comfort away and so justify ourselves for letting our faith get so weak.  Then we walk away from God instead of discovering a more profound relationship with God in the midst of our suffering and grief.  God suffers with us.  Our relationship with the Christ who suffered and died on the cross will and does deepen when the feathers hit the fan.  Our comfort causes us to neglect our daily need for God so that we are quick to turn away when our faith is tried.  Maybe a more contemporary version of the Lord’s Prayer should ask, “and bring us not into the time of comfort, but deliver us from the Evil One” for it just might be that our comfort is the Devil’s greatest tool.  Amen.

Bring Us Not into the Time of Trial

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Matthew 6:13; Genesis 22:1-19

Well, looking at this verse of the Lord’s Prayer, the word temptation shows up in most translations of it.  As I mentioned a moment ago, I think the word should be translated as “Trial”.  “And bring us not into the time of trial” would be how I read it. I would like to make my case. So, there is a season of the Church Year that we all know as Lent where the topic of “temptation” comes up.  Lent is the forty days preceding Easter and traditionally it is supposed to be a time of introspection and self-denial that tastes of the Israelites’ wandering in the wilderness and/or Jesus forty days of fasting in the wilderness that culminated with his encounter with Satan.  Traditionally, Lent is to be a season to fast and to pray in an intentional effort to reawaken our sense of reliance on God for everything.  It’s good to undertake such a practice.  Fasting for a day or days at a time does have spiritual benefit.  So also, being more intentional about one’s prayer life certainly has spiritual benefit.  These two disciplines of intentional self-denial, fasting and prayer, have long been beneficial to so many as means of increasing one’s awareness of the presence of God in our lives.    

My rant on Lent is with how tacky some of this self-denial stuff became and how Lent got reduced to being about how we struggle with temptation to sin, which gets defined as carnal pleasure or carnal vice.  It went like this.  You know, someone asks “What are you going to give up for Lent?” and the answer would be chocolate, or coffee, or alcohol.  Some people would go as far as to try to give up smoking.  The idea was to give up your vice, your bad habit, and somehow resisting the temptation to resume that vice before the forty days of Lent was up was somehow supposed to lead to a greater sense of desire for God.  Typically, all that happened was that we became much more aware of how dependent we were on what we were giving up.  Moreover, that Jesus gave up his life in such a horrific way doesn’t seem to jive with our giving up chocolate.

This temptation centered approach to Lent just reduced the intent of Lent to being an exercise in how we deal with temptations to carnality.  It reduced our relationship to God, our practice of faith down to avoidance of those seven deadly sins that the medieval church was so preoccupied with: Pride, wrath, envy, sloth, gluttony, lust, and greed.  It focuses on sin rather than on what God has done.  God through the incarnation and faithfulness of Jesus the Son in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit according to the will and the love of the Father has and is saving his entire creation from evil, sin, and death.  Eternal life is knowing God the Father Son and Holy Spirit and God’s bring us into communion with God’s very self.  To reduce this wondrous new life-giving relationship with God down to how well me, myself, and I resist those things I’m prone to have a bad habit relationship with is more than just tacky.

Temptation is just not the right word.  It’s trial, a trial or testing of where our loyalties lie, a trial of faith.  A trial, not a temptation, is what the Israelites faced as they wandered through the wilderness.  In the harsh scarcity of the wilderness would they stay loyal to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who brought them there in order to prove himself faithful or would they serve the gods of the nations whom their faithful God drove out of the Land before them.  Too often the Israelites chose to serve the gods of the nations.  

It was a trial of identity that Satan put Jesus through in the wilderness when he tried to get Jesus to use his power and identity as Son of God to serve himself rather than God the Father.  Satan’s tests began with “if you are the Son of God”.  Early Christians also constantly faced the trial of staying loyal to Jesus in the context of being persecuted for their loyalty to him.  They lost their jobs, families, friends, homes, communities, and even their lives…they lost so much not just for having beliefs about Jesus but because they were personally loyal to him, a loyalty that came to them as a gift after having encountered him through the presence of the Holy Spirit, an encounter that changed their lives, healed them, gave them hope.  

A trial is having to go through something so difficult that it has the potential to crush our fidelity to Jesus.  And so, this verse in the Lord’s Prayer isn’t that the Father not bring us into a time or place where we are tempted to succumb to carnal pleasures but rather that God not bring us to situations or seasons in life that are so difficult they have the capacity to destroy our faith and hope in Jesus, our love for him, our loyalty to him.  Bring us not into the time of trial.

So, there you go but we’re not done yet.  We have to look at why we would pray that God not bring us or lead us into times of trial.  It seems that would go without saying.  Why would God bring us to or lead us to a trial?  I could understand the second part of the verse where it’s implied that it is the Evil One who brings about trials in our lives and we’ll talk about that next week.  Most assuredly, there is something called Satan out there who loves to try to destroy our relationship with God, but here it seems Jesus is telling us to ask that God the Father not bring us or lead us into those trials.  Let’s sort that out briefly.

The Greek word for “bring” or “lead” is interesting.  It’s a word used for bringing or leading an animal to sacrifice.  This part of the prayer sounds a lot like what God did in asking Abraham to bring his son Isaac to Mt. Moriah to sacrifice him.  Isaac was the means to God fulfilling his promise to Abraham.  God had promised to give Abraham the Land we know as Israel/Palestine and make his descendants a great nation on that land that would be a blessing to all other nations.  The promise seemed impossible from the get go because God made it to Abraham when he was in his 90’s and Sarah in her 80’s.  Short of a miracle, it is all but impossible for people that old to produce children.  Yet God gave them Isaac and the name Isaac means laughter because both Abraham and Sarah laughed at the idea of having a child in their old age.  

So, why would God ask Abraham to lead, to bring Isaac his only son, the child of the promise to Mt. Moriah to sacrifice him.  I cannot emphasize enough the horror of this event especially for the almost teenage boy Isaac and the men who accompanied them.  The jury is out on how Abraham really felt.  The biblical account speaks of Abraham’s unwavering confidence that God would provide the sacrifice, that God would keep his promise.  This sheer confidence kept Abraham from succumbing to the sheer horror of it all and refusing to do as God asked.  Abraham followed through right up to the point of bringing the knife down on Isaac and God stopped him and provided a sacrifice…just as Abraham had been telling Isaac.

So, if I were to try to pull together the drift of this part of the Lord’s Prayer, we’re asking God the Father to not test or not let our loyalty to Jesus be tested by Satan by our having to go through things horrible enough to make us lose faith.  But, we still have to wrestle with the fact that the feathers still hit the fan and the gory part that we have to accept is that God lets them and the purpose of that is so that God can prove his faithful love to us and our faithfulness to him.  I’ll talk more about this next week looking at the Book of Job and the horrible bet Satan and God made with respect to proving Job’s loyalty to God.

For now, let me mention a few things.  Trials happen so how do we respond?  Well, Abraham had full confidence in God and God’s promise to him, full enough to carry through on God’s asking him to seemingly obliterate the promise by making a child sacrifice of Isaac which was a common practise in the surrounding nations of kings who wished to make themselves and their kingdoms great and powerful.  We’re typically not going to be giants of faith like Abraham was when facing trials.  We will have our doubts, our anger, our sense of righteous indignation towards God for letting this “blank” happen.  In my walk I have found that taking time to sit in the presence of God to read the Scriptures and to pray is truly beneficial.  God gets through to us with words of assurance and a sense of his presence with us.   

I’m reminded of when Jesus, just after feeding that huge crowd on five loaves and two fish, sent his disciples out in a boat while he stayed back to pray.  He sat on a hillside and watched as a wind storm came up and the waves battered the boat threatening to kill them.  Jesus walked to them on the water in the midst of that storm.  They thought he was a ghost which only compounded the fear.  But he said to them, “Have courage.  It is I.  Don’t be afraid.”  He got in the boat and calmed the storm.  Don’t be afraid of trials.  God hasn’t forgotten you.  He’s got his eye on you.  He’ll show up when the time is right and the storm will go away.

I’m reminded of the words of Paul at the opening to his first letter to the Corinthian churches.  He says: “For in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind— just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you— so that you are not lacking in any gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.  He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.  God is faithful, by whom you were called into the partnership of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord (1 Cor. 1:5-9).

I’m also reminded of when Paul talks of how he prayed earnestly, multiple times for Jesus to heal him of this horrible, oozy eye disease that he had.  Oddly, Jesus refused and told him: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”  We grow stronger through these trials.  

Again, Paul says, “No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it (1 Cor 10:13).  

When you find yourselves in the midst of trials and struggling to not renounce your loyalty to Jesus, draw close to him and he will draw close to you.  Don’t be afraid, he will strengthen you.  He will in time bring the trial to an end and you will be the better for it.  You will know him better and the trial will have been the vehicle of God to produce in you the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  Amen.

If We Don't Forgive

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Matthew 18:15-35

I don’t know about you folks, but this parable, The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant, really troubles me.  The lesson is brutally obvious.  We, the disciples of Jesus, are to forgive as God has forgiven us.  That seems only proper, right, and obvious, right?  The underlying logic is that as God is forgiving and therefore, as we are the Body of Christ indwelt by the Holy Spirit, we too are to be forgiving.  That doesn’t trouble me.  It’s always better to forgive than to bear a grudge…and we’ll talk about that.  

What troubles me here is how at the end of the parable the King in a fit of “wrath” turns the unmerciful servant over to be tortured until every last penny of his debt is paid.  And you have to realize the futility in that…how do you pay off a debt when you’re in prison being tortured and can’t earn a wage.  It’s impossible.  In the real world, it would been his wife and children who paid the debt.  Such is unforgiveness.  

And then (Brace yourselves.) Jesus says, “So my heavenly Father will also do to each one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from the heart.”  Wrath?  Prison?  Torture?  These are not necessarily words I associate with God the Father Son and Holy.  If God is in God’s very self a communion of unconditional, self-giving, even sacrificial love, then wrath, prison, and torture don’t seem to fit.

But, Jesus is indeed saying that God will get us, his children, if we choose not to forgive.  That there troubles me.  For one, it says there is a wrathful side of God.  I like a God who is full of patience and healing mercy and love and all that, not a wrathful God.  This wrathful image of God plays too easily into the hands of evil people who use it to perpetuate fear and provoke acts of hatred against those who are different from themselves.  We have to be careful when we tread the precarious ground of God’s wrathful side.

Another thing, Jesus says that God the Father will be wrathful towards us, the disciples of Jesus – his beloved children in Christ whom he has laced with his very self by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.  If we don’t take the path of forgiving one another from the heart, God will hand us over to be tormented.  Moreover, this forgiving that Jesus speaks of isn’t just the lip service, legal transaction kind of forgiving we cop out with where the offender says “Sorry” and the offended says “Forgiven” and we either go on pretending nothing happened or never speak to each other again while claiming all is forgiven.  The forgiveness Jesus is after is a deeper kind of forgiving, forgiving from the heart – you know, the place where our motives and drives come from.  I’ll get to that momentarily.  

We’ve also got to wonder what Jesus means by torment.  If the penalty for that servant being unforgiving was prison and torment, what’s that mean for us when we’re unforgiving?  What does Jesus mean by torment?  Well, let me lighten the moment and go Greek for a minute.  The Greek word for torment originates in the world of commerce as the word for a coin tester, the person who bites coins to test their authenticity.  The coin-biter torments the coin and the coin owner if it’s fake.  The concept’s scope of meaning grows to include testing the character of a person by torment.  Ultimately, it can be the obvious evil of torment for the sake of torment.  In this parable it is clearly the latter – torment for the sake of torment – but, I wonder if Jesus might be wanting us to think more along the lines that when we are unforgiving, we can expect that God will let the unfolding of the consequences of our unforgiveness, which may seem like torture, be for us a test of our character to show our authenticity.  Does Jesus let us suffer the consequences of being unforgiving until we have had enough and decide to mature and begin working to forgive?  Chew on that.

This concept of torment occurs in Matthew’s Gospel more than anywhere else in the Bible.  It means afflicted with disease (4:24) and suffering to the point of psychosomatic paralysis (8:26).  Jesus healed people suffering from these torments.  The demons who possessed the two “Gerasene demoniacs”, when they recognized Jesus as the Son of God shouted out, “What have you to do with us, Son of God.  Have you come to torment us before the time?” (8:29).  Jesus delivered the men by casting the demons out into a huge herd of pigs who then did a mass drowning.  Then immediately after that, Jesus fed the 5,000+ and sent the twelve disciples out on the Sea of Galilee in a boat by themselves where a perilous windstorm erupted.  The boat was tormented (or battered) by the waves.  Jesus came to them by walking on the water and after Peter’s failed attempt at walking on water, Jesus got into the boat and calmed the storm.  

In all these cases Jesus ended the torment and healed its effects on people.  Except for the demons, he turned the torment back on them and ruined the pork industry in the area that year.  But in this parable of the Unmerciful Servant – and take a minute to scratch your head – Jesus goes the opposite direction.  According to this parable, if we take the route of unforgiveness, we choose to revert back to the torment of a “prior-to-meeting-Jesus” state of being and Jesus will let us wallow in it…i.e., we lose our sense of his presence with us and we wallow around in prison muck trying to find something to replace it.  

When Jesus comes into our lives, he sets us free from our inclination towards unforgiveness and by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit gives us a new heart that desires to forgive; a heart that desires to be at peace with God, with ourselves, with those who have hurt us and also with those whom we have hurt.  If this parable does one thing, it points us to the fact that reconciliation, which means working the process of forgiveness, is our primary relationship task as Jesus’ disciples.  Being faithful people means being forgiving people, people who work at reconciliation.  In this world of sin-broken relationships, the restored image of God in us who are the disciples of Jesus looks like people working towards forgiveness.  When we choose to be unforgiving it is, frankly, a deeply personal renunciation of Jesus himself, his presence in our lives, and his healing work in us.  We can’t expect things to go well when we do that.

In the last few decades there have been a number of studies done on the effects of unforgiveness on our health and relationships that add some depth to our discussion.  An article by the Mayo Clinic entitledForgiveness: Letting Go of Grudges and Bitterness lists the relational effects of harbouring unforgiveness which is what is known as bearing a grudge.  It can cause us to: 1) bring anger and bitterness into every relationship and new experience; 2) become so wrapped up in that past wrong that we can't enjoy the present; 3) become depressed or anxious; 4) feel that our life lacks meaning or purpose, even make us feel at odds with our spiritual beliefs; 5) cause us to lose or not form valuable and enriching connectedness with others.  To sum that up, it basically says that if we choose to be unforgiving in one relationship in our lives it will affect every relationship we have from here on out.

Looking more at the realm of physical health, unforgiveness increases the levels of stress hormones in our bodies.  This in turn leads to increased blood pressure, higher cholesterol levels, weaker immune systems, and anxiety and depression.  All of which put us at a greater risk of stroke, heart disease, cancer, and chronic pain.  Unforgiveness has a huge health cost.  Speaking frankly again, there’s been a lot of work lately on the destructive effect that emotional trauma has on us and our bodies.  Unforgiveness does the same.

 My summation of all this is that being unforgiving leads us into a life of lonely, bitter isolation and sickness and the costs are deadly.  As I see it, the path of unforgiveness follows the same destructive course that addictions do on our health and relationships.  Harbouring unforgiveness will quench any sort of connectedness we have with others, leave us isolated and bitter, and make us sick.  Moreover, my unforgiveness doesn’t affect just me.  In a marriage or a close friendship you have two people who love each other.  Something happens and now one or both of them hates the other.  Instead, of working to reconcile things happen to further the hurt; retaliation and so forth.  Now they both are suffering a world of hurt and not only them each but everybody they are close to suffers with and for and because of them.  And the emotional effects of that unforgiveness gets carried forward into every new relationship they both have.

Unforgiveness is a choice, so also is forgiveness.  It is remarkable that Jesus uses the imagery of debt to define unforgiveness.  Unforgiveness is pridefully holding on to a feeling that we are owed something by someone who has or whom we believe has wronged us.  In the end, unforgiveness will cause us to become the hate-filled person that we believe the person who wronged us is.  There’s a saying: “Be careful whom you hate because you will become just like them.”  

Forgiveness, on the other hand, is letting go of this pride-filled demand for retribution and the need for the restitution of honour.  An eye for an eye only works as a deterrent.  It does not bring healing the way that forgiveness does.  Forgiveness is striving to be in a reconciled relationship with those who have wronged us, making the effort to understand each other, working to restore trust, and even more so, wanting one another to know the peace and love we have in Jesus in the presence of the Holy Spirit. 

Forgiveness is a process, a spiritual practice that we must work at.  This will be the first and probably only time I will agree with Joyce Meyer, who is a populist Christian writer and speaker.  She gives some helpful practical advice on how to forgive in an article entitled The Poison of Unforgiveness.  First, decide to forgive.  Decide to make amends.  We won’t do it if we wait until we feel like it.  Decide to forgive, desire to forgive, and start working on it and God will in time heal our emotions.  Second, we are powerless over unforgiveness so we must depend on the power of the Holy Spirit to help us forgive.  Third, do what the Bible tells us to do: pray for our enemies and do good to them and bless them rather than curse them. 

I add to her advice that we should also follow Jesus’ direction in Matthew 18:15-18.  As a matter of first course go to the person and address the situation.  If that doesn’t work, take two others.  If that doesn’t work, announce it to the church.  If that doesn’t work, then you’re done with them.  Let God deal with them, but still keep praying and hoping.

To be faithful disciples of Jesus is to forgive.  There’s no way around it.  There's a cost if we don't forgive.  Amen.