Tuesday, March 6

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Matthew 18:21-35

Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?”

Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.

“Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. Since 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.

“The servant fell on his knees before him, ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’ The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.

“But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii. He grabbed him and began to choke him. ‘Pay back what you owe me!” he demanded.

“His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.’

“But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened.

“Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ In anger his master tuned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.

“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.”

Have you ever heard the story of a man named Harry Havens? Mr. Havens story appeared in the Chicago Herald Examiner newspaper in November, 1930. The title of the article read,

“Man Spites Wife by Staying in Bed Seven Years.”

The article said that Harry Havens and his wife lived in Indiana and that Mr. Havens was the kind of husband who liked to help out around the house. One day his wife scolded him for the way he was going about one of these household tasks, and for some reason, it was the last straw for old Harry. He reportedly said, “All right, if that’s the way you feel, I’m going to bed and I’m going to stay there! And I don’t want to see you or anyone else ever again.”

He made himself a blindfold and went to bed. And he stayed there for seven years.

There are no two-ways about it; forgiveness is hard. Think about it: the only reasons we ever need to forgive someone are because he or she has done something wrong, or because he or she has done something that has hurt us. And when someone does something wrong, we have this tendency to want justice, to want punishment. And when we have been hurt, we tend to hang on to that hurt because it is “our hurt” and because we can use it to justify our own attitudes and behavior toward that person.

One writer describes this tendency to hold onto our hurts as “building a trophy room.” Just as we often keep sports trophies to remind us of our achievements, we can also keep trophies that remind us of the pain – real or imagined – that we have felt due to the words or behavior of others. In a sense we build a room in our hearts – a trophy room – where we can carefully store and catalogue these hurts. And we reserve the right to visit that room, search out a particular trophy, a particular memory, and to remind ourselves of how we have been wronged or hurt.

That’s essentially what the man in Jesus’ parable does. Even though his own enormous debt, 10,000 talents was more than a man could earn in ten lifetimes, has been canceled by the forgiveness of his Master, he returns home and remembers the debt he is owed by another. He not only refuses to forgive the debt, but has the man thrown in prison until he can repay, thus guaranteeing he will never be able to repay the debt!

But notice! His unwillingness to forgive eventually leads him to “prison and torture” himself, which I believe is Jesus’ way of warning us of the prison of bitterness and resentment that comes with spending too much time in the trophy room of our hurts and pains.

Do you have such a trophy room in your heart? I think most of us do. I know I do. Even when I think I have forgiven a particular hurt, somehow I manage to save a little piece of it and polish it up and put it on a shelf in my heart. Then that unforgiven little piece – a hurtful word, an injustice, a perceived slight – becomes that which enslaves my heart.

Would you be willing to ask Jesus to walk through the trophy room of your heart? Would you allow him to point out the hurtful words and actions of others that you are holding onto? Would you allow him to take them upon himself and to carry them away?

He would love to do just that.

Pastor Brian Coffey