Matthew 18: 21-35 Teaches us so much about what forgiveness is all about, and how costly God’s Grace really is, He has freely given us His forgiveness and His Grace, in and through the person of Jesus Christ, who died on the cross for us. His generous act cost Him so much, that we will never truly be able to appreciate it, well maybe in glory with un-impaired minds we will finally.
The cost to us of this great grace is that once we are recipients of His Grace, He puts us under obligation to forgive those who have sinned against us.
This is one of the most difficult, and life-long struggles that comes to all true believers, how easy it is to talk up a storm of our own imagined spiritual greatness, but come forgiveness time, we are brought back to earth. Yet to me it seems there are so many cheap and easy proponents of God’s Grace, who don’t understand or even bother to apply it to their own life. Too busy bearing real or imagined grudges from yester-year, too busy wanting other to come crawling and be publicly humiliated into a day of reckoning style event that so many in the Church fear. They want a confrontation, a setting right of all the wrongs. They want to usurp the Sovereign Lord’s Day when he brings all to judgement, and He sets right all wrongs.
Why would anyone willingly want God’s justice to be the order of the day, when we have sinned against God and our fellow humans, when we are also involved in sin, when all sin is always first and fore-mostly against God? Surely we should simply long for Grace, for mercy for forgiveness for us, and for those who have sinned against us!
And so Lord make us, and help us to be people who take all grudges, vendetta’s, past wrongs to your Cross, and lay it at your feet, and help us to know what it means to love you and our christian brethren so much, that to us all sins are covered by your Grace, may we never bring up again what wrong someone else has done to us!