"Unforgiving Hearts"

It still amazes me how people, who claim Jesus as their Lord, who claim they read their bible daily, pray with fervency and have a deep love for the Lord cannot forgive from the heart when they feel they were wronged! It makes me wonder what 'word' they read and 'who' they pray to. To hold to grudges reveals deeper seated spiritual problems and how little trust is really placed in our Lord.

Was it not Jesus who said if we do not forgive we are not forgiven? Does that not impact us? Yet we move along, with little thought how we treat others who have wronged us. Sometimes our emotional hurt is much greater than our faith in the word of the Lord. If you come to the cross, it calls us into a world of forgiveness and compassion. It changes our lives and outlook toward others who have hurt us. The cross shows us the depth of man's sins and the price that had to be paid to free us from the strangling power of sin. People become enslaved and desparately want to be free but sin holds them in its grasp until they can break to Jesus. Your forgiveness was not cheap. It came at a high price that no person on this earth would be willing to offer. The heart of God becomes exposed when He sends His own personal Son at our expense. The times we have walked over God, spoke His name is vile and unholy ways, rebelled by shaking our fists in His face that no one was going to tell us what to do and so thankless for the blessings we have been bestowed only to complain because things aren't working out the way we planned. In all this, God reached out, willingly and lovingly offered us 100% pardon at the cost of the blood of His Son. It should shame us as well as bring us to our senses to rejoice. We assemble to give thanks to His name, take His supper and hear Him proclaimed. But then it happens...someone hurts our feelings or something from our past reminds us of how we have been hurt and we hold to that. The person who hurt us becomes stuck in our mind and they are so arrogant and unrepentant. Resentment wells up, our hearts become darkened and our minds are wanting justice and accountability. It doesn't come so we become more embittered! On the flip side, we still attend the worship to our Lord, speak lovely things of His name and share in His supper not giving one thought that we are deceiving ourselves, becoming more corrupt within our hearts and walking a road of hypocrisy. We don't reveal that openly but God sees it all. He must shake His head in shame and then the words of Jesus fall on our ears: "Should you not also have had mercy on your fellow slave, in the same way I had mercy on you? And his lord, moved with anger, handed him over to the torturers until he should repay all that was owed him. My heavenly Father will also do the same to you, if each of you does not forgive his brother from your heart."