Archived Daily Manna | Rejoice Fellowship | A mission to release people to rejoice in the world.

Message: Christ repeatedly tells us that mercy will come to the merciful, and that God will “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Forgiving people who do us wrong, however, is one of the hardest things we can do. Anger and hatred are powerful and intransigent. If we have been wronged, even if we can calm our anger, thinking back to the incident may make us angry all over again. We don’t want to see them forgiven; we want to be vindicated. We want to see them judged and punished. We may know, in our mind, that Christ told us to “cast out the beam in our own eye” rather than to criticize our neighbor for the splinter in his eye; for it is easier to see faults in others than in ourselves. We cannot see the sins of others clearly enough to judge them, anyway, for we see through eyes blinded by our own sinfulness. angry faces We may also remember the exhortation, “Judge not, lest ye be judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” It is enlightening to read Habukkak 1 in conjunction with Christ’s teaching on judgment. Habukkak decried the wrongdoers in Jerusalem and asked God for justice; and God gave justice—He sent the Babylonians to destroy Jerusalem and enslave the entire population. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). To demand justice against others, then, is to ask to be judged oneself. We are not so foolish; we ask to be forgiven. For ourselves, we want mercy, not justice. But our trespasses will be forgiven as we forgive others; we pray this every day. Although knowledge of this fundamental truth is critical, in practical terms our emotions can remain obdurate. How can we overcome these powerful emotional forces within us? For always, anger and hatred damage us; sometimes, much more than they damage their object. It is often said, that hatred is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. The first step to forgiveness, as with all things, is that we must try. Forgiveness If we cannot bear to forgive someone in our hearts, the secret is the power of prayer. We *can* force ourselves to pray for the person we hate — even if we must start by only saying the words, without truly meaning them. God loves all his people, and we can pray that the object of our anger is God’s beautiful child, someone God loves as much as us, someone God hopes to redeem. If our enemy has taken money from us, we can pray that God will grant him riches — even if we’re just saying the words, “going through the motions.” If she has stolen our husband, we can pray that God give her sexual satisfaction and a happy home life; if he is arrogant, we can pray that God give him honor and glory among men. It will hurt even to pray such a thing in silence, but it will begin to erode our own feeling of injury. We can then pray that we forgive the person and try to say, in our prayers, all the things that might underlie the person’s wrongdoing. We say all the things that caused the person to act as he did. Behind the terrible thing that he or she did to us, there is always pain, and loneliness, and insecurity, and fear. Anyone who can manage to do this, day after day, night after night, will find the Holy Spirit working a powerful miracle in their heart. It is guaranteed. Seeking to forgive brings the very power of God into a person’s life. And, amazingly, it does one no actual harm. People do not toss and turn at night nursing forgiven wrongs!