religiousaffections

The Holy Spirit is taking his time during this season, taking his time rooting out sin in my heart.  In ways more tangible, emotional, and physical than he has in a long time - the Lord is bringing me low before his throne where I belong and where I need to be.  

Matthew 5:7 says, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.”  Not particularly earth shattering at first glance right?  Jesus expounds on this verse later in Matthew 18:21-35 as he tells the story of the unforgiving servant.  The long and short of it is that a king wished to settle his accounts with his servants.  One servant owed him ten thousand talents (roughly $6 billion in today’s terms) and in his mercy the king wiped clean the debt.  The servant left the king’s presence and quickly found a fellow worker who owed him $100.  He put his hand around the man’s throat and demanded payment.  And when the man couldn’t pay, he threw him in jail.

Oh how much of myself I see in the unforgiving servant.  A greater King has settled the debt I owed - a debt more unimaginable than all the world’s money put together.  Yet I go about each day so easily annoyed and brought to anger by other people’s offenses.  Who has loved his enemies better than our God? What is mercy?  In a way, it has to do with not giving someone what he/she deserves.  

Going forward my prayer is Paul’s words in Colossians 3:12-13, “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you must also forgive.”