Forgive or Go to Hell

Matthew 6:1-151″Be careful not to do your ‘acts ofrighteousness’ before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. 2″So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth; they have received their reward in full.3But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,4so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. 5″And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth;t hey have received their reward in full.6Bu twhen you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. nd when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.8Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.9″This, then, is how you should pray:9″‘Our Father in heaven,9hallowedbe your name,10you rkingdom come,10yourwill be done10onearth as it is in heaven. 11Giveus today our daily bread. 12Forgiveus our debts, 12aswe also have forgiven our debtors.13Andlead us not into temptation, 13but deliver us from the evil one.”14For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.15But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” {{more}} When I was in the US Air Force I heard a story which I am relating here: Her name was 66730, or at least that was the name she went by. Her father had died in a German Concentration camp as did her sister. Her freedom, her dignity, her humanity had been stripped away by those who imprisoned her and yet she survived. They had robbed her of everything she ever possessed, but they could not rob her of the one who possessed her, Jesus. She saw every day in Ravensbruck as a chance to ministerto someone needier then herself, and then one day she was released. As suddenlyas she had become a prisoner she was freed, and her solitary aim was to minister to others. When the war was over she began traveling and speaking sharing her Savior and the vision that He had given her. And then one day, something happened, something that shook her to the very center of her being, why do not you let me read you her account of what happened, oh you probablywould not know her as 66730, and you would be more apt to know her as Corrieten Boom.She goes on to say, “It was at a church service in Munich that I saw him, the former S.S. man who had stood guard at the shower room door in the processing center at Ravensbruck. He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time. And suddenly it was all there, the roomful of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, Betsy’s pain blanched face. He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing. “How grateful I am for your message Fraulein,” he said. “To think, as you say, He has washed my sins away!” His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often to the people in Bloemendall the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side. Even as the angry vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man: was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me toforgive him.I tried to smile; I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent  prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness.As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while in to my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me.And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on ourg oodness that this worlds healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to loveo ur enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.”One of the scariest parts of the Lord’s Prayer is Matthew 6:12 & 14 &15 Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 14 For ifyou forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15 But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. If you have ever prayed this have you ever stopped to listent o what you are saying? You are asking God to forgive you in exactly the same way that you forgive people who have done you wrong, no more no less. Many people have the same concept of God as the German poet Heinrich Heine. Heine was on his death bed and hispriest told him that God could forgive his sins to which the poet responded”Of course God will forgive me; that’s His job.” Well according to this particular portion of scripture, he does not have to. This one concept was so important that Christ not only mentioned it in the Lord’s prayer he went back to comment on it. He literally uses three times more words to define what he said then he used to say it. When you get to this part in the Lord’s Prayer you are in effect saying, “Lord if there is someone whom I have not forgiven then do not forgive me.”Ouch! Forgiveness is tough. There is no doubt about it and you may have been hurt by someone in ways that I cannot comprehend. Too often today we are shown that the only way to bring about closure in these instances is to seek revenge, retaliation. But that does not bring about closure. You see the news about some of the people who were allegedly abused in the Shelburne boy’s school. They have taken their cash and spent it on dope and then blamed the government for giving them what they wanted.”A Chinese proverb says “Before starting down the road to revenge dig two graves” You do not just forgive for the other person you need to forgive for yourself. Amen! For your health we are all familiar with the physical aspects of stress and anger. Ulcers are simply one indication that the body is not coping well with. For your head. When you are consumed by the need and desire for revenge it’s difficult to think of other things. You come to the place that not only do you have a one track mind, but the train’s been derailed as well. For your soul Jesus is very clear on this point, if you do not forgive, you will not be forgiven and the price for not being forgiven is to lose your soul.I scar really easy, I can just give myself a scratch and I will have the reminder of it for quite some time. That is true of most people in the physical sense and in the emotional sense. The truth is this, when we are hurt we carry scars some of them big and some of them small, but we carry scars. The summer I was thirteen I had my first opportunity to try Scuba diving. I was thoroughly enjoying myself using my friend Stevie’s equipment and had just submerged again when it happened. Another cousin of mine was there with his speed boat and when he started the engine in gear and it ran over me just as I was kicking down with my fins. What I managed to do was to kick my left foot into a propeller driven by a 50 hp mercury outboard. That is right ouch. That propeller cut through skin, tissue and muscle clear through to the bone before my foot kicked back away from it. Stuart was devastated; they rushed me up to the hospital emergency room where a doctor sutured my instep back together. This kind of slowed me down for the rest of the summer. Hurt with every step I took, there was no getting around it for quite a while it was a painful memory, not made inthe least bit less painful because it was an accident. That was almost a quarter of a century ago, I still have the scar, it’s faded but it’s still there. And every morning when I put my socks on I see it, and there are times I can almost put myself back there, can almost feel the warmth of the air, the cold of the water and feel the bite of the propeller. But it does not hurt anymore, it is healed, completely, but the scar is still there. Healing brought healing but it did not erase the scar. When we are hurt by someone whether itwas intentional or accidental it cuts, and if we allow forgiveness to heal it then we might have a scar and that scar might cause us to remember the hurt but it don’t hurt anymore. We need to realize the healing of forgiveness doesn’t necessary erase the scars. You might bear the scars of sexual abuse, or physical abuse, maybe you have the scars of betrayal in your marriage or of adivorce. Those scars may never go away, they may always be there, but that does not mean that healing has not taken place.About seventeen years ago I dropped a coffee carafe, now I’m sure that you are wondering why in the world would Henry have a coffee carafe right? When the carafe slipped out of my hands I reached to grab it and as luck would have it I caught it, just as it broke. The result was a neat little slice on the edge of my pinkie finger. It wasn’t big, it wasn’t all that deep, didn’t even hurt that much, but it didn’t heal. Oh it scabbed over and started to heal but then it would fester and hurt and get infected all over again. One day I finally got fed up with it and decided to investigate for myself, still being of an age where my brain had not fully engaged I got myself an ice cube and a razorblade, held the ice cube over the half healed cut until it got numb and then I slit it open with the blade, neat huh. What was really neat was that as a result of my superior surgical skills I discovered a little tiny pearl, well it looked like a pearl, it was really a little sliver of the coffee pot that my body had covered to make it less of an irritant but it was keeping the cut from healing, once I had taken it out the cut healed right up. Is the spirit of unforgiveness keeping some of your hurts from healing? If you have not forgiven there can be no healing. No healing for you, or for the relationship between you and the person who hurt you, or worse yet there will be no healing in your relationship with God. Physical hurts take time to heal, so do emotional hurts.Oh by the way one of the reasons why I scar so much is that I tend to pick at my hurts, that will increase spiritual scarring as well.You will remember perhaps the Guptill principle of spiritual growth that says that everyone grows in their spiritual life to their own personal point of disobedience. Well the addendum is; you will never grow in your spiritual walk beyond your unforgiveness. Amen!Matthew 6:13 says, “And lead us not into temptation, too often when we think of the word temptation we think sin. And if that is reality then we are confronted with one of two problems. The first being how can we come to grips with a God who would lead us into sin? You say do not be silly preacher; God would not lead you into sin. Then that leaves the second problem if temptation is sin and God wouldn’t lead us into sin why for would Jesus put this request in th eprayer.The easiest way to clear this up is to find a biblical definition of temptation. At the very beginning of Christ’s ministry an incident happened I will let Matthew tell you about it, Matthew 4:1, “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil.” You see what happened here. Jesus was tempted by the Devil, but it was the Spirit that led him to that point. In 1st Corinthians 10:13 God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. So now you have God allowing temptation. Now the problem here is that the word temptation is being misused. Somewhere along the line you have given the word temptation an evil twist, you have taken temptation to the next step and made it sin. What it actually means is to be tested, to be proved, to be strengthened. That’s why the very best steel is called tempered steel. It is the same root word. And so what Jesus is teaching us to pray is this, “Do not let me be tested by more than I can endure.” Amen!But deliver us from the evil one. Not deliver us from evil, but deliver us from the evil one. Evil is not an impersonal force which surrounds the world, instead it emanates from one person. And that person is Satan. His very name means the advisory, and in the Greek that is the one who pleads a case against someone. He is in name and fact the accuser. Satan is real; he is not a joke, he is not some dude in long red underwear with a pitchfork and horns, he isr eal. Satan is personal and his weapon is temptation. And like all enemies he won’t attack until he finds a nitch in your armor.Where will temptation come from? Sometimes it comes from outside of us, from our friends and peers. Usually when we talk about peer pressure we are talking about teens, and during those formidable years we are under intense pressure to conform, to be like the others. And we can pick up all kinds of nasty habits during those years, just so we won’t be different. But do not kid yourself, adults are every bit at risk of peer pressure as teens are. Fudging a bit on a business deal, not taking a stand on a particular issue, or not defending the church or fellow Christians when they are being attacked. Amen!Sometimes temptations come from those who love us the most. Having been to military I have met guys who felt very strongly called to the military but Mom and Dad,who were Christians were putting the pressure on for them to do something different more secure with better pay. The same goes for some who God had called to overseas missions. It’s a scary game to play, so your kid gets asecure job but he’s out of God’s will, I would not want to be responsible forthat one.Temptations do not have to come from outside forces, sometimes they come from within us.Every man and every woman has a weak spot. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Every man woman and child has this flaw. And mine and yours are different. Satan won’t attack me at your weak spot or you at my weak spot. You gotta find your weak spot and guard it.But temptations can also come at our strongest point. Many a fortress has fallen where there was no defense. 200 years ago most of Canada was known as New France. And the military center was in Quebec City, and it was virtually impregnable. It sat on cliffs overlooking the St. Lawrence River and was surrounded on three sides by unscaleable cliffs and so only one approach had to be defended. But James Wolfe and his troops scaled the unscaleable cliffs and defeated the French forces on the Plains of Abraham, and that is why today the Francophone’s are the minority and the Anglos are the majority.Do not ever look at a fallen brother or sister and say “That is one thing I would never do.” Can you honestly pray those two things; can you ask God to forgive you the same way that you have forgiven others? Or would that be a dangerous thing to do? And do you really want God to keep you from temptation or is your prayer more like Augustine’s was early in his life when he prayed “Make me good but not yet” Maybe you are not even in the place where your prayers can be answered, because you have never actually established a relationship with God. If that is the case He is only a prayer away. I would encourage you to take a good look at your spiritual condition. If you need to start that relationship with God it is as easy as praying Lord I am sorry for all I have done to displease you. Please forgive me and make me a new creation.It is that easy, and if you do that this week I would love to know about it. Now you know why you must either forgive or you will wind up in hell. Amen!