Day 18: Tearing Up Our I.O.U.’s

In connection with this principle of forgiving others that God may forgive us, I just want to relate some incidents briefly that I’ve experienced over the years in counseling with people. One of the commonest situations in which a person needs to forgive is the wife who’s been jilted or mistreated or abandoned by her husband. And, unfortunately, over the years, I’ve had to speak to many such ladies. Of course, it’s perfectly possible that it might be a husband who’s been abandoned by his wife. But let’s just take the picture of the wife who’s been mistreated and ultimately abandoned by her husband. So, you sit there and you say, “Well, you need to forgive him.” One of the answers I often get is, “I don’t feel I can. I just don’t feel I can.” My answer to that is always simple. “You don’t have to feel it. All you have to do is will it. Your feelings are not decisive, your will is.” You make the decision, you say it out loud and then you hold on to that decision. Every time you’re tempted to be resentful, you just say to yourself, “I have forgiven him.” That’s settled.

Then I think of another woman, I was talking to her about forgiving her husband who’d run off with another woman and left her with the children and I said, “You need to forgive him.” And she said, “Well, he’s ruined fifteen years of my life.” And I said, “Well, do you want him to ruin the rest of your life? Because if you do, just go on resenting him.”

You see, you’ve got to bear this in mind: it’s not so much the one who is resented that suffers, it’s the one who resents. The woman who resents her unfaithful husband suffers much more from that than he does. The only solution is: make up your mind to forgive him.

And then I think of a situation in which I was preaching on this principle of forgiving others and I used that illustration of the I.O.U. Well, I’d been explaining this very carefully and rather vividly and at the end of my message a very smart looking young woman, probably in her early thirties, walked right up to me, her face was radiant, she looked me right in the face and she said this: “Mr. Prince, I just want to tell you that while you were preaching I got rid of $30,000.00 worth of I.O.U.’s.” And she turned around and marched out. I didn’t have to counsel her, I didn’t have to say a word to her, she had got the message, she had acted on it, and she was the happiest person in that congregation that day.

So, let’s apply the lesson. Somebody has hurt you. Somebody’s wronged you. You hardly ever can go through life without that happening sometime. You need to bear in mind you may have hurt or wronged somebody else, too. So, you have this I.O.U. What are you going to do with it? Hold on to it?

Jesus gave a parable about an unforgiving servant in which the proportions are something like this: The servant was owed $17.00, he owed $6 million to his master. But he wouldn’t forgive the $17.00, so he didn’t get forgiven the $6 million. So that’s the same proportion with you. Somebody owes you $17.00. Okay, you can hold on, but God’s going to hold on to His $6 million of I.O.U.’s up in heaven. What are you going to do about it? My advice is: Make the decision and forgive.