A New Formula

“For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” Matthew 6:14-15

Forgiveness is not about keeping score; it’s about losing count. Think about it. If you had to forgive somebody 490 times in a day, that’s an offense every two minutes. 

Microsoft came out with a program many years ago called Excel that changed the accounting world. It made keeping up with numbers more simple. Everything can be easily added or subtracted quickly in neat little columns. Sometimes, we have an Excel doc in our mind that is keeping tabs on what people have done to us. Maybe your spouse has said something rude to you, so you jot it down in their column. Possibly, a friend doesn’t invite you to their party, so you put that into their column, and you continually keep track of wrongs. You can become very administrative in your unforgiveness. 

The thing about Excel, though, is that if you put in the wrong equation, it will not calculate your total. It will keep kicking it back and telling you to go back and fix something because the wrong equation is messing up your whole document. God may be telling you that your calculation of what people owe you is off. His equation is seventy times seven. If you are not dealing with these columns of offense in God’s way, you will be affected negatively both spiritually and physically. 

You have to decide to abandon your sinful, numerical approach of counting offenses. As representatives of Christ, that is not what we are called to do. Forgiveness does not mean that everyone belongs in your life, but it does mean that you have to forgive everyone from your heart. You may have heard of the saying “forgive and forget,” but forgiveness is not praying for amnesia or denying that it ever happened. Acknowledge that you have been hurt deeply, but stop sitting around waiting for an apology. 

Jesus said, “If you refuse to forgive others when they sin against you, your Father will not forgive your sins.” The right kind of math means you think about every time the Father has forgiven you on a daily basis and then take that same formula and apply it to the person who has wronged you. You sinned, and God forgave you. Use that formula with someone else. Jesus always set the bar higher than people expected. He knew what radical love could accomplish if we let it lead our lives.

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