Continuation of Part One.
The fifth word, slander, means to make false accusations against someone or to attack them through vague insinuations. We can slander with our words, with a lifted eyebrow, with an unfinished sentence, or by quoting others but taking their words and twist
who came to create a race of forgiving men and women. If you want to know what love is like, go to Golgotha and fix your eyes on the man hanging from the center cross. Study what he did, and you will know true love.
Then go and do for others what God has done for you.
But you say, “I can’t do that. You don’t know what they did to me.” What if God treated you as you treat others? What if God were as unkind and unmerciful as you are? What if he kept a record of your sins? You’d never get within a million miles of heaven.
“I’m going to trash him like he trashed me.” What if God said that about you?
Whatever God tells you to do, do it. Stop making the Holy Spirit weep because of your unkind words and your inner ugliness. Cry out to God for his help. Pray for a fresh vision of Jesus dying for you.
You can forgive because you have been forgiven. This is the Word of the Lord.
Father, some of us desperately need this message right now. We’re all going to need it soon because we live in a broken world.
Deliver us from anger.
Baptize our lips.
Cleanse us from resentment.
Free us from malice.
May the river of grace wash away every trace of bitterness. Lord Jesus, make us agents of forgiveness and missionaries of your grace.
Where there is hatred, let us sow love.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Do have a blessed week. Shalom
ing them into something sinister.
Slander was one of the sins of those who crucified Jesus. They mocked him and lied about him and falsely accused him. When you slander someone, you join with those who crucified our Lord.
Malice, the final word, describes an underlying attitude of ill will. We could call it congealed hatred. A malicious person can’t get along with anyone. What starts in the heart ends up on the lips. We think, we feel, and then we speak. What starts as a grievance becomes an outburst of wrath that hardens into anger that leads to clamor and slander. Malice marks such a person through and through. Stop it early and you won’t have to stop it later. That’s why Proverbs 4:23 reminds us to “guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.”
The Bible tells us to get rid of all these wrong attitudes:
No root of bitterness.
No symptoms of wrath.
No trace of anger.
No echo of clamor.
No slime of slander.
No dregs of malice.
When we harbor these things, the Holy Spirit weeps inside us.
The Cure
We must replace those rotten attitudes with something much better.
Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you (Ephesians 4:32).
Kindness speaks of gentleness in the face of provocation. It reaches out to the unworthy and withholds punishment even when it is deserved. It is “the oil that lubricates the machinery of life.” Compassion says, “I will care for you, and I will not shut you out.”
Forgiveness starts with God, comes down to us, and then goes out to other people. We forgive as God has forgiven us. We are to extend grace to others as God has extended grace to us. We, the undeserving, having been showered with God’s grace in Christ, give to other undeserving sinners (who have sinned against us) the same outpouring of grace.
From God to us to others.
Grace to us, grace to others.
We do for others what God has done for us.
He has removed our sins as far as the east is from the west.
He has put our sins behind his back.
He throws them into the depth of the ocean.
He remembers them no more.
He blots them out.
He cancels the debt we owe.
He declares us not guilty.
We have “the forgiveness of sins according to the riches of his grace” (Ephesians 1:7). He forgave us freely, instantly, totally. Can we not do the same for those who have hurt us so deeply?
The message is simple and clear: Go and do for others what Christ has done for you. This is the Big Promise for today. Forgiven people forgive people.
But it is not always easy.
Pastor Demitri
Richard Wurmbrand told a story which was published in the December 1998 issue of Voice of the Martyrs.
It was the story of a man named Demitri who was in prison in Romania. He was beaten with a hammer, paralyzing him, making him a quadriplegic. The other prisoners cared for him as best they could without access to running water or good facilities, but they were on work duties all day long. Demitri lay in his own filth, in pain and alone until the evening. Eventually he was freed from prison and returned home to his family.
One day someone knocked at his door. It was the Communist who had crippled him. He said, “Sir, don’t believe that I have come to ask forgiveness from you. For what I have done, there is no forgiveness, not on earth or in heaven. You are not the only one I have tortured like this. You cannot forgive me; nobody can forgive me. Not even God. My crime is much too great. I have come only to tell you that I am sorry about what I have done. From you I go to hang myself. That is all.” He turned to leave.
The paralyzed brother Demitri said to him, “Sir, in all these years I have not been so sorry as I am now, that I cannot move my arms. I would like to stretch them out to you and embrace you. For years I have prayed for you every day. I love you with all my heart. You are forgiven.”
At some point, our faith will be put to the test. We must then ask the question, “How much do we want to be like Jesus?” He was a forgiving man.
Hope this message blesses you.