March 13: 70 x 7
♫ Music:
Day 9 - Thursday, March 13
Title: 70 x 7
Scripture: Matthew 18:21–35 (NKJV)
Then Peter came to Him and said, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven. Therefore the kingdom of heaven is like a certain king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. And when he had begun to settle accounts, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents. But as he was not able to pay, his master commanded that he be sold, with his wife and children and all that he had, and that payment be made. The servant therefore fell down before him, saying, ‘Master, have patience with me, and I will pay you all.’ Then the master of that servant was moved with compassion, released him, and forgave him the debt. But that servant went out and found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii; and he laid hands on him and took him by the throat, saying, ‘Pay me what you owe!’ So his fellow servant fell down at his feet and begged him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you all.’ And he would not, but went and threw him into prison till he should pay the debt. So when his fellow servants saw what had been done, they were very grieved, and came and told their master all that had been done. Then his master, after he had called him, said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, just as I had pity on you?’ And his master was angry, and delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him. So My heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses.”
Poetry & Poet:
“Forgiveness”
by Debra Allbery
Where you are the temperature plummets
at night, and you sleep in the open
and just gravity holds you. The dry riverbeds
are both penance and reward. I know you’ve walked
miles now, and you’ve scattered the last of me
into the pines and box canyons and dust,
into whatever the wind carries and loses,
into a country whose language I don’t speak.
So the thoughts you send me now become gestures,
hands pocketed and unpocketed before you move on,
and in my dreams you take on a terrible solidity.
You wear that guilt-laced anger I’ve seen men mask—
like an old lover who whispered through his embrace,
Omit me from what you have written. You I omit,
the way an artist draws with an eraser,
absence taking tangible shape from the darkness.
Whether each of us has exiled within ourselves a memory
we can trust to find its way, or one crippled with lies,
we’re learning that the fugitive past can cover
its tracks, but not erase them; that out of love
and grief, it takes the shape of our shadows,
crouches by trash cans in the mind’s back alleys,
surviving on what we refuse. Look above it, instead,
and say that in time the unreconciled settles into place
like a renegade star in some guiding constellation,
and that our altered courses remain the correct ones.
That’s what I tell myself in these northern woods.
I call your abandonment grace and believe in it
even more than you. That I might finally move
through this meanwhile and find a place to live.
70 x 7
For the past twenty-nine years, my wife and I have spoken at FamilyLife marriage conferences. While the conference covers many topics like a theology of marriage, threats to marital oneness, effective communication, reality of spiritual battle, and cultivating sexual intimacy, there is one topic that many—including us as speakers—find the most challenging: forgiveness.
What makes this topic so difficult is an answer given by Jesus concerning the scope of forgiveness. Peter asks Jesus how many times we should forgive? He frames his question by offering an answer many Jews of his day would have thought unreasonable. Religious leaders taught that a sin against you might be forgiven three times, but a fourth was not required. Peter offers “up to seven” as an answer to his own question. Jesus shocks listeners by rejecting Peter’s generous number and states, “not seven, but seventy-seven times” (Mt. 18:21-22). To be clear, Jesus isn’t suggesting a numerical limit, but rather, no limit.
Jesus’s radical approach to forgiveness is not only for married couples, but for all Christ followers! Yet, what does Jesus mean by forgiveness? And, how do we accomplish it when we are deeply hurt? For an answer, we’ll have to consult both specific (the Scriptures) and general (clues given by Christian thinkers) revelation.
Defining Forgiveness
While there are many detailed definitions of forgiveness, I’ll offer a thin slice of what it means to forgive. We forgive another when we let go of the anger, resentment, blame and other toxic feelings we have toward the offender. Of course, forgiveness should entail both parties coming together to clear the air, talk about grievances and reach a mutual understanding of what needs to be forgiven and what constitutes forgiveness. However, a key part of forgiveness is what happens in the spirit of the offended after the transgression happens. Note that this definition of forgiveness does not necessarily mean we return to fellowship with the person who hurt us. There is a difference between forgiveness and reconciliation. We can forgive a person, but equally choose to remove ourselves from a toxic relationship. The former is a command, the latter discernment.
Stages of Forgiving
Lewis Smedes in his book, The Art of Forgiving, states that all individuals intent on forgiving must move through three internal stages. First, to forgive you must rediscover the humanity of the person who hurt you. The person who hurt us must move from being a monster to a “person who shares our faulty humanity, bruised like us, faulty like us, still thoroughly blamable for what he did to us. Yet, human like us.” Second, you must surrender your right to get even. Smedes vividly compares the fantasy of getting even with the person who wronged you to an intravenous drip stuck into your veins pushing spiritual poison into your system. Third, you revise your feelings toward the person who hurt you. The surest way to know that you have forgiven a person is to pray for them and their relationship with God.
Benefits of Forgiveness and Dangers of Not Forgiving
Why would Jesus be so firm in not putting a limit on forgiveness? Perhaps, he understands how our choice to forgive, or hang onto bitterness, will deeply impact our own flourishing.
Everett Worthington, director of the Campaign for Forgiveness Research, argues that negative emotions associated with unresolved conflict and an unforgiving attitude compromise our immune system. Worthington and his research team have sought to help among others, mothers in Northern Ireland who have lost children to religious violence. His studies show that women who forgive these perpetrators of injustice report a reduction in symptoms of stress including severe headaches, backaches, and the release of negative emotions. Conversely, our refusal to forgive comes at great mental, physical, and spiritual cost. Could it be the physical aches and pains we experience on a regular basis are residue of our refusal to forgive?
Christian thinker and author, Henri Nouwen, believed forgiveness opens a door to not only loving others, but God. “Forgiveness stands in the center of God’s love for us and also in the center of our love for each other. Loving one another means forgiving one another over and over again.”
Prayer:
Lord, this day let us think deeply about how you’ve forgiven us of all our sins—past, present, and future. Let us apply the Scripture’s command to “forgive one another just as God in Christ” forgave us (Eph. 4:32). We confess forgiving people who have hurt us is hard—at times, seemingly impossible—but you ask us to do so for our own good.
Amen
Dr. Tim Muehlhoff
Professor of Communication
Co-director of the Winsome Conviction Project
Biola University
For more information about the artwork, music, and poetry selected for this day, we have provided resources under the “About” tab located next to the “Devotional” tab.
About the Art:
Seventy Times Seven
Susan Savage
2007
18 x 24 in.
Oil on canvas
Private collection
“My life has been like a silver vessel, valuable and useful, but prone to tarnish. Yet in the refiner’s hands, I stand redeemed. Because he inhabits my soul, He is always with me, and making me new.”
–– Susan Savage
By elevating a simple, silver vessel to a place of contemplation, artist Susan Savage portrays something deeper and more spiritually significant in her work. As a symbol for the sacred, the simple elegance and refined presence of this silver vessel brings the viewer face-to-face with metaphors for biblical truths. Savage says that “it is my intent that my images reproduce the look of the visible world, but simultaneously offer something beyond mere physical appearances. The bowl emerges as a vehicle for a continuing story of meditation, mystery, truth, and reverent beauty. By taking the commonplace and lifting it up to a state of contemplation, the vessel exists to glorify, and it exists to signify.” Savage continues, “As my faith informs my vision, it becomes the reason for my work to exist. Consequently, I see my images as devotions, as a way to draw the viewer more deeply into contemplative meditation as it taps into one’s spiritual realm in some way. I like to think that my images are reminders of what we already know, but because the familiar is now somehow unfamiliar we pause as we are brought into a realm of transcendence, into a realm of revelation, even if words do not come easily.”
https://www.susandsavage.com/artist-statement
About the Artist:
Susan Savage is an American artist who received her B.A. and M.F.A. in art from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has had a long and rich career in secondary and higher education as a professor of art at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. Savage’s metaphorical paintings of objects as vehicles for devotional contemplation and dialogue have connected her personal and professional life on many levels. Her paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums both locally and nationally, and her work has been the focus of several featured articles and publications over the years.
Susandsavage.com
Audio: “Forgive” spoken word sermon excerpt by Billy Graham
They first took off his clothes, then they took long leather thongs with steel pellets or lead pellets on the end, and beat him across the back until he could hardly stand up. Then they put a crown of thorns on his brow and his face was bleeding, and they laughed at him and they spit on him and they mocked him. And with one snap of his finger seventy-two thousand angels had already drawn their swords ready to come to his rescue and wipe this planet out of existence in the universe. And Jesus said no, to this end he was born.
He wasn't just another revolutionary. He wasn't just another hippie. He was not just another great man. He was God in the flesh. And oh the ethics that he taught. Never a man spake like that man. When you get hit on one side, he says turn the other cheek. He never said what to do after that. But he did say forgive seventy times seven, count that out. Jesus taught that we're to forgive. He taught a revolution in the way we're to live. He taught us that it wasn't just our outward actions that God judges but it's the inward thoughts. And he dragged and lifted and hauled that cross. He didn't squirm, he didn't yell, he didn't scream. He just took it and said “Lord forgive them, they don't know what they're doing.” When he died on that cross. They nailed him. They put the nails in his hands. And you know what he said, “Forgive them, they know not what they do. Forgive them.” Could you forgive somebody that's putting nails in your hands and you know you didn't deserve?
Then look at the death he died. Did ever a man die like Jesus? The lightning flashed and the thunder roared, and the earth began to shake. And even the soldiers confessed that this must be the son of God. Anyone that can see Jesus on that cross and not be touched has a heart of stone.
And then on the cross he said “My God why hast Thou forsaken me?” And then he dropped his head and said it's finished. What did he mean? He meant your plan of salvation was finished. God can now forgive you of all your sins because Jesus had finished God's plan for your salvation. Because you see God knows every one of you by name. He has the hairs of your head numbered.
Speaker:
William Franklin Graham Jr. (1918–2018) was an American evangelist, ordained Southern Baptist minister, and civil rights advocate, whose broadcasts and world tours featuring live sermons became well known in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Throughout his career, spanning over six decades, Graham rose to prominence as an evangelical Christian figure in the United States and internationally. According to a biographer, Graham was considered "among the most influential Christian leaders" of the twentieth century. Beginning in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Graham became known for filling stadiums and other massive venues around the world where he preached sermons which were often broadcast via radio and television. During his six decades on television, Graham hosted his annual "crusades,” evangelistic live-campaigns, from 1947 until his retirement in 2005. He also hosted the radio show Hour of Decision from 1950 to 1954.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Graham
https://billygraham.org/
About the Poetry and Poet:
Debra Allbery (b. 1957) is an American poet. She graduated from the College of Wooster, the University of Virginia, and the University of Iowa; taught at Dickinson College, Randolph College, and the University of Michigan; and is the director of the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where she's been on the poetry faculty since 1983. Her work has appeared in Crazy Horse, The Missouri Review, Ironwood, Iowa Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review, and The Yale Review. Allbery is the author of the collections Fimbul-Winter (2011), winner of the Grub Street National Book Prize in Poetry, and Walking Distance (1991). She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Hawthornden Foundation.
https://poets.org/poet/debra-allbery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debra_Allbery
About the Devotion Writer:
Dr. Tim Muehlhoff
Professor of Communication
Co-director of the Winsome Conviction Project
Biola University
Tim Muehlhoff is a professor of communication at Biola University and co-director of the Winsome Conviction Project, designed to reintroduce civility into our private and public disagreements. Tim is also an author whose latest book is End the Stalemate: Moving from Cancel Culture to Meaningful Conversations (Tyndale House).