Beyond the Surface Part II

Text: Matthew 6:5-15
Title: Beyond the Surface Part II
Lent, 2010 Feb. 28, Clarksville Grace

It was 5:30 a.m. When the alarm went off in the bedroom, the coffee pot was already awake in the kitchen, filling the house with an aroma that made getting up a little easier. She rolled out of bed, made a pass through the kitchen, went to her “prayer closet” and shut the door. It wasn’t really a closet, but it was the place she went every day to talk to God. In her case it was a favorite chair in living room. Her favorite time was early morning, before the house was filled with the sound of kids getting ready for school and before the demands of the day had a chance to start clawing for her attention. Most days she had a fresh cup of coffee in one hand and her journal and Bible in the other. Sometimes the conversation she had with God was deep. She shared her joys, her fears, her doubts with Him, said things to God that she didn’t or couldn’t share with anyone else. She found Him always willing and ready to listen. Sometimes she wrote her prayers, (Phineas Bresee said “Thoughts disentangle themselves when the pass through the lips and the fingertips”), some mornings she spoke out loud, and other times she prayed in silence. More times than she could count she felt His arms wrap around her even tighter than the blanket that awaited her in that chair of prayer every morning.
Some mornings there was more silence than speech and she simply enjoyed being in His presence. On other days it was more mundane. The discussion didn’t get beyond surface stuff, sounding more like a conversation with an acquaintance than a closest friend. There were also the days where the amount of time talking and the amount of time listening ended up pretty even. This was one of those days. Pray. Listen. Pray. Listen. She started off as she often did, having been taught through this very prayer (Lord’s Prayer) that acknowledging God’s holiness and giving Him the praise He deserves is a great way to begin. The first several minutes were a tapestry of praise and thanks, pausing to reflect, remember, rejoice. She had been walking with God for a long time and there was no shortage of reasons to be grateful. Having started her prayer with praise, she continued in the pattern of the Lords’ prayer. She prayed for His will to be done in some situations that were heavy on her heart. She prayed for God’s provision for the day that lay ahead of her. She was totally unprepared for what happened next. She recited the prayer for forgiveness and when she paused she heard something that startled her spirit and caused her to sit straight up. “No.” “No?” She heard the voice of God speak to her with a gentle firmness that was crystal clear. “That’s right, I said no. I’m not going to forgive you.” It rocked her world. She repeated the line “forgive us our sins…” and she heard it again, this time louder as it rang through the confused corners of her consciousness. “I said No.”

She had never experienced anything like it. “What do you mean no?! That’s what You do God, You forgive sins.” All of a sudden she couldn’t get the picture of another face out of her mind. The instant she saw it, a knot formed in her stomach and the tension tightened on her shoulders like a 32” belt on a 36” belly. The sight of that face in her mind’s eye brought it all back and in an instant she went from confusion to anger. For the first time she heard, really heard the words she was saying: “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” And God said to her, “No, I’m not going to forgive you, because you haven’t forgiven _______.” And in that early morning moment, it all came back.

She had every reason in the world to hold a grudge, and nurse it. Every right to be bitter, harbor resentment, to be lavish with vengeance and stingy with grace. All of a sudden a line in the prayer she had repeated a hundred times stopped her in her tracks. Maybe it was because this time it wasn’t prayed with a chorus of other voices in a corporate worship experience. It was happening in the quietness of the prayer closet, an intimate conversation where the Lover of her soul was speaking a Word she didn’t want to hear but needed to hear more than anything. This is not the kind of thing you can hear when everyone else is talking, or when life doesn’t slow down enough to listen, which is why so many people miss it. I think maybe that’s one of the reasons Jesus said it was important to have a place and a time like this - a closet that could be a prayer chair, a car, or anywhere else. God is capable of shouting louder than all the competing voices but He prefers not to have to. He doesn’t want to be one voice among many, He wants to be the One voice we most want to hear, the One voice that matters so much we make time to hear. On this surprising morning, His voice was saying no.

Nobody likes to hear “no.” Not when asking for a date, applying for a job, asking for a raise, or asking mom and dad if so and so can spend the night. And nobody likes to hear “no” from God, especially when we’re asking for forgiveness. It’s troubling to think He could ever say that for two reasons. One, because we all need forgiveness, and if “no” is even an option, we might be in trouble. And two, it’s a problem because every one of us has had good reason to refuse to forgive someone else.

I don’t know the stories of everyone here but I don’t have to know the details to know the truth. The truth is we all have people in our past, or maybe in our present, who are hard to forgive. In some cases its parents, in others it’s perverts. It is ex-spouses, or former friends who turned out to be someone totally different than we thought. It’s a sibling who showed during a time of grief that mom or dad’s estate was more valuable than their relationship with their brother or sister. It is a boss who was the source of an injustice or a neighbor who took us to court. It’s a person in a position of power who was actually a predator, or the one we thought was so soft-spoken who turned out to have a tongue like a sword. They are the people who are hard to forgive. They have lied, cheated, been unfaithful. They have misused and abused, beaten, belittled, and left wounds in our spirits that are open and bleeding long after the bruises on our bodies have healed. While the scars may say the hurt is long past, the truth is that beneath the surface there lies an open wound that still feels as fresh today as the day we got it, no matter how long ago that was. We’ve heard the phrase “time heals all wounds” but we know better. The truth is it takes more than time, because the only thing time does for some people is make them more bitter, making the resentment stronger the longer it sits, like the afternoon coffee in the pot at midnight. This story has a thousand different details but in the end the plot is exactly the same. Their ages, faces, and facts are as different as night is from day but the one thing that’s true of them all, is that they are hard, and some would say impossible, to forgive. And we all know them.

To make matters worse, it seems God has this thing about refusing to allow our relationship with Him to be considered apart from of our relationships with each other. He won’t offer us forgiveness as long as we’re withholding it from someone else. I don’t particularly like it or want it to be that way, but that’s what Jesus says in the part of the Lord’s prayer that can be forgotten when we pray it all together but has a way of being whispered back to us when we pray it alone. It’s right here in v 14-15. “For if you forgive others 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.” It’s like the small print at the bottom of the page, only it’s not small print, and it’s not at the bottom of the page. It’s right there alongside these other words of Jesus, right after the model prayer and before He moves on to talk about fasting.
I think that’s why some people stay away from prayer closets. It’s a lot easier to stay out of there because you never know what God might say when He has the time and space to speak without having to yell to get our attention. It’s in the quiet places of intimate conversation where the stuff below the surface tends to be raised. It’s where God sometimes says stuff like “No, I’m not going to forgive you till you deal with what you have going on with this other person.” He says things like, “My intent, my desire for you is that all of your relationships line up with the relationship you have with Me. Forgive them. Then come back and talk to me.”
It was the beyond-the-surface conversation she wanted to avoid but needed to have. She took a sip of her coffee, tried to clear the cobwebs, and knew that now she had a choice. Let it go or hold on to it. Keep hold of the refusal to forgive or enjoy the forgiveness she wanted God to give her. She also knew that it was a choice because she couldn’t have both. She couldn’t keep her grudge and get forgiveness too. And according to what Jesus says here, neither can we. We can’t have God’s gracious forgiveness that we don’t deserve, if we refuse to give it to those who don’t deserve it from us.
Something told her that if the early morning intimate conversations she had enjoyed with God were going to continue to be enjoyable, this forgiveness thing had to happen. So she…. Well, it doesn’t matter what she did that morning, as much as it matters what we do this morning. Anyone you need to forgive? Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.

Communion - God’s table is a great place for forgiveness to be received. It’s also a great place for forgiveness to be offered. So as we come this morning, if someone needs to be forgiven, or you need to ask forgiveness of someone else, do it. Go to them. Call them. Text them. Do it now.

Benediction: Colossians 3:12-14