Happy New Year. It is amazing to me that the year 2006 has already come and gone, but I am excited to see what's in store for 2007. This week there are many things that I could talk about regarding the New Year and all that it can represent-the resolutions that we make about the change we would like to see in our lives and the fact that we often see this day as a "wiping clean of the slate"; a way to erase all the ways that we messed up the year before; starting anew with a clean one that has endless possibilities. Though all of these resolutions and changes are encouraging to our outlook on this coming year, I would like to talk about something that I would guess is often overlooked on our resolution lists.

If you can make the change in your heart that I'll talk about this week, you will see and feel less heartache and stress this year. What is this change you ask? It is forgiveness. Forgiveness is a powerful thing. It is something that we can be grateful for as Christians because it is the gift that we have been given through the death and resurrection of Christ on our behalf. We are lost and condemned to an eternity of hell without forgiveness and yet we have been given this amazing gift freely. Often you will hear forgiveness referred to as grace.

There is a story that I would like to look at from scripture. In Matthew 18:23-35 Christ tells his disciples a story about a man who owed an exorbitant amount of money and the king cancelled all of his debt. The man then goes out and has a fellow servant thrown into jail for owing him a couple of bucks. The King hears about it and calls the servant into see him telling him "Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?" Then he is thrown in jail and tortured until he was able to pay back all that he owed.

The thing to realize in this story is that the servant will never be able to pay off his debt. The amount that Christ said that was owed was such a huge amount that it was not humanly possible to pay it back in a lifetime. To illustrate that, we have been forgiven so much more than we can possibly understand and yet all too often we are concerned with what others "owe" us that is incomparably smaller than all that we have been forgiven of.

The last line of this parable, where Christ explains its meaning, says it all: "This is how my heavenly father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart." Christ also makes this quite clear in the Lord's Prayer "...forgive us...as we forgive..." It goes on to say in Matthew 6:14-15, that if we forgive men then our Father will forgive us, but if we do not forgive men then the Father will not forgive us. This is pretty serious and strong language, but it is vital as Christians that we get a firm understanding of it. When we are wronged we need to remember that we have a God who is bigger than all of it and he will be the judge and he will bring justice. We have to remember that we have been forgiven of so much and that the people who have wronged us have equal share in that forgiveness from Christ. We don't have a monopoly on grace from God. He sent his son to die for all people.

Looking again at the Lord's prayer, think about people that you are struggling to forgive right now, and then think about God using the same measure of forgiveness for you as you have for them. Then decide if it is worth harboring that unforgiving attitude that often results in bitterness. It is here that I return to what I mentioned earlier about feeling less heartache and stress this year.

Unforgiveness is like a poison and unchecked over the course of years it will eat you up internally and you will find that you are miserable inside and you probably have forgotten how the whole thing started. There was a period in my life where I was unwilling to forgive someone and after about six or seven years I got to the point where I hated being in the same building as this person. I had nothing good to say about them to anyone and looked for every opportunity to let as many people know about how horrible of a person they were. It was draining and I hated that I let this person have that kind of control over me. The funny thing is that they did not even know that I was this upset.

It was like a cancer eating me up inside. Finally I gave it to God and said I can't do this anymore and ever since that time this relationship has gotten stronger and I no longer carry the burden and the heartache that I once did. Learning to forgive will change this year for you, I have no doubt of that, but ask yourself if there someone right now from last year that you need to forgive? Is there something that, if you don't take care of it now, will still carry through to 2007? Don't look at the New Year as a clean slate and one that you start a journey of forgiveness for people from this point on. Look to your past and make sure that you leave that baggage behind you, in the past. Realize that you are a child of God and that you have been called to a life of forgiveness and that you have been forgiven of far more than you could every repay.

Final Thought: This week I am taking a quote from Philip Yancy's book What is So Amazing About Grace where he is quoting Lewis Smedes. "The first and often the only person to be healed by forgiveness is the person who does the forgiveness. When we genuinely forgive, we set a prisoner free and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us."