Thursday - Stand Your Hurt Next to the Cross

Matthew 18:32-33 – "Then his lord... said unto him, O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me: Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee?"

Notice what the king doesn't say. He doesn't say the hundred pence didn't matter. He doesn't say the servant had no right to be upset. He simply asks him to set his hurt next to the debt he had already been forgiven.

Do the math for a second. Ten thousand talents is about sixty million days of labor. A hundred pence is about a hundred days. The debt this servant had just walked away from was roughly six hundred thousand times greater than the one he refused to release. It's like being pardoned from a life sentence and then suing your roommate over a broken coffee mug.

This is the turn every one of us needs to make. Your pain doesn't stop being real when you set it next to the cross – it becomes small. Not because it didn't matter, but because what Christ carried was so much larger. Their words get smaller because the cross is bigger. Their betrayal gets smaller because the cross is bigger. The weight you've been carrying gets smaller because the cross is bigger.

Try it today with whatever you named yesterday. Put it, honestly, next to what you've already been forgiven. Not to dismiss it, just to see it in proportion.