QTVOTD: Be as merciful as God…

“Be merciful (responsive, compassionate, tender) just as your [heavenly] Father is merciful.” Luke 6:36 ->me: Today my reading was in Matthew 18:21-27 where Jesus is telling Peter the parable of the master who canceled the huge debt owed by his servant. The rest of the story is tomorrow but in this passage, the unforgettable commentary stood out for Luke 6:36. Peter starts out by asking Jesus how many times he should forgive his brother who has sinned against him? “Seven times?” he asks? Then Jesus says, “No, not seven times, but seventy seven times.” and then progresses to tell the parable. Here are the interesting tidbits: 1) Jesus starts the parable by saying “The kingdom in heaven is like a king…”. The moral of Jesus’ parables is to give a glimpse into the economy of justice in the Kingdom of God. 2) The servant owed the King 10,000 Talents. A talent is the highest denomination in Greek currency, and 10,000 was highest Greek numeral, so the point wasn’t that the servant owed the King something, it was that he owed him an ungodly amount of money. 3) The price of our sin, before confessed and repented, can have a profound impact on our family. To reclaim the debt, the king was ready to take the servants wife and children. 4) The king had mercy for the servant with a repentant heart. The servant fell to his knees asking for patience and promised to payback the amount owed. The King was not only merciful but in his wisdom he could see that the servant could never pay him back the amount owed. I am no different – God, through His Son, canceled my debt and placed it upon Jesus. That debt was so overwhelming that there would have been nothing I could have ever done to pay it back. Jesus call on me to be merciful just as my Heavenly Father is merciful. The context here is life changing.

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