Matthew Study 6:14

"... if you do not forgive... neither will your Father forgive you..."

An old man eased down the rickety stairs to the floor of his stone basement.  Above him were numerous mobiles, each perfectly balanced and hanging delicately from the ceiling with thin silver cords.  Once arriving at the workbench he opened the wooden cabinet and, running boney fingers across the gamete of color-filled bottles, found the perfect one for this particular occasion. 


"Ah, here you are..." He carefully removed the bottle from the cabinet, made his way to the center of the room where an ancient stone Well stood and tipped the bottle upside-down, emptying its contents into the Well, where it poured into the blackness of its depths forever. 


After a moment of satisfaction he returned the bottle to its shelf and began searching for the next next ingredient.  "Aha - here you are!"  He excitedly took the new bottle in his fingers and made his way over it over to a Well in the middle of the room. Yet, as he tipped this new bottle over the Well, nothing poured out. "That's odd." He tipped it again, even tapped it on its side a few times. Still nothing.  Why couldn't it be poured out? Upon deeper observation he saw the precious liquid had become clogged by an old cork, stuck there in the bottleneck.  


When the old man saw this his attitude of excitement and joy at once changed to frustration, anger, and righteous rage. He raised his voice at the bottle and shouted at it, his voice echoing through the house.


"I asked you to clean yourselves out but apparently you've chosen to ignore me!" 


He tightened his grip and threw the bottle across the room where it smashed to smithereens across the cold, stone floor of the candle-lit workroom. The room exploded with the sound of splattering glass and the delicate mobiles, each hanging with a thin silver cord, radically skewed and tipped out of balance. 


As the liquid absorbed through the cracks of the stone floor the old man returned to the cabinet, looking for another bottle that would carry out his Plan.

Forgiveness is everything in the Kingdom of God. Without vessels of forgiveness, God's hands are tied. Some would say God cannot forgive through us until he can forgive to us. Only when we release our bitterness - the bottle cloggers, if you will - is when we can both receive and pour out, his Grace.

Forgive, my brother, forgive your brother from your heart. Only then will the plans of the Well-Maker be poured through your Well, and then out to this broken world.