by Pastor Lynn Walker – Cowboy Country Church
4092 Norge Road – 405-320-0055

When forgiveness fails
Well, you stuck your foot in your mouth and said something that hurt someone’s feelings or made them mad. You were just teasing or trying to be cute, but the person you said it to didn’t think it was cute or funny at all!!
 So they took it the wrong way, as far as you are concerned, and now you have lost a friend. Maybe they didn’t take it the wrong way; maybe what you said was just plain wrong or inappropriate. So, being the good Christian that you are, you decide that you should apologize and ask for forgiveness and everything will be all better. Well, your ex-friend tells you that your apology is accepted, you are forgiven, but they no longer want to be friends with you. Sounds like you are not forgiven after all and now you are upset about losing a friend and you don’t know what to do to fix it.
Well sometimes you can’t fix it!! My wife was teaching children about being careful what you say in the first place. She gave all the kids a paper plate and a tube of toothpaste; she told them to squirt a good dose of their toothpaste onto the paper plate. When they all had a big pile of toothpaste on their paper plate, she then told them to put the toothpaste back into the tube! Now that was fun to watch those young grade schoolers trying to cram the toothpaste back into the tube. Didn’t take them long to figure out that it couldn’t be done. Same principle works with what comes out of your mouth; unkind words spoken foolishly cannot be taken back. They still ring in the ears of the offended. We have to remember that forgiveness never fails, but sometimes people fail to forgive. Proverbs 11:17 says “Your own soul is nourished when you are kind, but you destroy yourself when you are cruel.” If we speak only kind words, we won’t have to worry about being forgiven will we?