To forgive, you must be "little."
Only "little" people forgive.

It costs to forgive. It costs to not-forgive.
Either way, the price is your very life, the only life you have.
Offenses are a very great crisis . . . for you.

Your relationship with God is at stake.
The gate to His presence is legally locked
against the one who will not forgive.

Your destiny is on the line, your divine purpose at stake
and therefore your eternity. 

Life and death are in the balance - spiritual and physical.

People die mostly of bitterness not disease.
Bitterness is a poison you drink voluntarily,
and not the snake bite of victimization.

No offense is worth the price of losing your Personal Father,
your life's glory, your eternal soul . . .

And! your present peace.
 
A deep and crucial lesson was taught by our Lord in Matthew 18.

The story began with a question of the ambitious disciples to Jesus,
"Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?"
It was an honest inquiry, born of human tendency
and Jesus answered it with loving respect, completely
and fully in the record of this chapter.
But his answer did not fit their question.

He called
a little child to Himself and put him in the midst of them.

A visible illustration of His answer.
That by the visual they could comprehend
the reality of what He was about to teach
the culmination of which would be . . . forgiveness.
 
Truly I say to you, unless you repent
(change, turn about) and become like little children
(trusting, lowly, loving, forgiving),
you can never enter the kingdom of heaven (at all).

Whoever will humble himself therefore and
become like this little child (trusting, lowly, loving, forgiving)
is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 18:1-4 Amplified 

A startling answer! Certainly not the one they expected.

Mankind ever believes that
power and ability are the peaks of achievement, of importance and worth.
Humanity believes in "up."
Jesus ever took them "down."

The word "change" doesn't mean "become something bigger" -
change into what you should be.
The Greek meaning is - "turn around and go back."
Become what you used to be.

The inference is that "you have gone the wrong way and
gotten lost.
You must go back to where you were long ago."

Then Jesus linked Himself to the child and the child to Him.
Christ is with the child in us.
He puts His stake with the child. Only.

Whoever receives and accepts and welcomes one little child
like this for My sake and in My name
receives and accepts and welcomes Me.

The child He refers to is not the child in their midst,
not the "children" of their world
but the child within, buried in each of the men
who stood before him,

The "child" is the primal and vulnerable being who yet lives
in every adult,
the real self, the unsophisticated,
dependent being
with no pretense, no sufficiency.

Jesus spoke - not "child" but - "little child."

Early on, we children learn to deceive, to pretend.
Very young we take on the "lie of life:"
self-sufficiency, self-indulgence and -
above all - self-protection.
Adultness,
which is to say . . . pride.

The awful truth about us at our raw core is that
we will ever be,
from this Perilous Now - through the Unknown Future
even into the Eternal Forever -
only a child.
Needy and utterly incapable,
therefore . . . desperate.

Another way to say, "poor in spirit."
A beggar.
This is the humility of the child.

And! the frightening human crisis:
having no value, by virtue of
being nothing,
in total inability.

God is a above all, a Father, and longs for
His children
to be children . . .
who need a Father.

Jesus is "joined" only to the little child in us,
that vulnerable and honest being
void of two things: mask and effort.
Pretense and strife.
Lying and trying.
 
Jesus introduced the subject and then He gave
several illustrations
of His one subject.

The key - the core of the discourse -
is the humility of the child.
 
Humility is the entrance to the
kingdom of a heavenly life in
earth's terrible ground.

And being "little" is humility,
the only humility.

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Copyright © 2001 Martha Blaney Kilpatrick