Forgiveness and a bag of bricks

Do you carry around your hurts with you like a bag of bricks, or do you truly forgive?

Do you get angry sometimes? Do your siblings or friends make you frustrated and angry sometimes? Of course. I want you to imagine a pile of bricks here. The bricks represent things that have made you angry.

This brick is really old. It was made maybe 100 years ago; it’s starting to crumble and fall apart. When someone treats you badly - maybe they were selfish, or stole your toy, or were mean to you - you want to get back at them, right? The Bible says we’re not supposed to take our own vengeance. So, we’re not going to do that, we’re going to take that old brick, something that happened a long time ago, and put it in this paper bag.

This brick is the next oldest brick, a little newer than the last one.  If someone is ugly to you, maybe says something unkind or untrue about you, you probably get angry and want revenge, right? But we don’t do anything and we just put that brick away in the bag, too.

This brick is newer – it represents something that happened maybe 6 months ago. We’re going to put that in the bag, too, and not think about it.

This brick is newest. This represents something that someone did to you maybe last week. We’re not going to think about that, either. We’ll just put it in the bag.

You know, you can put all those bricks in the bag, tuck them away and yet NOT forget about them. How would you like to carry these bricks around with you all the time? You wouldn’t. But you do it.

I tend to do it. Our moms and dads tend to do it. Instead of forgiving we put these bricks in a bag and carry them around in our hearts. We say we’re going to forget about them, that we’re not going to think about them, that we’re not going to get back at the people who did bad things to us. But instead of forgiving, we tend to still carry them around. The problem is, they get really, really heavy.

And you know what happens after awhile? The bag breaks and the bricks come spilling out. And when they come spilling out, that’s when people see how angry we are.

You know what Jesus says about these bricks? Jesus says to throw them away and to forgive in your heart. That’s something only Jesus can enable us to do. If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll pray to ask Jesus to give you a new heart and teach you what it means to forgive.

PRAYER

Lord, we all tend to carry those bricks around with us instead of forgiving. Thank you, Jesus, that on the cross you said, “Father forgive them, they don’t know what they do.” Help us to remember our own need of forgiveness and bless us as we learn to forgive and how much we need Jesus.

About the Redeemer Community Church PCA children's devotions:

Sometimes it can be hard to break down Biblical truths for our kids into easy-to-understand and easy-to-remember bite-sized pieces. Pastor Chuck does this weekly in his Children's Sermon, and we're sharing key points from those sermons here each week. Feel free to use with your littles as conversation starters throughout the week, reminders of what we learned in church on Sundays, and just general opportunities to share our love of God's word and His love for us.

Redeemer Community Church PCA is a Presbyterian church in Ocala, FL.