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CONNIE: Do you keep any oily rags piled up around your house? Probably not—at least not if you don’t want your house to burn down! But what about in your heart? Is there anything there that might cause a fire?

Giving God’s trumpet a Certain Sound for 75 years, this is the Voice of Prophecy.

CONNIE: Hello, I’m Connie Jeffery,

LONNIE: and I’m Lonnie Melashenko. Welcome to our program today, we’re calling it “Keep That cellar Clean.” Its program number eight in our series on simple Biblical things we can do to improve our lives.

CONNIE: But I take that we’re not going to be talking about taking the trash art of the basements of our houses.

LONNIE: Well, we could talk about that—the Bible does have some words of counsel about keeping our living places clean. But our focus today is a bit more personal. We’re not talking about the basements or storage bins at our houses or apartments. We’ll be talking about the things we store up in our hearts and minds. The kinds of thoughts and attitudes and memories that affect how we interact with other people. And we’ll be looking especially at how forgiveness for things in the past can help to clean some of the cobwebs and oily rags out of our memories.

CONNIE: I had a fascinating experience recently that really taught me a lot about the value of forgiveness. You know I’ve been working on some programming with our sister ministry Faith For Today. Well, as part of that, I had the chance to meet and speak with a most fascinating lady from South Africa.

LONNIE; her name is Ginn Fourie, and she moved, Connie, from tremendous personal tragedy to forgiveness and reconciliation. Tell us about her story.

CONNIE: Well Lonnie, she’s really one of the most remarkable woman that I’ve ever met, and to encapsulate the story…She is a South African woman who’s 23 year old daughter was murdered by a group of guerilla’s or terrorists, and her daughter Lindy was chatting in a café, the Heidelberg Café, in Capetown, South Africa, when 3 gunmen burst through the door and shot there machine guns off, killing Lindy and three of her friends. So here we come to the mother Ginn, who has gone through this horrible tragedy, but has also come on a long journey to forgiveness …Briefly, she came into contact with the gunmen at the trial about a year later, and actually walked up to them and said, “I forgive you”. They said, how can you do that, because these three gunmen were not going to reveal who their high command was. They actually had a high command who ordered these killings, she told them, because my high command gave forgiveness as he lay dying on a cross. So, she goes to their trial, and they were actually given 25 years each, but in February of 1998, they were granted amnesty, a lot of terrorists in South Africa were granted amnesty. She didn’t want to overturn that verdict, but she went to tell the authorities that they needed to get counseling for them… She said though, if God can forgive, I can as well... 9 years later she met the man that ordered the killing and she heard on the radio that he was doing a book signing, and she saw him and went up to him and told him that I forgive you for killing my only daughter, and later on, he was so moved that he was literally shaken. She could have stored up her anger, but instead she gave humanity back to this man, and they now both work for a foundation going across South Africa, teaching healing and forgiveness to those in need.


“Amazing Grace”, Michael Harris, from There’s A Wideness in God’s Mercy CD.

CONNIE: Amen! What a fitting response to a story of human grace.

LONNIE: How true! Jesus sets us the example of forgiveness by His amazing grace toward us, and through the work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts He empowers us to forgive each other.

CONNIE: Lonnie, don’t you think that some people find it easier to forgive than others? I mean, some people just seem to have that sort of graciousness about them that you know that no matter what you do, they’ll understand—and if you go to them and ask for forgiveness—well, it’s just like they can’t seem to hold a grudge in their heart. But then there are other people who really struggle with this. It seems like it’s just their nature to hang on to every insult and offense that’s ever been done to them. And even though they want to forgive, it’s just not easy for them.

LONNIE: I think you’re right about that Connie. Maybe it’s because of the way they were brought up, or it may be hereditary. But it seems to me that all of us—if we’ll just spend a little time each day considering what great lengths God has gone to in order to provide forgiveness for us—well, it just makes it easier to forgive someone else when you realize how much you have been forgiven.

CONNIE: That’s true. And we have a little book here that makes that point very nicely. It’s called, How Can I Forgive?, and we’d like to send a copy to you—just for the asking. It’s very practical, short, and helpful. It’ll walk you right through the steps that are essential to being able to forgive someone.

LONNIE: Friend, I highly recommend this book. And if you’d like to receive a free copy, just give us a call today on our toll free line at 1-800-872-0055.

CONNIE: We’ll share that toll free number again at the close of today’s program, along with our mailing address. So please stay tuned and have a pencil ready. But right now, let’s listen as Pastor Lonnie shares today’s message, “Keep That Cellar Clean.”

Keep That Cellar Clean

Adrian knew what he had done wrong as soon as he saw the flames sprouting from the windows of his garage. He and his wife had been sound asleep in their home in Newmarket, New Hampshire when the smoke detectors started making a racket. Quickly they called 911 and found their way out of the house. By the time they made it to the front yard, much of the attached garage was in flames.

That’s when Adrian remembered the oily rags he’d left in a cardboard box in the back of his truck.

He knew better than to leave them there, but he’d just forgotten to take care of them. The resulting spontaneous combustion started a fire that did tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to the garage, his truck, and his house.

Most of us know that it’s just not safe to leave piles of oily rags lying around, waiting to burst into flame due to spontaneous combustion. We learned in school that the oil slowly starts to oxidize, which creates heat, and that if the heat can’t escape, eventually there’ll be smoke, and then there will be fire.

So we’re careful what we do with our oily rags.

But is it possible that some of us continue to stack up oily rags somewhere that they’re not noticed—somewhere where they can smolder quietly, building up heat, just waiting to explode into flames?

I’m talking about the things we store up in our minds. Christian counselor Jay Adams illustrates it this way: When we continually store up memories of insults and abuses and mistreatments in our minds, it’s like piling oily rags under the stairway, down in the basement. For a while, nothing happens. But then all of a sudden one day the house burns down, and we say “I don’t understand what went wrong; it just all of a sudden erupted into flames!”

The same sort of thing can happen in our minds. We store up those old, oily rags that one-by-one seem harmless. But pile enough of them there and there comes a flashpoint when the flames erupt!

Truck driver Tom West had been angry for a long time—it had all started when people at his company blamed him for wrecking a truck. Through the years he felt like he was hassled over and over about it, and he didn’t take the hassles well. They made him angry, and he let that anger continue to grow and fester.

The oily rags piled up in his mind, smoldering there, getting hotter and hotter until one day he drove into the shipping yard with a gun and started shooting. When it was over, two men lay dead, another three were wounded, and West was facing murder charges and the possibility of the death penalty.

Stories like that are all too common in our world. But they are just the tip of the iceberg—the mass murders with gunmen sprinting about the workplace taking potshots at workmates are the stories that make the headlines. They’re the ones we hear about. But what about the rage-induced crimes that never get mentioned on the six-o’clock news? The FBI estimates that there are approximately 2 million instances of workplace violence every year in the US! That averages out to about four violent acts per minute, just in the workplace! On average, a worker is killed by a coworker on the job about once a week! Obviously there must be a lot of anger and frustration floating around out there to bring about such carnage.

Where does all this rage come from?

Why do people keep piling up oily rags in their minds, just waiting for them to erupt into flames?

Well, for one thing it feels good, doesn’t it? To nurse a little anger and resentment? Storing up little snatches and pieces of what others have done wrong helps us feel morally superior to them, doesn’t it? Never mind that those oily rags may take on a life of their own someday when we least expect it.

“He just snapped,” people will say afterward. Or, “She seemed like such a nice, quiet person. I just don’t understand what made her do that!”

It can happen when we least expect it—to the people we least expect it to happen to—ourselves!

But there is an antidote. We shouldn’t have to go around worrying that we may be carrying a ticking time bomb inside our heads. The antidote, which is guaranteed to defuse that bomb, and to unpile all those oily rags, is found in a very familiar text, right in the middle of one of the most familiar memory verses in the whole Bible.

Are you ready for the cure?

Do you want the antidote to anger?

Here it is, right in the middle of—of all things—the Lord’s Prayer. It’s a phrase I daresay we’ve all repeated a hundred or more times in our life: “‘and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors’ ” (Matthew 6:12, NKJV).

It’s the only part of this classic prayer that Jesus felt was important enough to bear reiteration at the end of the prayer. Immediately after the “Amen,” He came back to this ever-essential point, saying this: “‘for if you forgive others their trespasses, you’re heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses’ ” (Matthew 6:14, 15, NRSV).

Why is this so essential that Jesus felt the need to repeat it? Because He knew what it meant to carry around a load of the past with you. He, the spotless Lamb of God, had volunteered to come to earth and bear the weight of all the confessed sins of all earth’s generations on His shoulders.

It was a terrible burden to bear. Enough to suck the very life out of the Son of God.

And if that was the case, what would carrying around the memories of hurts and sins do to us mere mortals? It couldn’t be a good thing.

And it’s not just mental and spiritual health that it’s bad for. Medical researchers are beginning to zero in on the way our attitude toward life affects our physical health as well. In a recent study conducted by Kaiser Permanente, it was discovered that the effects of carrying around anger and hostility begin to show up in our bodies at an early age. In their study, the doctors worked with people aged 18 to 30, following them for ten years.

And here’s what they discovered: Those who had the highest levels of hostility also had the highest levels of arterial calcification—a big-word way of describing hardening of the arteries. In other words, by carrying around hostility, they were putting themselves at greater risk of heart disease.

Another recent study found that people who are highly anger-prone are three times as likely to have a heart attack than those who are a bit more even-keeled.

That hardly comes as a surprise, does it?

And yet it seems so natural for us to pile up memories of little offenses and irritations that smolder away, feeding our level of anger.

It was so important to Peter to be able to do that, that one day he approached Jesus with a question. Basically, when can I quit forgiving my brother and start counting his offenses against me? Here it is in Matthew 18:21: “Then Peter came to Him and said, ‘Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?’ ” (NKJV).

And of course Jesus responded with an unimaginably high number of offenses that we ought to be willing to forgive before we start holding people’s sins against them: “Jesus said to him, ‘I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven’ ” (verse 22).

That’s 490 forgiveness. For the same thing!

It hardly seems possible that God would expect us to be that forgiving, but then God is in the forgiving business! He sent His Son to the world for that express purpose: To bring forgiveness to all who would confess their sins. That’s a big investment in forgiveness, wouldn’t you say? Can you imagine how many quadrillion sins God has chosen to forgive through the centuries? It makes 490 seem like pretty small potatoes.

God knows the universe will be better off when all the sins have been forgiven—we just don’t need all that negativity following us around for all eternity. So He’s made a way for forgiveness to clean out the record books, get rid of the piles of oily rags. It’s based on His love for us, and the love He wants us to have in our hearts for each other.

In the great Love Chapter, 1 Corinthians 13, the apostle Paul reminds us that “Love is not irritable, and it keeps no record of when it has been wronged” (verse 5, NLT). In other words, genuine love isn’t even counting. It will never get to that magic number 490 and then start holding sins against others, because it just doesn’t keep a tally.

There’s no room in a genuine, loving Christians heart or mind for storing up those oily rags of resentment that are likely to burst into flame. Forgiveness clears the accounts and lets us move ahead without the life-threatening symptoms of anger that otherwise would accumulate in our cellars.

In our series on simple things that we can do to really improve our lives, there’s none more important than simply learning the meaning of forgiveness and learning to forgive in the same way we want to be forgiven. Remember Jesus’ words: “ ‘Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.’”

And remember His words on the cross as well: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!”

He didn’t want to go to sleep without getting that all straightened out between Himself and His attackers. He didn’t want to carry resentment in His heart as He died for the sins of the world. In excruciating pain and agony, suffering, knowing He was about to draw His last breath, He still pled that forgiveness would be meted out even to His cruelest attackers.

You know, when I think about that. When I picture Jesus on the cross, wounded and bleeding, being insulted, spat upon, taunted, and I hear those words, “Father forgive them,” I can’t imagine what anyone could do to me that would be worth holding a grudge about. Can you?

Do you need some help cleaning out the cellar—getting rid of those old rags of resentment? If so, take some time at the cross. Stand there and remember how much you have been forgiven. Remember how much Jesus wants to forgive you.

And then think about that person who has hurt you, and pray that prayer: “Father, forgive them! And help me to do the same.” Can you do it? I know you can. By the grace of God.

“Touch of Grace”, Tammy Larson, from Touch of Grace CD.