Exploring the intricate dynamics of relationships, we dive deep into the heart of First Corinthians 13 to uncover a profound truth: love does not keep a record of wrongs. As we navigate the reasons behind our tendency to remember past grievances, we realize it's not merely about memory; it’s about what we value and how it shapes our identities. This episode challenges us to confront the self-righteousness that often lurks beneath the surface, urging us to replace our mental ledgers with grace. We reflect on how the desire to justify our feelings can lead to bitterness and a distorted sense of superiority over others, ultimately undermining the trust and intimacy essential for a thriving marriage. Join us as we unpack these themes with insightful biblical examples, aiming to transform our understanding of love and forgiveness in our relationships. Navigating the murky waters of marital conflict, this episode presents a compelling argument against the age-old habit of keeping a mental ledger of wrongs.

Takeaways:

• In First Corinthians 13, love is portrayed as something that does not keep a ledger of wrongs, emphasizing the importance of forgiveness over memory.
• Our tendency to remember offenses stems from a deeper issue of pride and self-righteousness, rather than mere forgetfulness or a good memory.
• True intimacy in relationships is built on trust and safety, which are destroyed when we keep records of wrongs against our partners.
• The act of self-examination is crucial; we often default to blaming others instead of recognizing our own shortcomings in conflicts.
• When we measure ourselves against others, we distort our sense of righteousness and lose sight of our own failures, which can poison our relationships.
• Ultimately, grace transforms our interactions, allowing for genuine love and understanding free from the burdens of past grievances.

Well, we are back in our study of First Corinthians 13.

We've been looking at what love does not do in that it will not keep a record of wrongs, it doesn't keep a ledger.

And that's where we left off last time, discussing the reason why people remember these things of the past.

It really isn't a matter of just because one possesses a good memory.

And the issue isn't memory, it's really value because we remember what we value, what treasures are in our hearts.

And that truth is seen throughout the Bible.

That sounds a little strange, really.

Maybe until we stop to examine that a bit.

We would never say, I enjoy remembering someone who's hurt us.

But what they do is beneath the surface.

They serve a purpose.

They explain why we're bitter, they strengthen.

You see, our arguments, they justify how we feel.

And if we feel righteous, we may feel more righteous in comparison to the person who wronged us.

But either way, that injury kind of becomes part of our identity.

The heart says, I can't let this go because if I do, I'll lose my case and I have a case that I can defend.

So it's all about that.

And we have arrived at something much deeper than just forgetfulness.

We've arrived at self righteousness.

You see, the human heart has always sought to establish its own righteousness by comparing itself with somebody else.

And Jesus exposed this tendency.

The Pharisees entered the temple thanking God that he wasn't like other men.

You see, his confidence didn't rest upon God's mercy.

It rested upon other men's failures.

That's what he was doing.

He was comparing himself with others.

See, beside him was that publican unable to even lift his eyes toward heaven, crying, God, be merciful to me, a sinner.

And so one man carried a ledger against everyone else around him, and the other one carried a broken heart before God and said, I can't do anything but acknowledge I'm a sinner.

What's the difference?

It's not simply that one had committed greater sins.

The difference is where each man directed his attention.

The Pharisee spent his life examining other people.

The publican examined himself.

Do you see the difference?

That's what I've said last week and that's what we will continue to be saying.

We need to develop a heart for God and a desire to please him.

So much so that we will examine ourselves to see whether we're in the faith.

It's not about examining everybody else, looking at our own selves.

It's a Lot easier to inspect another person's failures than our own.

Nothing comes more naturally, I think, than just self justification.

From the opening chapters of Genesis, we see man attempting to shift responsibility somewhere else.

When God confronted Adam, Adam immediately looked to Eve.

That woman that you gave me, she's the one that she gave me of the tree.

And Eve, when she was, she pointed to the serpent.

Well, neither began with the simple words, I've sinned.

They just said someone else is to blame for this.

That instinct has never left us.

Every husband knows how quickly the mind begins constructing a defense.

You know, before the conversation has ever ended.

Arguments are already forming and explanations are already developing.

And evidence is already being gathered.

Why do we do that?

Because pride finds confession painfully difficult.

We would rather prove itself right ourselves right, than become righteous by acknowledging our sin.

And that's why a ledger is so appealing.

You see that?

That's why we keep a ledger.

We've been trying to answer that question.

Why do people keep a ledger of wrongs?

A ledger always seems to prove our case.

That's why we keep it.

And as long as we possess a list of others failures, we can also quietly persuade ourselves that our own heart is not the greater problem.

We're not the problem.

It's somebody else.

And so we begin measuring ourselves by our spouse instead of by Christ.

Every remembered offense becomes another reason to feel morally superior.

But the gospel destroys that.

It destroys that mindset.

How can a man who stands forgiven at the foot of the cross continue measuring himself against another sinner?

You see, every husband who has honestly looked into the law of liberty knows that he has no ground upon which to boast.

The cross forever removed our ability to claim any superiority.

When Isaiah saw the Lord high and lifted up, he didn't cry, woe is this nation.

Though he could have, he said, woe is me.

And when you see the glory of the Lord and how sinful you are, you'll have the same response.

The nearer a man comes to God's holiness, the less interested he becomes in maintaining a ledger against somebody else friends.

This explains why husbands who are growing spiritually often become more gracious rather than more critical.

They're becoming increasingly aware of their own need for mercy.

Oh, this is important.

The man who believes he owes God very little usually extends very little grace.

But the man who never forgets the greatness of his own forgiveness finds it increasingly difficult to demand payment from anybody else around him.

Our Lord illustrated this truth with the power in Simon the Pharisee's house.

Remember when this sinful Woman had entered Simon's house.

She came weeping at his feet, washing them with her tears and wiping them with her hair of the head.

And Simon watched the scene with contempt.

In his mind, he'd already judged the woman.

And Jesus Christ responded by telling a simple story about two debtors.

One owed a great sum of money, the other owed comparatively little.

Both debts were freely forgiven.

And then Jesus asked a question that exposed Simon's heart to the quick.

He said, which of them will love him most?

Well, the answer is obvious.

The one who has forgiven the greater debt.

In other words, the one that had more to be forgiven.

Jesus was not suggesting that the woman had actually sinned more than Simon.

That really wasn't his point.

Instead, she understood her need for grace.

You see, because of that, because she felt more deeply about that than he did.

Simon's self righteousness had blinded him to his own debt.

And there's the difference.

The woman had no illusion about that.

She knew that she had been forgiven much and therefore she loved much.

Now, that principle reaches directly into marriage.

I tell you, it reaches in a lot of areas, but it certainly is true in marriage.

The husband who continually meditates on the greatness of God's forgiveness, he becomes increasingly gentle toward the failures of his wife, not because her failures are unimportant or insignificant, but because he has become overwhelmed by the greatness of his own pardon and his own forgiveness.

The ledger begins to lose its appeal.

Something greater has captured his heart, and it's not the ledger, its grace.

Grace always changes the mathematics of the soul.

A ledger adds, grace subtracts.

A ledger keeps counting offenses and adding more details and facts about the offense.

Grace keeps remembering mercy.

Alleger says, you owe me.

And Grace says, christ paid what I could never pay.

That's why Paul doesn't begin 1 Corinthians 13 by discussing techniques for resolving conflict.

He begins with love.

Methods without transformed hearts simply produce more sophisticated forms of selfishness.

I'll tell you, that's so true.

A man may learn to avoid harsh words while inwardly preserving bitterness.

You know, he can become outwardly polite, but secretly maintain a detailed account of every disappointment that you've ever given him.

So the gospel aims much deeper, you see, than just mere behavior and behavior modification, as the psychologists tell us, or explain.

It reaches the affections.

It changes what the heart values.

And when Christ comes becomes our treasure, when he becomes our.

Our focal point as far as who we're going to please and the desires of our heart, then the desire to preserve another person's debt that begins to die.

So it's only then that we prepare to understand why keeping a record of wrongs destroys the very thing that every husband longs to build.

It destroys trust.

And without trust, there can be little intimacy.

It slowly suffocates.

So we've built some things here.

We've talked about marriage, how that it reveals what's really in the heart.

It joins two sinners together.

And it emphasizes, as we have last time, that wrongs are always inevitable.

Just expect it.

And do you young people who are just married or maybe thinking about getting married just know friends?

You're going to face disappointments, you're going to see wrongs you've never seen before.

The heart may very easily begin keeping a ledger because you feel like you're the fault for it, you're being blamed for it.

And the ledger grows out of pride and self righteousness.

So what we need to add in this section today in our study.

Is we need to come face to face with the courtroom, the confession, the actual, the intimacy that is broken down and destroyed because we've turned our marriage, a place of trust and communication and love, into a courtroom where we're, we can't confess.

Confessing is too dangerous.

We've got to justify, we've got to fight for ourselves.

And then we move into biblical examples as we continue our study of ledger keeping hearts.

We're going to talk about Cain and Saul, the pharisee in Luke 15, and especially the elder brother in Luke 15.

And that'll give a lot of weight to this valuable lesson on forgiveness.

We're going to be looking at Matthew 18 and talk about the unforgiving servant.

We'd like to look at Joseph and David and others.

These belong mainly to this, to our ultimate objective, and that is to see Christ and Calvary and realize that we are what we are by God's grace.

But when we're looking for that ledger, to add another fact, another point to the case, it will destroy trust.

And without it, marriage will suffer.

The destructive power of record keeping and keeping, of wrongs becomes evident when we begin to consider what it does to the just the general atmosphere and environment of a marriage.

Because every successful marriage rests upon something far more valuable than just being financially secure and physically attracted or sharing mutual interest.

Those blessings are important.

They enrich your relationship, but they can't sustain it.

The true foundation upon which every lasting marriage is built is trust.

That's where it's at.

A husband and wife may know that they are safe with one another.

They must know that Honesty will not be punished, and that confession will not become a permanent indictment.

Without that confidence, that intimacy slowly begins to disappear.

And the reason?

Because intimacy has never been built upon just being close.

It's always built upon safety and trust.

And this is why the habit of keeping a ledger is so destructive, because it destroys.

Now, I'm not saying a literal ledger, though sometimes people do do that.

I'm talking about keeping a record of all those wrongs, even if they're in our head.

It quietly removes that sense of safety without either husband or wife recognizing what's happening.

A woman who has repeatedly watched her past failures reappear during new disagreements.

I can guarantee you she's going to eventually begin protecting herself.

She may not be consciously doing it.

She may not be consciously deciding to become more guarded, but I'll tell you, experience teaches her that openness has become costly, and so she's not going to be so open.

Every confession carries a risk.

And every admission of wrong or weakness carries may strengthen another argument on his side.

Every honest conversation has the potential to become another permanent entry in the growing record of disappointments.

And before long, she begins saying less and less, not because she's become more mature, but because she no longer feels secure.

She no longer feels safe and does not want to speak freely anymore.

And many husbands mistake this change for peace.

We've talked about this in past discussions.

They observe the arguments have become less frequent, and they just think, well, the marriage is doing just fine.

It's improving.

But the reality is, the opposite may be occurring.

You see, the absence of conflict doesn't mean that there's harmony.

Sometimes it just reveals that one spouse has concluded that honesty no longer accomplishes anything for good.

And so silence is the best thing.

And that appears peaceful because there's no longer any, you know, fighting and carrying on as it had in the past.

And so a marriage may become remarkably calm on the surface, but the two hearts are really drifting steadily farther and farther apart.

I've seen this before.

I've experienced it before.

There's one reason the New Testament places such emphasis upon truthful and gracious communication.

Paul exhorts believers in Ephesians 4 to put away falsehood and speak every man truth with his neighbor.

For he says, we are members one of another.

Now, he's not simply commanding accuracy in our statements and facts.

He's describing a relationship in which people may safely live in truth in the light.

The home should become the place where that takes place.

It's where masks, though, become unnecessary, because it should be a Place of safety.

It's where failures can be confessed without fear of being humiliated and cast down and rejected, or where repentance is met with grace instead of exploitation.

Awful when you confess sin and someone just uses it against you.

Such openness can exist where one spouse has become the accountant of another's failures.

You see, James makes a very similar observation when he writes, confess your faults one to another and pray for one another that you may be healed.

Healing begins where honest confession becomes possible.

But sin, it flourishes because secrecy protects it.

There's nobody gonna hold you accountable.

They're gonna hide it.

But confession brings it into the light, where grace can begin its restoring work.

That's why it's so important to handle sin biblically.

And yet confession itself requires tremendous courage.

Every time a wife admits that she's spoken unwisely or done something unwisely, every time she acknowledges a poor decision or reveals some discouragement, she's placing herself or placing something precious in her husband's hands, she's entrusting him with her heart.

She's telling him the secrets of her heart.

And if she receives that confession tenderly, that marriage can grow stronger and stronger because trust has deepened.

But if he quietly stores it away for future use, he teaches her that vulnerability is dangerous.

And once that lesson is learned, intimacy again begins to leave.

It's.

It's just snuffed out.

And that explains why the image of a courtroom so perfectly illustrates a marriage that's governed by a ledger.

Courtrooms are not designed to restore relationships, really.

They exist to establish guilt.

Evidence is collected, witnesses are examined, past actions are reviewed, and every statement is weighed in an effort to determine who's right and who's wrong, who's going to be held accountable.

Unfortunately, a lot of Christian homes slowly adopt that same atmosphere.

Instead of approaching conflict with the desire to understand one another, they both prepare their respective cases.

Old conversations can be revived and brought back again.

Forgotten disappointments become new evidence, spoken words or years earlier or summoned back to testify.

Once again, any kind of disagreement that was done disappears beneath the weight of unresolved grievances of the past.

This is tragic, but very common.

The tragedy is that a husband can genuinely believe that he's seeking justice, when in reality, he's become the prosecutor of the woman he promised to cherish.

The purpose of conflict quietly changes.

Instead of asking, how can we restore our fellowship?

He asks, how can I prove my case?

Restoration gives way to prosecution.

Unity is no longer a consideration.

It's sacrificed on the altar of being right.

He's Got to prove that.

And at that moment, the marriage has ceased functioning like a covenant governed by grace.

It's become operating like a courtroom governed by evidence.

And building a case against the other.

Love, friends, can never flourish under those conditions.

No wife can fully open her heart while living beneath that kind of trial.

No husband can experience the closeness while continually building a case against the very person that he's vowed to love.

And so you see the ledger.

It promises kind of a protection.

I've got this evidence.

But it delivers the opposite.

It delivers isolation.

It promises justice.

But it gives distance and separation.

And, you know, thinking of winning the argument is what we really want to do.

It really does the opposite.

It slowly loses the marriage altogether.

So the question, friends, now really becomes unavoidable.

If keeping a record of wrongs destroys trust, intimacy and fellowship, the question really becomes, why do we do it?

Why would we continue to do that if we know what it's doing to the marriage?

Why do human beings and the human heart cling so closely to old offenses and keep those in their memory?

Why do hurts and disappointments that should have been buried years ago continue resurfacing with clarity?

Why is it often easier to remember an unkind sentence or an unkind deed spoken 10 years ago than a hundred acts of kindness performed since then?

And the answer is not because they can't remember or not because they have a great memory.

It lies within the fallen heart itself, within the carnal mind itself.

Paul is not merely describing a bad habit that can be corrected with better communication.

He's exposing one of the oldest tendencies of sinful humanity.

Because ever since man's rebellion in the Garden of Eden, the heart has instinctively sought to justify itself while placing the blame and the responsibility upon someone else that's rooted within us.

So rooted in us that we often practice it without even knowing it.

We naturally become attorneys for ourselves and judges of everybody else around us.

We interpret our own actions by our intentions, but we interpret the actions of others by.

By their actions and their failures.

That spirit appeared almost immediately when sin entered the world.

When the Lord came walking through the garden and asked Adam, have you eaten of the tree whereof I commanded you not to eat of it?

And Adam had a wonderful opportunity to say the simplest words a sinner can ever say.

Yes, Lord, I have sinned.

But you know what he said?

The woman that you gave me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

Notice what Adam was doing?

He wasn't merely explaining the circumstances.

He was building his case.

He shifted attention from his own disobedience to Eve's participation.

In one sentence, he managed to accuse his wife while suggesting that even God had some responsibility, because it was God that gave him the woman.

And since sin had entered the world before, man began protecting himself by redirecting attention towards somebody else's failures, every husband has inherited that same tendency.

When conflict enters the home, our first instinct is seldom self examination.

Instead, our minds immediately begin constructing an explanation that places us in the best possible light.

And we say, you know, we just replay the conversation.

And we're not asking, where did I fail?

We're asking, how can I explain why I responded the way I did?

So they understand.

We become remarkably skilled at doing this.

We know our motives, we know how tired we were.

We know the pressure we were under.

We know why we spoke sharply to them.

We understand our own circumstances, and we know it well.

So quickly can we excuse ourselves.

But yet we're not willing to do that for the other.

They don't receive the same generosity that we give ourselves.

We judge them almost entirely by what they did, by what they said, by how they looked when they said it.

You see, we interpret ourselves by intention.

We interpret them by their actions.

The result is pretty predictable, because every disagreement quietly strengthens the illusion that our spouse is the greater problem.

The ledger grows because every new offense confirms what we've already decided to believe.

You see, our Lord exposed that when he asked on the Sermon on the Mount, remember, why beholdest thou the mold in thy brother's eye?

He said in Matthew 7, but considerest not the beam that is in your own eye.

It is the most.

It is one of the most penetrating questions that ever the human heart has been asked.

Think about that.

Why do you do that?

He asks.

And I'm still asking myself that question.

Why do we do that?

It reveals the remarkable blindness of pride.

Jesus is not suggesting here that our brother has no fault.

The mote is real.

The problem is that the man examining it has a beam coming out of his own eye.

And yet somehow he remains fascinated by another person's smaller problem when he has this comparatively larger one.

That's exactly what a ledger accomplishes.

It magnifies another person's failures while shrinking our own.

And the more time a husband spends reviewing his wife's shortcomings, and the less time he spends confronting the condition of his own heart and his own failures, the ledger becomes a convenient distraction.

It allows him to feel morally superior and in a position where he can defend himself while avoiding the painful work of just simply confession.

And repentance.

This is why self righteousness and ledger keeping kind of go together.

They traveled on the same path together.

The Pharisee illustrates this very well.

You'll remember there was, you know, the Pharisees well, they were masters at identifying sin.

They saw the failures of publicans and harlots and sinners and those taken in adultery.

And they saw that with very clear proof of what sin is.

And they noticed when the disciples plucked grain on the Sabbath day, because that's a violation of law.

They criticized Jesus for healing on the Sabbath.

They condemned him for eating with tax collectors.

They watched the outward conduct of everybody else around them while remaining blind to their own hypocrisy and their own pride and unbelief, living within their own hearts.

It is impossible to read the Gospels without noticing how little mercy the Pharisees extended to others.

And that's not accidental.

As I've said, people who believe they need very little forgiveness generally offer very little forgiveness.

And it goes the other way too.

And that's where we want to get to, you know, that's why Jesus gave the parable in Luke 18.

It's so important.

It's a great lesson.

Well, this Pharisee stood up praying, God, I thank thee that I'm not as other men are.

His prayer was really a comparison.

He in fact, it says he prayed with himself.

Thus, I'm not even real sure he was talking to God.

His prayer was really an effort to justify himself and put him up a little higher than the sinners.

He built his confidence by measuring himself against somebody else.

Standing nearby was this publican who dared not even lift his eyes toward heaven.

He cried out, God, be merciful to me, a sinner.

Now, one man carried a ledger.

Do you see that?

The other man carried a burden.

One man was occupied with another man's failures, and the other one was overwhelmed and occupied by his own need for God's mercy.

And Jesus said it was the publican, not the Pharisee, who went down to his house, justified.

The lesson reaches very directly into marriage.

A husband who spends his life measuring his wife's problems and her failures will almost certainly become critical.

He spends his life measuring himself by her weaknesses rather than measuring himself by the holiness of Christ and become humble.

These two men may experience exactly the same disappointments within marriage, and yet they'll respond very differently because they're looking in different directions.

But there's another reason that the heart clings to this ledger, and we want to look at it for next time.

I thank you for joining me in the study.

Until we meet again, Have a good day and a pleasant week ahead.