I have three younger sisters. Growing up, my second oldest sister was the easiest to pick on. We had learned that she was a screamer. If we were discreet enough, we could pick on her, and she would start screaming. She would then get in trouble for her screaming outburst and we would giggle. One time she screamed and my Dad called her downstairs to get on to her. She defended herself by saying that one of the other girls had pushed her. Dad asked her, “What does the Bible say we should do to people who wrong us?” Without missing a beat, my sister exclaimed, “STONE HER!”

This cute little story is a good representation of how we all feel when people wrong us. We want justice. We want them to be punished and to suffer for what they did to us. Paul tells us that love is not this way. Love does not keep account of the wrong suffered. Instead it forgives and moves on. There is no need to bring it up again. It has effectively been forgotten.

This is a very important practice for us to follow. Keeping account of how people have wronged us is very harmful. It hurts us. We remain angry and bitter towards that person. If we are not careful, that bitterness permeates us until we become a miserable person. On top of that, it is impossible to maintain a relationship when we are always angry and bitter at the person. Both parties wind up losing a friend. Finally, to keep account of it is to hold them in continual guilt. They can not take back the action they did. So we hurt them by not exercising forgiveness. We hurt both them and ourselves when we keep an account of all the wrongs done. True love is not like that. True love forgets.