Check yourself before you wreck yourself.

"Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die."

I saw this quote on pinterest and I think it is so right on. It goes along with something I’ve been thinking about lately, which is the nature of forgiveness. As Christians, or even just as people if you don’t believe in Christ, there’s no other way to live than to be forgiving. It should be like breathing. It should be automatic and easy, but because of our sin and natural proclivity to selfishness, it’s often not. But letting resentment build and never confronting the offender, or just truly letting it go and forgiving, is a sure way to kill your own heart and soul. It’s a gradual death though. It begins with a minor offense that you think you’re letting go of, but really you’re stuffing it into a file cabinet in your mind to be brought out, added and compounded the next time a minor offense happens, and it seems a little bigger and you get a little more angry and a little more resentful. Not dealing with it is not the same as forgiveness. It also robs the other person of the chance to seek forgiveness and fix the behavior. Before too long, everything seems like a major offense because you’re holding a long list of minor things together against the person at once. Not telling the person with whom you are upset, and instead somehow thinking they ought to know, is naive at best, and desperately wicked at worst. It deadens your heart and conscience as you push away the Holy Spirit and allow your evil nature to take over. And it’s a sure way to let once-valuable relationships be destroyed by Satan. I’ve seen this attitude destroy friendships and marriages. Isn’t a potentially awkward, maybe painful, conversation worth it to avoid this soul-deadening and relationship-destroying slippery slope?

“The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?
‘“I the LORD search the heart
and test the mind,[b]
to give every man according to his ways,
according to the fruit of his deeds.’” Jeremiah 17:9-10

Is your heart attitude leading you to life or death?