The Apostle Paul says that love keeps no record of wrong. [1Cor 13:5] The ESV translates this as resentment. Love is not resentful. Yet this lack of resentment is not always easy. In fact, resentment is the most natural response. After all, the "wrong" has left its psychic wound, and the smart lingers. Every time the perpetrator comes to mind, so does the wrong they did us. And the wound begins to throb once again.
I find that it is the way of the world to keep a very careful record of wrongs, but it is the way of Jesus to forgive and also forget. The deeper the wound, the harder this forgetting will be, but this is one of those things that we cannot do in our own power. Nobody said it wouldn't take a miracle!
The Christian life begins in an act of forgiveness, a setting aside of wrong. God treats the guilty one as if he were innocent, and the prodigal daughter is welcomed home with a feast. Sometimes, when you explain all this to an unbeliever, their faces cloud over and they say, "That's just not the way the world works." And sometimes believers say that too.
But God says, because I have loved you, loved you when you deserved nothing but punishment, you are enabled now to love as well. And love keeps no record of wrong.
To build your house on the rock is to walk in the way described by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus said, "If you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins." [Matthew 6:15] If the Spirit is forming us into the likeness of Jesus . . . and that's what should be happening to us as we walk with Him . . . then we will walk in love like Jesus did, keeping no record of wrong.
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