Today I preached on a passage out of Romans 12, where the Apostle Paul encourages his audience to not take revenge and to trust God to deal with vengeance. My main point was that we don't really trust God on this (and other issues.) We take revenge in all kinds of ways. We refuse to forgive those who wrong us. We feel the need to punish them by reminding them of their failures. We withhold our love. We shame them. It doesn't matter if they are our spouses, our parents, our children, our peers or our bosses. We all to often find ways to take revenge. My own personal favorite is to remind people that they are wrong and I am right; an "I told you so" of sorts.
I got a lot of good feed back from those who where there.
But I failed to give some good "putting things into practice" steps for those who came to listen. So I thought I would make a short list of things that might need addressing in our lives
1. Make a list of those people that you feel the need to correct and point out their sin (short comings).
2. Pray and ask God for forgiveness if you have been motivated by anything other than love (1 Cor. 13 applies).
3. Forgive them for being imperfect;-).
4. Make apologies and reparation where necessary
5. Make a plan to work at blessing others rather than punishing or cursing them
