Wednesday, January 2, 2008

The Wicked King and His Slave

A wicked king whipped a hardened criminal, and few took notice of his action. However, when the king whipped his righteous slave for a trivial matter, all who witnessed it marked the injustice and remembered it in their hearts.

A few years passed, and the people, tired of his tyranny, rose up and overthrew the king, placing him into prison. Remembering the good slave, they went to him and made him a duke of a land.

Later, these same men saw the new duke, who had once been a slave himself, whipping one of his own slaves over a minor fault, they immediately seized him, threw him into chains, and put him in the deepest and darkest of prisons.

“Why did you do this to me?” he asked.

“Because we saw you when you were oppressed, and we freed you. Here you are doing the same thing that your wicked master was doing.”

“But this was only one act of injustice. My master was far more cruel than I have ever been.”

“But you lived under his tyranny,” they told him. “You above all others should have understood the mercy that was shown to you. And you should have sought to show mercy to others every day of your life. But because you ignored the gift you received, and chose to use your new power to repress your former brothers, you will be treated worse than the tyrant.”

So the Lord has given you a gift of salvation from the wickedness of your former life. But if you choose to use this gift as a seat from which to judge others and cause others pain, then not only will salvation be stripped from you, but you will be treated worse than if you had lived every day in wickedness, never having known salvation in the first place.

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