Settle it Now
“Reach a settlement quickly with your adversary while you’re on the way with him to the court” – Matthew 5:25
Jesus had a way of taking big spiritual truths and laying them out in real, practical terms. In His teaching in Matthew 5, He paints a picture of someone being taken to court over an unpaid debt. If you owed someone money and didn’t pay it back, you were thrown in prison. And from there, you were stuck. No work, no income, no freedom. The only way out was to pay up... but you couldn’t. So the sentence became permanent.
That’s the picture Jesus uses to warn us about unresolved conflict. He’s not just talking about lawsuits or financial debts. He’s talking about the spiritual cost of holding onto offense, bitterness, or brokenness in a relationship. If you let that conflict keep going, if you keep delaying the hard conversation or putting off the apology, there will come a point when it’s too late to make it right.
There’s an urgency in His words: Settle it now. Not later. Not eventually. Now. Because unresolved conflict doesn’t stay still. It festers. It grows. And eventually, it builds a wall that’s not just between you and the other person, but between you and God.
Romans 12:18 says, “If possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” In other words, you might not be able to fix everything, but you can do your part. You can humble yourself. You can take the first step. You can choose to forgive or confess or call or write or meet and deal with it.
Jesus is reminding us, don’t carry that brokenness all the way to judgment. Don’t let it become a prison. Settle it now. Free yourself by making things right while you still have the chance. Because if you keep putting it off, the cost only gets higher.
Jesus had a way of taking big spiritual truths and laying them out in real, practical terms. In His teaching in Matthew 5, He paints a picture of someone being taken to court over an unpaid debt. If you owed someone money and didn’t pay it back, you were thrown in prison. And from there, you were stuck. No work, no income, no freedom. The only way out was to pay up... but you couldn’t. So the sentence became permanent.
That’s the picture Jesus uses to warn us about unresolved conflict. He’s not just talking about lawsuits or financial debts. He’s talking about the spiritual cost of holding onto offense, bitterness, or brokenness in a relationship. If you let that conflict keep going, if you keep delaying the hard conversation or putting off the apology, there will come a point when it’s too late to make it right.
There’s an urgency in His words: Settle it now. Not later. Not eventually. Now. Because unresolved conflict doesn’t stay still. It festers. It grows. And eventually, it builds a wall that’s not just between you and the other person, but between you and God.
Romans 12:18 says, “If possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” In other words, you might not be able to fix everything, but you can do your part. You can humble yourself. You can take the first step. You can choose to forgive or confess or call or write or meet and deal with it.
Jesus is reminding us, don’t carry that brokenness all the way to judgment. Don’t let it become a prison. Settle it now. Free yourself by making things right while you still have the chance. Because if you keep putting it off, the cost only gets higher.
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