Number two, the cure for anger is not prayer. Listen, I believe in prayer, I do, but I could pray for you 'til Jesus comes back and you're still going to be angry. The cure for anger is not prayer. The cure for anger is forgiving people. Now prayer might be the catalyst to get you to forgive somebody, but it's got to somehow end in you forgiving somebody. Listen - and I'm talking about this in terms of leadership. The people around you cannot grow without failing. You can't grow without failure. You can't help them grow if you're not willing to forgive them. There's an awesome story, a guy named Tom Watson Senior, he's the founder of IBM okay. In the middle of IBMs big growth they hired a new junior executive and within three months that junior executive made a decision and he made a mistake. He made a huge mistake and that huge mistake cost IBM $10 million okay, so $10 million this junior executive made a mistake.
Tom Watson Senior who is the founder of IBM asked to meet with him the next day, and so the guy for sure thought he was going to be fired so he walked in with his resignation letter and all this and he was deeply apologetic and repentant and that kind of stuff. He said it was a mistake, I'm sorry Mr Watson. I'll offer my resignation. I apologise to you, and Tom Watson Senior said man, I don't accept your resignation, nor was I calling you in here to fire you. I'm not going to fire a man that has just cost me $10 million to train. [Laughter] That would be dumb. You don't fire someone who's cost you $10 million to train; you forgive them, help them learn from it so that they can grow. See we have to create a culture of forgiveness. We have to create a culture of forgiveness. To forgive - this is how you forgive. You must identify what has been taken from you, and then cancel the debt. [Wow.]
Rabbis, including Jesus - this is so important on forgiveness - rabbis, including Jesus, define forgiveness as cancelling debt, cancelling debt. They do not define forgiveness as pretending like it didn't happen. They do not define forgiveness as forgetting. They do not define forgiveness as pretending it didn't hurt. If someone hurts you you could actually say listen, you hurt me real bad. It did hurt. It did hurt. What you did was wrong and it hurt me really bad - but here's what forgiveness is to Jesus. Forgiveness is you don't owe me any more. [Yes, that's right.] Whatever I feel like you owe me, you don't owe me. I have felt in the past like you owed me something because you took something from me, but from this point on it's not that what you did wasn't wrong, it's not that what you did didn't hurt. It's just from this moment on I cancel your debt. You don't owe me one more thing. You don't owe me one more thing. That is forgiveness. That's forgiveness.
One of the scariest verses in scripture is when Jesus said - He talked about this in Matthew 18. You guys know the story, it's the guy that owed more than he could ever pay the king and so the king cancelled his debt. Then the guy goes out and he finds a guy that owes him 300 denarii or something and he chokes him, and he has him put in prison until he could pay his debt back. Then word got back to the king and the king then pulled him in and said I forgave all that debt of yours and you didn't forgive this guy for his small debt? Are you kidding me? Then Jesus says so the king hands him over to the torturers to be tortured until he could pay his debt back and [unclear 00.49.05] then this is scary. Jesus said this is how My heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart. Yi-yi-yi right, because see here's the point of it. Here's the point. It is cancelling debt frees you up, like most of the time when people hurt you they couldn't pay you back even if they wanted to.
In extreme cases you really see this, like I had a 40 year old woman come to see me in my counselling office and her dad had sexually messed with her her whole childhood. Then her dad at 74 years old gets saved, 74, gives his heart to the Lord. He comes to her and asks for forgiveness for what he did, and he said to her I wish I could give you your childhood back. He wanted desperately to pay her what he owed her but could he? No way, he can't give her her childhood back, so even if he wanted to pay it he couldn't pay it. So what's the best thing for her to do? Cancel his debt. Why? Because if she holds - listen, if you hold a debt over somebody that they can't pay even if they want to, all that's going to do is torment you because they can't pay it. They absolutely can't pay it. It's forgiveness. It's forgiveness. Listen, it's very important. The story seems to indicate that one of the most important things about forgiveness is remembering what you've been forgiven from.