Posts Tagged ‘forgive’

Baggage

Feb
1

I don’t know how many times I have heard people talk about getting revenge.  “I am going to get them back!”  And I’m not talking about when you’re playing around or having water balloon fights or things like that.  I mean when people have taken serious offence to something, and they will not rest until they’ve had vengeance.  Why do people feel so passionate about causing someone else pain?  Do they really think that will end the cycle?  Do they really think the other person will passively accept retaliation without escalating the conflict?  And when I’ve asked, “Well why don’t you just forgive them?” it’s like asking them to cut off their own arm.  “FORGIVE THEM?!  I can’t forgive them!  Do you realize what they did to me?  I’ll forgive them after I get them back.”  So they wind up, whether they exact vengeance o r not, carrying around this baggage of anger and bitterness and animosity, and completely miss the opportunity for healing in any direction.

I think that’s why Jesus said if you don’t forgive other people when they hurt you, then he won’t forgive you for hurting him.  Think about the wicked choices people make that shatter their relationship with God.  You can probably list quite a few sins.  Think about what Jesus sacrificed his life for.  Without his forgiveness, you will never restore that relationship.  Basically Jesus said, “If you refuse to forgive, you will go to Hell.”  After all the pain you’ve caused your own Creator, who has a love for you the size of infinity and therefore can feel the pain of your selfish hatred more than you can imagine, you can’t be his friend if you can’t let a little of your own earthly pain slide.  It’s completely hypocritical to expect forgiveness if you’re not willing to give it.

So besides the fact that you risk your soul by not forgiving, you miss the chance for reconciliation with others.  You can build relationships through forgiveness.  You can introduce others to the grace of God because they got a taste of his forgiveness through your grace.  God likes a BIG family.  And if you can’t see fit to add more people to it by building relationships instead of denying them through unforgiveness, then you’ve got no place in the Kingdom of God.

How’s that make you feel?

and Justice for All

Sep
13

This is kind of a continuation of “Well FORGIVE me!”  It deals with the place of forgiveness in situations of repeated abuse.  Can you mesh forgiveness with justice?  Is there a way to give grace without promoting lawlessness?

I don’t mention this in the talk, but if you think about it, the answer to that questions was Jesus giving his life on the cross.  If God wanted to forgive everybody without any desire for change, Jesus wouldn’t have needed to die.  God could have just said “I forgive everybody no matter what.”  And it would have allowed everybody to continue living wicked and selfish lives.  But then Heaven and Earth would both be places of eternal evil because the law would have been thrown away to make place for universal forgiveness.  But in making his ultimate sacrifice, Jesus demonstrated the legal consequence of our evil as a motivation for us to stop breaking God’s law and live a life in accordance with all God asks of us.  So if we are willing to turn away from our selfish lawlessness and obey God, he can forgive us and promote justice at the same time.

Jesus said “Those who obey my commandments are the ones who love me.”  So if we truly care about Jesus and what he said and did for us, our lives must be changed out of our love for him.  We can’t live as enemies of God if we truly love him.  So when people say something like “Just ask Jesus into your heart” it’s never some mantra or empty religious ritual that saves you.  It’s the fact that the love Jesus demonstrated for us with his life, death, and resurrection, motivates us to return love to him and live lives that will make him happy.  We enter into a relationship of mutual love and find forgiveness, not as a technicality for some empty prayer, but out of deep desire for God to be reunited with us in purity and righteousness.

So real grace not only forgives a perpetrator, but also promotes his or her best interest, which is eternal righteousness in accordance with God’s law.

Get it?

Well FORGIVE me!!!

Sep
11

How many times have you heard someone say they’re sorry, but their tone clearly revealed that they weren’t sorry at all?  How many times have you been the person doing just that?  It seems like people in our culture have a difficult time actually allowing themselves to regret a wrong action or feel sorrow for hurting someone else or even admit that they did anything wrong.  We always like to come up with excuses for our behavior.  It seems even more difficult for some people to actually forgive when they’ve been hurt.  So what do we do with all that emotion?  And does giving or receiving forgiveness actually do us any good?  What do you think?

This talk I gave last year was an emotional one for me.  I even felt choked up listening to it again.  But I sure am glad to have learned some things about dealing with this stuff in my own life.  What experiences have you had that you’ve learned from?

Don’t go to church

Aug
27

Plenty of people go to church on Sundays and sit in a pew and think that pretty much covers their religious quota for the week.  But Jesus had some pretty strong ideas about religion and what kind of impact it ought to have in real life.  This talk explores some of those ideas and how they might affect life today.