Tag Archives: mercy

IS GOD’S FORGIVENESS CONDITIONAL?

30 Friday May 2014

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Did you ever wonder what the part in the Lord’s Prayer that says “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” means?  I had always filed that one under “Theological Mysteries Too Deep for Me to Understand.”  Doesn’t God assure us ALL of our sins are forgiven because of Jesus’ death on the cross?  This seems to imply that He will only forgive as I forgive and I’m human.  If someone has done something really awful to me and I’m struggling to forgive them, does that mean God will not forgive some of my sins?

 I wasn’t going to take any chances with this and decided that forgiveness was to be my way of life.  I have some pretty bad sin in my life – bad.  I have spent the majority of my life serving myself at great cost to others.  But I claimed God’s promise that He forgives me for everything I’ve done as long as I am sincerely sorry and turn away from those things.  There is a lot of sin that a just, righteous God had to wipe from this sinner’s slate, and if He’s willing to do that for me, I will forgive whatever somebody has done to me.  Some wrongs are tougher than others and I often find myself struggling to stay at the proper level of forgiveness, but rather than dwell on what someone has done, I shift my focus to their need for God, remembering the time in my life when sin defined my life.  I concentrate on praying for them and for me.  Focusing on forgiveness and prayer keeps my thoughts away from what they have done.  God’s gift to me is a forgiving heart, which I feel very blessed to have.  Even with that, I have found it to be consistently and profoundly true that forgiveness may not do anything for the other person but it has set me free: so much less to fret about and stew over.

 So, despite not fully understanding what this part of the Lord’s Prayer means, I had it covered by my decision to just forgive.  Then a few weeks ago I was listening to Alistair Begg on the radio as he explained this passage.  Seems I’ve been taking the line too literally – no surprise there.  According to Pastor Begg, as sincere followers of Christ, our goal must be to forgive everyone of everything (forgive us as we forgive others) because that’s how God forgives those who accept His gift of salvation.  If we’re unable to do that, then we haven’t fully realized how detestable sin is to God; we haven’t acknowledged how abhorrent our sin is to Him, nor how great His gift of forgiveness is.  Once we fully understand the magnitude of God’s grace and mercy we will be able to forgive seventy times seven times.  It’s something we will work on as long as we walk on the earth, but it is to be our goal. To choose not to forgive someone and stick to that decision is a clear indicator that we haven’t grasped how wretched we are without Jesus.

 Psalm 51: 3, 4 – “ For I acknowledge my transgressions, And my sin is always before me. Against You, You only, have I sinned,”

 As humans we rate sin – murder is worse than a lie, lying is worse than stealing my pen from work, stealing my pen from work is worse than using God’s name in vain.  But whatever you consider the smallest sin separates you from God.  We must look at sin from God’s viewpoint, not our own.  In His eyes, no matter how “small” the sin, the object of His great love – YOU – are separated from Him.  That grieves God.

 Mark 5:34: “And He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well.  Go in peace, and be healed of your affliction.”

 Grace is relatively easy to understand intellectually.  Jesus paid our debt and God no longer holds us accountable for any of our sins – not a single one.  In my mind I understand that.  But truly comprehending how great His mercy is is extremely difficult.  If I have spent my entire life repeatedly committing the sin I think is the absolute worst one, but right before I die I sincerely accept Jesus as my Savior, God forgives me. He said He would and I expect Him to do that.  And He expects me to forgive everyone of everything without keeping record of the offenses.  Too much to ask from a human being?  Yep.  But I can do it because His Spirit dwells in me and I call on His power to get me to the place He expects me to be.  I can’t just consider forgiveness; I can’t reason through a situation to determine if I will or won’t forgive; I certainly can’t make a decision about forgiving someone based on worldly rationale because the world will tell me I certainly do not have to forgive everyone of everything all the time.  From a worldly perspective I cannot accept that someone like Jeffrey Dahmer could be forgiven.  But God clearly tells me otherwise.  The world rails at the thought of a child molester being forgiven.  But God will forgive anyone that is clothed in Jesus’ righteousness.  That’s the magnitude of His forgiveness that I have to understand.  And if I cannot understand it, I simply must accept it and trust Him in that.

 As a Christian I am held to a very high standard.  That standard is not another human being – my standard is Jesus.  God’s work in me is conforming me to His image, not to the image of the “goodest” person I know.   When forgiveness is hard, I remind myself that, had I done something as horrible as Mr. Dahmer, the moment I accepted Christ’s death as payment for my sins, I would have been forgiven.  That’s God’s promise.  Learning to forgive is part of our sanctification – part of becoming more like Christ.  We must constantly be working on it.  If there’s someone you haven’t forgiven because you feel justified that what they did was so bad you need not forgive them; perhaps someone keeps hurting you time and time again and you have stopped even considering the need to forgive them, you can know you haven’t fully grasped how abhorrent your sin is and how great God’s forgiveness is.

 Luke 11:3, 4 – “Give us day by day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins, For we also forgive everyone who is indebted to us.”

 God’s forgiveness is not conditional.  This statement in our Lord’s Prayer is a reminder of what God has set as our goal.  If there are still people in our lives we are struggling to forgive, we can know we haven’t fully grasped the magnitude of what God has done for us.  We haven’t fully realized how wretched we are without Christ.

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HIS GRACE IS [ENOUGH; AS MUCH AS IS NEEDED]

22 Saturday Mar 2014

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What was going on during the 400 years between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament?  I don’t know a lot about that period of history, but I do know that the Jewish religious leaders spent a lot of their time adding details to the ten laws God had given them to insure everyone was following them in the strictest sense.  “Don’t pick up your mat on the Sabbath” – they decided that was work.  “Don’t pick one piece of grain from the field on the Sabbath” – they decided that was harvesting, thus it was work.”  By the time they were done adding minute details to insure compliance, there were thousands of laws the Jewish people had to keep track of.  There must have been a shared belief that it was possible to be in complete obedience to God’s Laws if they could list all the behaviors they considered to be in violation and punish those who did not comply.  Without considering all of the theological and historical facts of what was actually going on, that’s my simplistic take on what they were trying to do.  They just kept burdening the people by adding more and more details to the Law. 

Mark 3:2-6 ESV – “And they watched Jesus, to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man with the withered hand, “Come here.” And he said to them, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.”

It is easy for us to see the error of the religious leaders.  But adding rules and requirements to God’s gift of salvation is something most of us regularly do, though it is generally less obvious to us.  We accept Christ’s payment of our sin debt as a gift initially, but as we live out our faith, we unwittingly add “details” and expect ourselves and others to comply with our ideas of Godly behavior.  I often find myself calculating the hours I spend reading my Bible or praying to insure I am devoting enough time to my relationship with God – what “enough time” is I’m not sure.  I worry that I haven’t found a meaningful way to serve others: proof that I am not yet worthy of being His child.  Grace IS amazing and I have to remind myself every day that I don’t have to add anything to it.  Of course, I need to be doing – but living out the love I have for God is not the same as the misguided notion that what I am doing is earning my salvation.  

Ephesians 2:8-10 – “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”

Almost every day I read something about things we must include in our Christian walk to assure us of our salvation.  A Pentecostal friend doubts my salvation because I don’t speak in tongues.  I ran across a website that says being baptized isn’t simply an act of obedience but a requirement for salvation.  Churches often adopt a written statement of how its members will conduct themselves, listing behaviors that they will and will not engage in.  For grace to be free, and His Word assures us that it is, there can be no signs or behaviors required, except this one:  to believe that Jesus is God in human form and that His death is the only way we can be made righteous before God and thereby be reconciled to Him.  Period. 

Romans 11:6 – “But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace.”

It’s easy to tell others all of the things we stopped or started doing as a result of our relationship with Christ.  But when non-believers, new Christians or unlearned believers hear these things, they conclude that God loves us based on the things we do or do not do.  They cannot separate these things from the concept of grace that we try to explain.  Just as the Pharisees kept the Jewish people accountable for every detail of the Law, those we are trying to help find Christ believe they must be “in compliance” with the “laws” we hold about following Christ and know they will fail, so they choose not to take part.  How much better if Christians talked as much about free grace as we do about acceptable behavior – or better yet, provide examples of God’s grace through our own lives. 

Psalm 14:2-3 – “The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man, to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God. They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good, not even one.”

In order to appreciate this amazing free gift of grace, we need to understand how God views Sin.  Once we understand how vile it is to Him, we begin to understand what is so amazing about His grace.  Think about forgiving a murderer for killing an innocent child, then take it to the next level – pay his debt to society for him; serve his prison sentence even when it means you will be executed for the crime. We murder our relationship with God when we choose Sin over Him.  We are the murderer taking from God what He loves.  Our sentence was death but God paid it, not simply by forgiving us but actively paying the debt required.

Once we comprehend God’s grace to us, there is another challenge:  extending God’s grace to others, again, not as a requirement of salvation but as a way to show others the extent of God’s love for us.  While we may find extending mercy – the opposite side of the grace/mercy coin – a bit easier because it is deciding NOT to do what we feel we have a right to do, grace modeled on God’s example requires action most often in direct opposition to what our human nature wants to do. God’s grace isn’t merely a decision to forgive us when we don’t deserve it.  He DID something – He left His glorious home and came to earth where He suffered rejection, humiliation, and a painful death.  God’s example of grace is the model for our treatment of those who have wronged us – to do the unexpected, something non-believers would deem “over-the-top” – forgive the murderer, sure, but how about developing a relationship with him because he doesn’t know Christ; forgive the woman at work who stole your idea and, as a result, got that promotion, but also send her a card or a gift congratulating her, knowing God is in control of your life and your rewards are eternal.  Once we grasp the extent of God’s grace to us and stand in genuine awe of it, over-the-top behavior can become our new normal.  What a difference that would make in our world!

“Amazing grace, …  saved a wretch like me.”

LET YOUR GENTLENESS BE KNOWN TO ALL

04 Saturday Jan 2014

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One of the biggest struggles I face in my Christian walk is sharing the Gospel with a gentle, loving spirit.  When someone makes a comment challenging what I believe, I immediately begin to feel angry, frustrated and anxious as I anticipate what they might say or how they will react to His message.  I knew I had a lot to overcome before I could effectively obey God’s command to share His plan of salvation with “the whole world”.  To begin with, I have a fear of talking to people about anything! Over the last four years, I haven’t grown very confident at effectively sharing my testimony, explaining God’s plan of salvation and why we need Jesus.  As I continued to struggle to master the art of “witnessing,” I recalled a book I read after I first became a Christian titled Learning Evangelism from Jesus by Jerram Barrs. Who better to learn evangelism from than Jesus Himself?! The book looks at a number of encounters Jesus had with religious leaders, the Jewish people and other unbelievers and how He handled each situation. As I reviewed the book, I was reminded that the root of my problem is not so much my inability to control my emotions as much as it is a problem of pride and lack of mercy for the lost. 

Deuteronomy 4:29 – “But if you seek the Lord your God from there, you will find him, if, indeed, you seek him with all your heart and soul.”

For most of my life, I let pride keep me from God.  Pride kept me from listening to sincere Christians and reading the Bible without constantly objecting to its words.  It was only after I began to earnestly seek Him that my pride took a back seat to my desire to find out who God really is.  I was blessed to have a few Christians in my life who shared their experiences and knowledge with patience, love and gentleness.  I didn’t have anyone belittling me or “assaulting” me with their knowledge or religious practices.  They answered my questions and suggested material to read after I talked with them.  Now that I have committed my life to Christ, my job is to share His message and I must do it in the same way these people shared with me, remembering that most may not be ready to hear what I am trying to tell them.  They are waiting for me to say or do one thing that reinforces all the negative things they have come to believe about Christ’s followers.

Luke 18:14 – “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

For the past three years, Christmas has brought a fair amount of anxiety to me as I watch and listen to Christians lamenting our culture’s efforts to remove Christ from our observance of this holiday and deciding to prove their love for Christ by insisting everyone use the phrase “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays.”  This year I read the most disheartening post yet in this battle.  It read: “Merry Christmas.  I hope this post offends as many people as possible.”  I suppose on the one hand this message could be interpreted as the sender wanting as many people as possible just to read it and remember that Christmas is about Jesus’ birth, knowing many are offended by Him.  But rest assured most unbelievers will only use it to confirm the widespread belief that Christians believe themselves to be “holier than thou,” self-righteous, and uncaring.  No, a conscious effort to offend is not the way to convince them to seek God.   Before I found Christ, a message like that would have strengthened my resolve not to be involved with people who had such an attitude.  It saddens me that Christians resort to such tactics and people jump on the bandwagon believing they are fighting a valiant war for their Savior.  But offending people is not how Christ taught us to fight His battle and we must always hold up Him up as our example.

Luke 18:9 – “Jesus also told this parable to some who were confident that they were righteous and looked down on everyone else”

I heard Hank Hanegraaff say this past month in a discussion about Christmas in today’s culture: “Pagans are going to fulfill their job description.  The question is will Christians fulfill theirs?”  Our job as a Christian is not to constantly remind unbelievers that they are wrong.  Our job isn’t even to reclaim December as the month to celebrate Jesus’ birth.  Our job ALWAYS is TO LEAD OTHERS TO CHRIST by sharing the Gospel message.  If we were to consistently do that, December could become the month Jesus’ birth once again becomes the main focus.  Those we help find Christ will realize they have been wrong through our testimonies and acts of love towards them, not through phrases meant to offend.  We have to remember where unbelievers are and stop expecting them to behave like believers.  We must guard against pride and a critical spirit.  Jerram Barrs reminds us who Jesus will hold accountable for wrong motives (Learning Evangelism from Jesus): “We do not see Jesus condemning the sinners in the world; rather, He condemns the leaders of God’s people with His severest words.”

I spent some time during the last month talking with a man who claimed to be a believer but all he could tell me was how wrong God has been, how he doesn’t need God to tell him what’s right and wrong, and all the errors and crimes against humanity he finds in the Bible.  Each time I knew I would be talking to him, I found my anger and anxiety rising.  It occurred to me that I needed to learn how to handle this situation calmly and in a way that communicates respect.  This man needed to know that my primary concern is that he comes to a right understanding of God not to argue and get him to admit I’m right and he’s wrong.  Until I can present the Gospel as Christ did, God cannot use me to reach others. I began asking God to remind me of where I was before I surrendered to Him and who I am without Christ. 

Philippians 4:5 – “Let your gentleness be known to all men.”

I also realized I was trying to develop my skills at sharing the Gospel under my own power – forgetting I can rely on the Holy Spirit. Before interacting with this man, I prayed.  I prayed during the conversation and God kept bringing encouraging thoughts to my mind:  it’s OK if I don’t know an answer; it’s OK if the conversation ends and I don’t feel I’ve changed his mind; I am only planting seeds; only God can bring in the harvest.  God brought appropriate Scripture to my mind that might help him see God’s true character.  I allowed God to “proofread” my responses and found myself replacing a LOT of words that reflected pride, sarcasm, arrogance, anger, even shock at some of the things this man was saying.

Isaiah 55:11 – “So shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth; It shall not return to Me void,”

I never got a response from the man after my last message so I don’t know how effective I was or if my words helped him understand God better.  But I know that as long as I speak the Truth in gentleness and kindness, my efforts are never in vain.  I pray God can use my words to lead this person to Him, but, if I blew it in some way, I know God can overcome that.  I do know He used the experience to teach me how to serve Him better.

1 Corinthians 8:1,2-“…Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.  The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know. “

Sharing God’s Word is what I am called to do to help bring others to understand their need for Jesus.  I do not share His message to demonstrate my knowledge about Him.  I don’t share it to be “right.”  I talk to unbelievers for one reason only – in hopes they will seek Christ. 

Jerram Barrs: “…if I have a hard heart toward the unbelievers and sinners around me, then it is a certain sign that I do not have a good understanding of my own sin and unbelief, nor of my own need before Jesus for His continual mercy and forgiveness.”