Greetings All,
This week's 'thoughts' come from a British lady named Joyce Huggett, and are taken from her book,
"All Through the Year." They have to do with one of the most difficult
of all biblical commands -- the command to forgive others, as well
as the command to believe the promise of forgiveness (the Gospel) for
ourselves. 
And if you're wondering if the the
first of these thoughts (about forgiving others) might
apply to you, it doesn't usually take much time. For when we harbor
unforgiveness, a person, or a face, or a memory usually pops up within
just a few seconds of even hearing the challenge to do so. One may have
popped
up for you while you were reading that sentence, reminding you of
the need to forgive someone, or forgive them again. Because as I have
learned, in cases of deep hurt or offense, forgiveness usually involves
more than a one time, "I forgive them." It involves an ongoing
commitment to release the person from what we believe is our justifiable
right to harbor anger, retaliate, desire them harm, or refuse them the grace of forgiveness. 
And I say, "the grace of forgiveness," because oftentimes it's a forgiveness they don't deserve, and grace is undeserved favor. It means extending a grace which allows us to practice the very difficult obedience of "forgiving others as God in Christ has forgiven us" (Eph. 4:32 / Matt. 6:14-15).
The second thought also
addresses something difficult for us to do (as I pointed out in my
message on Sunday). It's the difficulty believers often have in fully
accepting the forgiveness Christ secured for them on the cross when He
poured out His life-blood unto death to atone for all of their sins -- even the worst ones. Something that is often much harder for us to do than we tend to think.
These thoughts, then, address both
aspects of forgiveness: The need for believers to forgive
others, and the need for those same believers to fully embrace and
accept the forgiveness Christ purchased for them. Enjoy.
" 'I don't get mad. I just get
even.' We smile when slogans like that greet us from the back
window of people's cars. Yet such tit-for-tat thinking is part of the
clutter which sometimes hinders our prayer, because it is incompatible
with Jesus' teaching on forgiveness. To forgive means to let go of
resentment and bitterness, hatred and anger. To forgive means to let
the offending person off the hook. To forgive means to cancel the debt
we feel they owe us. To forgive is therefore extremely costly. And it
happens in stages.
Forgiveness
begins by feeling the full brunt of the pain and recognising that we
have every reason to feel hurt as well as every right to want to
retaliate; to hit back; to hurt as we've been hurt. But forgiveness
continues by making a deliberate choice to refuse to exercise that
right. By engaging the will, forgiveness drops any accusations we might
wish to make and switches off the gas which
has kept our anger simmering. Yet forgiveness goes even further.
While refusing to deny that we have been hurt, it searches for
acceptable and significant ways of serving the one who harmed us in the
first place. This, as least, is forgiveness following the pattern of
Jesus." 
Sometimes we forget
that forgiveness (in Christian circles) is defined by what Jesus did on
the cross. And since it is, forgiveness means "paying for another the
debt they deserve for their sins against us." That's what Jesus did to
purchase and secure our forgiveness -- He paid the penalty for our
offenses against God (which, as those who believe in the Trinity, means
sins committed against Himself). He freed us from the penalty we
deserve for our willful, and intentional, as well as
unintentional, offenses against Him. That's what forgiveness is:
Choosing, like Jesus, to pay the debt of sin, or cancel the debt of sins, which someone has committed against us -- hard as that always seems to be.
------------------------------
Then Huggett moves on to what may be an equally difficult thing for us
to do -- fully embrace and accept the complete forgiveness
Christ purchased and secured on the cross for all who would ever place
their faith and trust for salvation in Him.
"Introverts are good at confessing and bad at receiving forgiveness,
particularly if they come from an evangelical background. I am an
introvert, and an evangelical, and these words of Thomas Merton never
cease to
amaze me.
'We are not permitted to nurse a sense of guilt. We must fully and completely accept
and embrace His forgiveness and love. Guilt feeling and inferiority feeling before God
are expressions of selfishness, of self-centeredness. We give greater importance to
our little sinful self than to His immense and never-ending love. We must surrender
our guilt and our inferiority
to Him. His goodness is greater than our badness. We
must accept His joy in loving and forgiving us (Heb. 12:2). It is healing grace to
surrender our sinfulness to His mercy.' "
With you in the battle to forgive and fully accept forgiveness
Pastor Jeff
