Sun 8 Mar, 2009
“When we forgive a debt or an offense or an injury, we don’t require a payment for settlement. That would be the opposite of forgiveness. If repayment is made to us for what we lost, there is no need for forgiveness. We have our due. Forgiveness assumes grace. If I am injured by you, grace lets it go. I don’t sue you. I forgive you. Grace gives what someone doesn’t deserve. That’s why forgiveness has the word give in it.
Forgiveness is not “getting” even. It is giving away the right to get even.
That is what God does to us when we trust Christ: “Everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name”
Reflecting on this I am struck the statement that grace gives what someone does not deserve. Typically when we ask forgiveness, he have harmed someone and in our act of asking forgiveness we hope the other person will accept our gesture and a relationship will be restored. However, what Jesus did was just the opposite. God, the injured party, initiated towards us and forgave us, while we were still in the act of injuring Him. It was a demonstration of His grace. He gave sinners what we did not deserve.
Questions. Did you ever consider that God loved sinners, while they were still in the act of sinning? To those whom God has shown his grace, he has no intention of ever getting even with those who previously rejected him, even if that rejection was throughout your entire life. Has God shown grace to you? How have you responded to that grace?
Quote from “The 50 Reasons Jesus Came to Die”.
Picture – The cross at Mount Erebus, Antarctica, commemorating the 1979 Air New Zealand Crash near Mount Erebus.
