Sunday, March 21, 2010

70 x 7 = 490

I'll bet the very first thing you thought when you saw my title was "Oh, I am overjoyed. Jessica can do arithmetic."  Or perhaps you thought "It's about TIME for a post, it's been FOREVER!" In effort to be humble, however, I will assume that these posts have not been sorely missed for lack of depth, etc. The length of time between now and my last post, through the fault of my own, would be because I simply have not made the time to do so. I apologize, profusely. Anyway, today's post is about forgiveness. Oh yes. It's such a difficult thing when this "friend" was a real jerk to you and you just want to hold a grudge. Or when your brother (or sister) ...(or parents) really embarrassed you in front of your friends or annoyed you. It's just tough. However, Jesus says to do it. No matter what happened or what was said, Jesus wants us to forgive. We have to do it in order to glorify God.

I just want you to think about this for a second. Any POSSIBLE sin that anyone could POSSIBLY commit has been paid for by the blood of Christ. Not only that, but if someone has done something wrong against you, they did it directly to God too. The same goes for when you sin against someone else. You have hurt God, to His face. God is able to forgive at the drop of a hat! At the flip of a coin! If you made a mistake, would you not want your friend to forgive you? Or even if someone isn't your friend. If you are looking me in the computer screen right now, reading these very words and telling me that you are a serious Christian who is striving to obey Him, then shouldn't obeying HIM be the more important thing here? Seriously. If you honestly want to do what God says, it shouldn't be an issue to forgive someone who has wronged us. Whether that someone be a friend or someone you don't agree with or get along with very well. But it IS an issue. Why?

I mean it, WHY do we have such trouble forgiving? I know my struggles and areas of serious sin but I don't know yours. Heck, you may be the kind of person who forgives really easily! There is one person, I ain't saying names, that I have yet to fully forgive, to this day! I really want to get over that, and it's hard. Now, if I really wanted to start some kind of fight, I would just tell you to read my post on anger and then argue that forgiveness shouldn't be an issue because we shouldn't even be angry at somebody in the first place. This is assuming that we've already gotten really upset. Some reasons I, personally, might have trouble forgiving is because either my reputation has been ruined in someway, and I am selfishly dwelling on this imperfection that others might now know about or because I am jealous of that person. I mean, honestly, I am. I compare myself to people and when I see or know someone who I think is better than me, I am eager to cling to any flaw that I find out about. If that flaw happens to be something that they did to me, I don't want to forgive them because that would mean letting go of the one thing that I know isn't perfect about them. Selfish, isn't it. I think my next post'll be on jealousy.

Now, there are a million different reasons why you might harbor a grudge against someone. And frankly, I don't know what those are because every person is different. So, I encourage you to really think about WHY you don't want to forgive someone and really ask God to help you in that area of your walk with Him. To be plain and simple, God wants us to lean on Him, worship Him, be out-of-our-minds crazy about Him. We can't do that if we are busy thinking of ways to get back at someone or even just silently festering with fury at someone. We have to let it go. God will deal with them, it's not our business.

 Matthew 6:14-15
For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.

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