“As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.” ~ Colossians 3:13b
My God and cleanser of my soul, I thank you for forgiving me of my sins by nailing them to the cross, “canceling the record of debt that stood against me with its legal demands.” You have cast them into the depth of the sea and promised never to bring them up against me again. For that is what forgiveness is: paying a debt and never mentioning it again. Yes, forgiveness is an act of grace, and it has freely flown down upon me like an overflowing river of blessing that waters the soil of my heart that it may bring life and freedom. As your word encourages me, “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
Yet I am so aware of my propensity to be hard hearted and unforgiving. Being one who is not condemned, I so easily condemn. Being so richly forgiven, I am so slow to forgive. Having the floodgates of grace opened up to me, I tend to build dams that restrict the flow to others. My flesh is quick to inflict justice, but so stubbornly resistant to release mercy.
I well know that this is not consistent with how you have treated me, and I fear that I have taken your grace for granted, considering my own forgiveness an entitlement. Maybe my refusal to forgive, but to grow bitter and resentful, is why my heart becomes so stagnant and lifeless. And when that happens in my heart, I become cold and indifferent even to you. Especially to you.
I know it is true and I despise the condition, for in your kindness you have shown me that forgiveness is not merely a legal transaction, but is the entryway into a grace-oriented, love-saturated relationship. In Jesus, you have taken away my sin so that I may know and enjoy you, without the fear of the law’s legal demands (which the gospel tells me the he fulfilled on my behalf). No, forgiveness does not merely displace me from penalty, it draws me into your embrace, like the younger brother to his love-sick father, so that I may know that I am accepted… and have been missed. And so when I do not forgive, my own spiritual health suffers. I grow distant from the God who has pledged himself to be my Father, Friend, Savior and Lord.
And so, in view of your great mercy to me, I do desire to forgive. But let it begin with my own forgiveness. May I begin again today in the gospel’s promise that I am forgiven, and that with the blood of Jesus over my life, my new sins are forgiven before I even repent. O blessed is the man whose transgressions the Lord does not count against him. Father, I am such a blessed man!
As I am learning, forgiveness is an implication of the gospel and an overflow of grace. So may your act of grace toward me in the Savior be the fuel that empowers me to forgive others from my heart, and not merely out of obligation. May your forgiving love and grace overflow in my heart with a floodtide desire to extend debt-paying, throw-it-into-the-sea casting, genuinely reconciling forgiveness to my debtors. I trust that the result will be, not only a blessing to the one forgiven, but an unexpected joy in my own heart, as one who is learning to break the dam, release the grace, and have the resurrection life of Jesus lived through me.
