Forgiveness, the Patience of God

Patience—the patience of God—is a gift God offers to humankind.  Being a gift, it is FREE.  It costs nothing to claim it, and it isn’t even hard to claim.

But we must be WILLING to receive it.

It requires surrender at one level and commitment on another.  It requires us to go against the flow of our carnal selves, and against the ebb of our self-sufficiency, and to choose instead to live in the lap of the will of God—which seems hard, but it is actually the easiest of things from the point of view of surrender and commitment.  That’s when it becomes hard—because unless we are surrendered and committed, we don’t get it.

In and of itself, patience as a gift is first a choice 
to act patiently, one moment at a time.
What motivates the choice that becomes 
an action is another thing entirely.

~

Patience is good for us because it is good for others, 
and because it is good for others and therefore us, 
we will ALL thrive and grow 
when we are able to demonstrate patience.

Think about it, patience is such a wonderful gift to receive.  It is the very exemplification of grace.  And this heralds the fact and theology of God’s grace.  If another person’s patience is a wonderful grace to receive, think about the gift of salvation—God’s eternal patience—expressed as a plan, conceived from before the beginning of time.

Ah, SALVATION, the gravity and the gift of salvation.

We take our salvation for granted to our detriment, yet when we are grateful for it, the simplest and most powerful of blessings, our lives are enhanced and transformed, and we tap into patience for ourselves and others ever more.  It really is very simple and this patience we tap into as if it were on tap.  Like with all things of God, the depths of goodness can neither be plumbed nor fathomed.

And it is this patience that augments the grace of forgiveness.

TWO TYPES OF PATIENCE – EASY & HARD

Just to be clear, there are what I see to be two types of patience, one that is hard and one that is easy.  The hard patience we’ve all experienced when we’ve earnestly sought to be patient.  It’s when we MUST be patient and we choose to be patient, a thing of great discipline.  It’s the type where patience is wisdom, a real character competency.

The easy patience is more a gift of God, 
and it is to be nurtured 
through surrender and commitment.

Easy patience is when we find that our faith fortified by the Holy Spirit to such an extent that there is no sign of anger that might have previously been there.  When we have been graced with this type of easy patience, we cannot explain it, but it is so easy—the truest of gifts.

Hard patience is the typical kind that we experience a lot in our more carnal existence in life.  The truth is this is the most common patience.  It is patience despite the presence of frustration and anger.  It is the overcoming of these.  It is the type of patience where we grit our teeth to get through, choosing joy despite hardship.  It is the type of patience that has the appearance of patience without being a patience gifted to us as easy patience is.  But it is still a good form of Christian patience, and this kind of patience is emblematic of most seasons of our lives if we are honest.

True patience, therefore, is easy patience—the patience of God.  A forgiving patience.  Easy patience—or holy patience—is the patience of Jesus, who is Perfect Patience.

JESUS IS PERFECT PATIENCE

Jesus was called “Perfect Patience” by early church father, Cyprian of Carthage (210–258), not least by his approach with Judas Iscariot and Saul who became Paul, both of whom we can relate with.  By this Cyprian connects patience with both wisdom and humility, but not in common, worldly ways that are ‘perfectible’.

The wisdom and humility of Christ is in knowing that all is well as all ends well—which is applied as the prophetic nature of practical faith.  Hebrews 11:1 puts it well: “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”

As easy patience can only come from a full unequivocal momentary willing surrender to God, by the unconditional acceptance of the uncontrollable purposes of life, such a surrender equips the person with easy patience because nothing—yes, absolutely nothing—is coveted.  There is no greed, nor envy, nor jealousy, nor lust, nor anger.  There is no pride.  No sin, whatsoever.  As mere human beings, this can only be mastered one moment at a time.

In this, the easy patience is exemplified in us, as Jesus was and is and ever will be, by the Holy Spirit, Perfect Patience.

PATIENCE, WHAT IS IT IF NOT FOR THE FRUIT OF FORGIVENESS?

The real blessing that comes from forgiveness is patience for self, for others, for life.

This is because within patience is the peace of a heart that is right with God and therefore life, and this is the case because forgiveness is right—right before God, right for us, right for others—and when we do what is right, we enjoy peace as a result.

This is an incredible reality of BEING to live, as to experience.

This is the pinnacle of Christian faith, to be a living, breathing testimony of the grace of God.  It is what it means to live in the fullness of eternity right here on earth—“on earth as it is in heaven.”  It does not mean that the carnal nature has been perfectly transcended, but the blessed peace that comes from patience as the fruit of forgiveness is a reward for having faith sufficient to forgive. This is because we have trusted the Word of God to the extent of forgiving in advance of the blessing promised because it is the right thing to do.

WHAT DOES PATIENCE AS FORGIVENESS LOOK LIKE?

Both the means and the end transcending the means, patience is something that enables forgiveness, and it is the blessing that comes from forgiveness.

Patience and forgiveness are hence intertwined and interdependent.  The former is the blessing promised from forgiveness, but it is also required input to forgive.  Patience will help with forgiveness as forgiveness will also help with patience.  And because patience mitigates anger it promotes peace and wellbeing, and we should all want it.

Patience humbles us to acknowledge we must do 
what we cannot do without God.

Whenever we have struggled to forgive, perhaps we have also struggled to comprehend the interchangeability and blessedness of patience.  Patience mitigates the pride that stifles forgiveness.

THE MOTIVE FOR PATIENCE

“What’s in it for me?”  It’s an ever-relevant question.  It speaks to the concept of motivation. Motivation is humanity’s drive to do what inspires it to do.  So, what inspires patience?  What makes patience important to do?

Centrally, patience must be about overcoming our desire and need of comfort.  Surrender our insistence that we be comforted, and everything we truly need (which is little) will be granted to us, such is the spirit and pledge of Matthew 6:33.

Being that patience is a perfect way to express and operationalise forgiveness, given that it is a key fruit of forgiveness, and given that forgiveness is THE way to access peace in our lives, that ought to be sufficient motive to endeavour upon the mastery of patience.

It is worth losing our lives to save them in Jesus’ name through a patience that masters every situation because there are too many petty situations we lose our patience for.  And from this perspective all situations and gains are petty compared with the prize of patience.

Think about it.  If we were able to always maintain our patience we would have constant access to peace, and we would be the safest and most trustworthy of persons.  Obedient to God, great for others!

Such patience is full of integrity and humility,
it mirrors the faithfulness of God.
~
It is indeed what God is calling us to.

So the motive for patience is a life wisely lived, for there is hardly a wiser way to live life than to agree to live for patience.  And think about that from an endpoint of view.  To achieve such patience there must be the truest and rightest setting for what is important in life.

The end justifies the means—as a faithful promise
—and—by faith—the means produces the end.

The patience of God is a patience to emulate.  As God is slow to anger and abounding in love, we are to grow into such a patience that others remark about the peace we have.  It is blessed to be a blessing, and in this context, this is no cliché.  It is the power of God, the power of forgiveness, that indwells it.

So, Lord, bless the reader to imbibe 
such a mission for Your patience,
in augmenting Your forgiveness in their lives.

Forgiveness, the Love of God

If not for love, we would not exist.  Love brought us into being, love made us free for a free will.  Love made a way for us to return to God having failed love.  And love sustains us, eternally.

God’s love.  For God is love.

God’s love sustains us,
whether we acknowledge it or not.

God’s love is intricately woven into all creation, from every nuance of intelligent design to the concept of the family unit, to the purpose of love in procreation, to the fact that all creatures need love, to the justice we cry out for in all courses of life, right back to the concept of creation itself.  Why in the world is there this thing called “life”?  It’s because of love.  It’s because of God.  Existence is the actual proof.

But there is a chasm between God’s original design in the perfection of love and our lived reality of life where we endure lives often riddled with puzzling complexities and toxic relational situations.  When love blesses, does no harm, and brings life, the actuality of life on earth is that harms are done so routinely as to make it seem like love’s tapestry is negated in and over creation.  And, no matter how much we are loved and reciprocate in the loving, we all contribute to the dysfunction.

Having failed God and life and just about everybody else in our lives we all need a cosmic second chance and that second chance is a given through God in Christ, which is to be the template for OUR lives.  How do we give a relationship a second chance—in case that second chance is warranted?  We give it a chance to be forgiven.  

To paraphrase C.S. Lewis,
we forgive the “unforgivable” because we 
ourselves have been forgiven the unforgivable.

As we honour the truth through the humility of seeing our sin, we are given the keys to life as we see ourselves as no better than others.  God’s love shows us this in the cosmic forgiveness we have received.  To the glory of God’s name, we all have the same condition as everyone else.

THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF LOVE AND TRUST

Love compels a person to the wisdom of trust.  Forgiveness is the wisdom of trust.  We must trust God to truly forgive, making forgiveness one of discipleship’s most important performance indicators.  Those who take their faith seriously, seriously trust God to the extent of understanding and appreciating the value of the mercy that has been extended to them as an individual.  It motivates behaviours of reciprocity because God has been so good to us.

In trusting God, a door is opened to us that opens up to us access to a power we can only receive through an iron clad trust of God.  God must be our god, our only god, and this pure allegiance can only be lived one moment at a time.  We march to God’s tune alone when we extend the mercy God’s extended to us to others, each and every time.

Hard as it is to write, we cannot love if we cannot trust, because love implies and requires trust.  And this is the most direct reason why forgiving is central.  If our forgiving is hindered in any way—and for those who have endured trauma at the hands of others, this is hard as much as it feels unfair—our trust likewise is hindered, and it affects our capacity to love.

Harmed by the abuse done to us, and harmed by their refusal to repent, we are actually harmed MORE through a heart hardened by these harms, and our inability to forgive hinders our capacity to trust and therefore love.

True reconciliation is more about redeeming our own calloused hearts to trust and love than it is about their repentance of the other or restoring broken relationships.

Love requires abandon, and abandon is exactly what trust is.  Trust trusts because it does.  Trust and love could also be described as “surrender” and there’s nothing more important from a faith perspective than that.  So we can see why love and trust are interdependent, and we can see that faith is characterised by these qualities in the letting go.

As much as love and trust let go and have no resistance, it’s to be the same with forgiveness.  Given that God had no hesitation in extending the loving hand of grace to us in Christ Jesus, we too can embody this love, this trust, this forgiveness, especially as we’ve received God’s love, God’s trust, God’s forgiveness.  We, who are no better than anyone else.

In terms of God’s love, we have been trusted with the keys to the Kingdom because, for all eternity, we have been forgiven.  God can trust us to run the Kingdom when we ruled by love, to trust, forgiving as we have been forgiven—because we have received it humbly.

RIGHTEOUS LOVING OF FORGIVING & TRUSTING LEADS TO LIFE

There is such a contrast between light and darkness, good and evil, love and tyranny in many of the Psalms.  In Psalm 52 there is the image of what happens when we trust in what’s termed “God’s unfailing love” which is perfect faithfulness; when we trust in what is entirely trustworthy:

“But I am like an olive tree 
flourishing in the house of God; 
I trust in God’s unfailing love 
for ever and ever.”

Trust leads to a flourishing life surrendered to God’s purposes, and such a life is free from the tyranny of many burdens that were never intended to be ours to carry.  To LIVE this life is to live IN the house of God.

In life, to go forwards, we often need to backtrack.  I’ve intentionally not called it going “backwards,” because whilst it might seem frustrating and even humiliating to backtrack, it is necessary, and we only realise this when we trust God enough to go back.  In going back, we meet frustration, but with patience and trust we go back with an attitude of fully relying on God, not leaning on our own understanding.  Progress is made when we can go back with an attitude of joy, knowing that God wants the best for us, and that God’s measures of success are not the world’s or even our measure of success.

When we more willingly accept our life situations,
we demonstrate by our patience that we trust God.

FORGIVENESS, THE LOVE OF GOD, IN OUR LIVES

Love in the full sense of the word is embodied in the attitude and action of forgiveness.

God instituted forgiveness from the beginning in the plan that would send the Son to the earth, to live as an exemplar, to die as our Saviour, to be raised as our Lord and King.

God loved us by Jesus’ lived example, Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, and Jesus’ defeating death, each demonstrating forgiveness rooted in love.  It is the model of love.  Our model for life.

Love ensures that the truth is honoured (God’s perfect justice)
and that forgiveness (God’s perfect grace) is offered in trust 
because all will be required to respond to that truth.

When the love of God is in us and working through us, we see both our need of forgiveness—we are so thankful we have been forgiven—which inspires our need to forgive.

God knows we need to forgive to have access to the flow of God’s love that is ever present and available for us.  God knows we need to trust that God does and will execute justice—and we can, knowing that God’s justice is perfect, and that we can leave others’ debts against us with God, just as we must reconcile our debts before God.

For our own good,
for our own health,
for our own healing, 
it’s to LOVE that we are called by God, 
and the principal means to this love, 
practically in our lives, is forgiveness.

This is the call from God to each of us: it is LIVING this love of forgiving in the everyday conflicts that occur in our homes, on the roadways, when shopping, in our workplaces, in our churches, in our going out and coming home, everywhere, just as much as it’s LIVING this love of forgiving debtors in the entrenched conflicts in those places.

Each is as hard as the other, the everyday and the entrenched.  The former is hard because of our instincts, reflex actions, and biases, etc.  The latter is hard because of our hardness of heart and also the wisdom needed in the boundaries that are at times warranted.

Everyday conflicts are forgiven in the moment when we keep ourselves humbly accountable when we judge others in a flash, whether for unintentional errors, mistakes, and lapses.  What a great blessing it is to have such awareness that we can catch ourselves even as “little things” trigger us.  The fact is we so easily judge and condemn attitudes and behaviours that we ourselves engage in; the lack of awareness, the hurry, the indifference, not considering others, forgetting, selfishness as others would see it, etc, whether by intention or omission. 

Entrenched conflicts are forgiven through a choosing to walk in the freedom and light of knowing our OWN sinful nature.  When the log or plank in our own eye is ever in focus, we thank God each day for this knowledge that empowers us to work on ourselves and not point our index finger at others.  We can change things in our own life, but we can do nothing to change another person. When we thank God for the knowledge of our own sin, we embody immense gratitude that we have been forgiven all our sin.  Living in this knowledge removes all burden from us as we walk easier and lighter into each glorious day of our lives, no matter what is happening in our external world.

~

Forgiveness, the love of God, is the eternal message 
not simply for eternal salvation, but for LIFE now
for any who would simply believe, trust, and forgive.

Forgiveness, the Righteousness of God

“God made Jesus who had no sin to be sin for us, 
so that in Jesus we might become the righteousness of God.”
— 2 Corinthians 5:21

Forgiveness, the righteousness of God, is God planning beforehand and doing at the beginning what only God could do—something we would need and could never do ourselves; something only Jesus could do.

God created us free to love, knowing we might choose to sin, and therefore WHEN we did (there were really no “ifs”), we needed God to set us free, once-and-for-all, to love.

Love is creation’s inherent design, dividing good from evil.  Love is goodness, and evil has no part in love.  Love is interwoven into life itself because love forces a dividing line between good and evil.

The righteousness of life is God’s eternal measure 
that humanity must CHOOSE for good OR evil.

In life, there is no middle ground.

It was right for God, in Jesus, to forgive a fallen humanity, because we cannot help ourselves.  We needed God’s forgiveness.  We need it, present perfect tense.  It is also right for us human beings to forgive other fallen human beings.  To live, we need the forgiveness of others, and just as much to live, we need to forgive.

Because of what God has done, forgiveness is right.
To forgive and to be forgiven is right.
To forgive and to be forgiven is justice.
Where sins are reconciled, no debt thereby remains.

If God in Christ did not count people’s sins
against them, then who are we to?

Love is the fulfillment of goodness, and this is the domain of God.  Forgiveness is the epitome and performance of love, so forgiveness itself is the fulfillment of goodness.

Love is the conquering of evil, the triumph of goodness, because righteousness and justice are God’s domain over all creation.  We are God’s righteousness when we forgive, even as God executes eternal justice according to our execution of forgiveness OR lack thereof.

Where we forgive when forgiveness isn’t sought, and thereby transfer the other person’s debt to God, God thereby accounts for that as it pertains to both us and the person we forgive.  Forgiveness is credited to us.  A lack of forgiveness, apology, and repentance is taken up by God.  A debt remains.  All give account.  This is the domain of God.

RIGHTEOUSNESS OR SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS?

Righteousness has become a very unpopular term in popular spheres.  It’s not a word many Christian leaders or Christians are game to use.  It is a very misunderstood term in an era of biblical illiteracy.

But righteousness is nonetheless, as it has always been, true to God’s character, as it is the nature of this life—no matter how much people may spurn it.  We cannot escape these facts.  We live in a world where we cannot escape right and wrong, good and evil, love and hate/ambivalence/fear.  Righteousness is entwined with life.

Righteousness is trusting “God with all our heart, and [to] lean not on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5).  When we choose rather to trust our own understanding, doing what is “right” in our own eyes, our paths are crooked, because we can’t see straight.  Those who lack insight can neither love nor honour truth.  It leads to harm.  Harms are therefore done to others by us and by others to us.  The Bible mentions that being “right in our own eyes” is folly no less than 61 times.  Being right in our own eyes is self-righteousness.

The key choice we all must make at each juncture of our lives,
one moment at a time,
is will we go God’s way or our own way?

Will we follow Jesus’ example or Adam’s?  Will we humble ourselves as Jesus did, being obedient as he was to death; his was a cross, our deaths are of our prideful nature of going our own way in rejecting God’s way.

We must “pour contempt on all our pride,” per Isaac Watts’ When I Survey the Wondrous Cross (1707), or otherwise end up in a state of, and partake in events that bring, spiritual death.

WHEN WE DON’T FORGIVE & HOW IT IMPACTS US

A great biblical metaphor for forgiveness and unforgiveness is contained within Ezekiel 47:1-12.  The metaphor is a river with a prevalent flow.  Forgiveness is going with the flow of the river, it doesn’t “push” the river.  To “push” the river is to get stuck in the “swamps and marshes [that] will not become fresh” (verse 11) which is the bitterness and resentment of a hard heart.  This is what happens when we get stuck insisting on changing what we can’t, like getting upset about people we can’t change, or insisting situations be fitted to our “needs”.

The flow of the river is freedom and LIFE, 
but the swamps and marshes are death.

Those who forgive experience God’s freedom.  They accept the flow of the river, the flow of life.  Forgiveness is a wise choice.  It is a choice to reconcile what is, whether we can reconcile with the perpetrator or not.

Those who forgive live habitually empowered lives because the flow of the river brings differing scenery.  When we get stuck in the swamps and marshes, our view is truncated, and we don’t see right.  Forgiveness brings perspective, and certainly Christians enjoy the knowledge of just how good God has been in Jesus—they follow God’s direct example.

Those who struggle to forgive tend to become offended when people reinforce boundaries.  They struggle with letting go and get stuck when they can’t control certain people, situations, and outcomes.  We have all tasted this.  There is no life in such a mindset.

No matter what a person has done to us, 
when we say they are not worthy of our forgiveness, 
we say we are better than the other person is, 
especially when we see them as evil, 
no matter how malevolent they actually may be.

That said, “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord.  We must “leave room for God’s wrath.”  (Both these quotations are from Romans 12:19.)

FORGIVENESS, THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD

God wove into the narrative of the gospel—the saving of sinner’s souls—a pattern for life.

This pattern of God’s wisdom, the righteousness of God, is a pattern that ALL may follow, if they “choose life,” the pattern of which is woven into the narrative of Jesus’ dying on the cross.

Jesus knew when he gave his last commandment before the cross that the disciples would struggle and ultimately fail in their humanity to “love one another”.  (John 13:34-35)

Jesus knew when he prayed to the Father in his disciple’s presence that they would struggle and ultimately fail to “be one” as the Father and Son are one.  (John 17:20-23)

It’s why Jesus told the disciples, “By [your love for one another] everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  It’s the love that transforms the world.  It’s a love that can only be done one-moment-at-a-time.

There is no hope in the gospel without this love—the love of God modelled in the cross that humanity is to exemplify.  It’s the righteousness of God that we follow in being the righteousness of God.

The wisdom of God is righteousness is life.
There is no wisdom nor love apart from it.

It is a ministry of reconciliation that we have, that we are called to, that sets us free even as we are freed and may show others to this freedom.

“... not counting people’s sins against them... God has committed us to the message of reconciliation.”  (2 Corinthians 5:19)

If God in Christ did not count people’s sins 
against them, then who are we to?

~

The righteous of God in forgiveness is summed up in the account of the adulteress woman of John 8:10-11:

“Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

“No one, sir,” she said.

“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

Forgiveness because of righteousness,
then righteousness that leads to LIFE.

NOTE: the foregoing is commentary on INDIVIDUAL faith wisdom and what is God’s best and God’s will for individuals.  It’s not about institutional responses to abuse.  Institutional entities have a duty to respect due process.  This justice has nothing to do with forgiveness.

Forgiveness, the Peace of God

God created the world in peace and for peace.  And this peace is not just written on God’s heart, God wrote it on our hearts, also; that is, our need of it.  The sad thing is we often get in the way of our own peace by pursuing a peace that infringes on others’ peace.

We strive to attain our peace by ourselves, 
not comprehending that true peace comes 
when we’re at peace with others.

God’s desire is peace; that everyone live at peace with one another, understanding it’s achieved through everyone’s quiet enjoyment of peace.  When one is without peace it ought to concern others.

A FAKE PEACE

There is a tyranny of counterfeit peace doing the rounds in this age.  There’s nothing new under the sun there.  It sounds like, “I’ll have it my own way, thank you very much.”  Such an attitude comes from leaning on one’s own understanding, and it never ends well.

The counterfeit peace is marked by a comfort that can be grasped, but a comfort all the same that isn’t the same as the comfort we need when we’re suffering.  As there is a counterfeit peace, there is also a counterfeit comfort, and just as addictions are the clearest sign of this, the commonest sign is being right in one’s own eyes.

The counterfeit peace is marked by a self-serving nature that insists on feeling entitled to what it can have.  Such self-serving, however, never derives a satisfying peace.

The feature of this counterfeit peace is it 
has little regard for what others think or feel.

~

God’s wisdom is entwined in peace to the degree 
that we must behave benevolently to experience benevolence.

PEACE IS BEYOND JUSTICE 

Seeking justice for wrongs done is only one half of a two-part process to peace.

Too many people are get mired in the first half, 
and they may wonder why there’s still no peace.

THIS is the work of peace: to love our neighbour as ourselves.  But we all fail love in our relationships, oftentimes daily.

Inherent in the work of the Christian, 
to love their neighbour as themselves, 
is repentance for when we get it wrong.

If people call themselves Christian and do not repent and therefore demonstrate that they do not love their neighbour, they cannot achieve true peace for themselves because they do not first establish it for the other, as far as it depends on them.

If a person abuses us and in so doing, they reject peace, we can still take the upper hand and establish peace anyway through our forgiving them their grievous debt of stealing their love from us.  We transfer that debt to God.  We let God repay, which is biblical—see Deuteronomy 32:35 and Romans 12:19.

PROLONGED ANGER IS A SIGN WE’RE STUCK

Anger is part of the grieving process and it’s normal and natural to experience it in the face of loss and injustice.  But when we linger in anger for weeks or months or years, or we continue to trigger in anger, it affects our and others’ peace.  That peace is affected is a sign of two things: 1) the initial and ongoing injustice itself, and 2) our resultant anger.

The good news is we still have power 
in choosing peace over anger.

Remembering that anger is right but only the first part of a two-part process, our anger is a sign we’re stuck, and that forgiveness is the key to going on to the second part which is peace.

It really does pay to imagine what is under all the anger.  Is it sadness?  Could it be some other unspeakable emotion?  The emotion we feel could be justified, but do we want to be continually ransomed by our emotions?

WHY DO WE FORGIVE?

We don’t forgive what the person/people/situation did to us as if that was okay, nor do we forgive what it did to us, but we can forgive the person for their lack, remembering that we too lack many things, and OUR love will never be perfect either.

We may not treat others as some others have treated us, but we demonstrate hypocrisy when we behave as if we’ve never hurt anyone.  We do.  And especially in our anger.  The longer our anger is tolerated, the higher the probability we’ll be destructive.

Forgiveness is the way we nip our anger in the bud.  And if we cannot see why we would forgive, we have bigger problems.  Once we know WHY we ought to forgive, we can begin to inquire into HOW we will forgive.

Forgiveness is a trust.  A merciful action based on a decision to extend mercy, because God’s mercy has been extended to us—mercy that gave us an unlosable salvation—we reciprocate God’s love.  We love God back as we forgive others.

Forgiveness is as simple as loving God back 
for the mercy that has been extended to us.

When we reduce love of others, love of our neighbour, to the attitude and action of forgiveness, we live a powerful love that works two powerful ways: it delivers a compelling love of hope and grace in all our relationships, plus it is the trust of God, which is God’s only requirement of us when we have accepted our salvation—God’s wisdom for OUR own good.

Forgiveness is the wisdom of God that annuls 
evil’s design to steal hope, kill love, and destroy peace.

Forgiveness is the wisdom of trust.  We must trust God to truly forgive, making forgiveness one of discipleship’s most important performance indicators.  Those who take their faith seriously, seriously trust God to the extent of understanding and appreciating the value of the mercy that has been extended to them as an individual.  It motivates behaviours of reciprocity because God has been so good to us.

A FINAL WORD

Forgiveness is the wisdom of God because it shows a person can accept the things they cannot change, and that’s peace.  When we cannot accept what we cannot change we have bigger problems.  But forgiveness will take us all the way to peace if only we can trust it.

Forgiveness, the Wisdom of God

Forgiveness is a trust.  A merciful action based on a decision to extend mercy, because mercy has been extended to us—mercy that gave us an unlosable salvation—we reciprocate God’s love.  We love God back as we forgive others.

Forgiveness is as simple as loving God back 
for the mercy that has been extended to us.

When we reduce love of others, love of our neighbour, to the attitude and action of forgiveness, we live a powerful love that works two powerful ways: it delivers a compelling love of hope and grace in all our relationships, plus it is the trust of God, which is God’s only requirement of us when we have accepted our salvation—God’s wisdom for OUR own good.

Forgiveness is the wisdom of God that crushes 
evil’s design to steal hope, kill love, and destroy peace.

Forgiveness is the wisdom of trust.  We must trust God to truly forgive, making forgiveness one of discipleship’s most important performance indicators.  Those who take their faith seriously, seriously trust God to the extent of understanding and appreciating the value of the mercy that has been extended to them as an individual.  It motivates behaviours of reciprocity because God has been so good to us.

In trusting God, a door is opened to us that opens up to us access to a power we can only receive through an iron clad trust of God.  God must be our god, our only god, and this pure allegiance can only be lived one moment at a time.  We march to God’s tune alone when we extend the mercy God’s extended to us to others, each and every time.

~

Living wisely is living a life of mercy repelling daily the instincts to harm others, and in resisting the deliberate holding of hurts, disappointments and betrayals that cling to us from relationships we can’t control during our lifetimes.

NOW, ABOUT JUSTICE

Justice remains eternally important, and in forgiveness what we’re doing is transferring the debts others refuse to pay to us to God, even as, in forgiveness, we repay ALL our debts.

Recognising we’re here for a finite time, the real point of life is recognising that we will MEET God in eternity, and it will be there that a cosmic and irreversible transaction will take place.  True justice and true accounting occur.  It is a trust of faith to know that this does take place, as it is a trust to live as if it will occur, to the reverence and glory of God.

God knows that we must leave justice to eternity.  This is the trust of the requirement, and there’s wisdom in it, because we in our human lives need to uncouple ourselves from the demands that justice be done to our satisfaction, because God knows we will never be satisfied other than via true reconciliation—which beyond justice, is only available on earth when parties reconcile by making peace, which is often not possible because one or both do not confess and repent of their sin.

Justice is infinitely important to God, and at times, and in God’s way, God opens up opportunities for injustice to be reconciled.  That is, in the fullness of time, and by the circumstances of change, where God makes injustice plain to everyone, those who have faced injustice get their opportunity to love their enemy well with the truth even as they have forgiven their enemy’s debts, having transferred those debts to God to judge.

FORGIVENESS, THE WISDOM OF GOD

Where this needs to start and end is in the truth that says, “The days are evil.”  Paul speaks most urgently of our need to live as wise, not unwise, “making the most of every opportunity...”

Two issues that are under the guise of “evil” are temptation and persecution.  One we have a problem with as individuals, the other individuals and entities cause us problems.

The key temptations in life get under our guard and hurt and then harden our hearts.  Hardness of heart leads to an incapacity to forgive.  The worst of it is an absolute loss of insight—that inability to see how merciful God has been with us.

Persecutions occur in many different ways, not least through gaslighting, but there are manipulations, isolation, physical injury, intimidation, etc.  Persecutions can and often do lead to disheartening that usually boomerangs back as a hardened heart.  Victims respond to the abuse that is done to them by what’s called, “reactive abuse.”  Forgiveness is the wisdom of God that fortifies a victim of abuse from reacting.

A reminder of the gospel from John 3:16-18 (NIV):

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.  For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.  Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.”

Forgiveness is the key way we guard our hearts (Proverbs 4:23; Philippians 4:7), and the key truth to return to is the mercy of God.  Indeed, Paul highlights from the first eleven chapters of Romans, having set out a forensically perfect case for the gospel, that everything that God has already done is more than sufficient to motivate us to live a life of forgiveness, which is love, sincerity, gentleness, gratitude, and grace, etc, and everything else about virtuous intent and demeanour from Romans 12-16.

In terms of a living modus operandi, forgiveness is the unbeatable wisdom of God.

~

Forgiveness for a Christian is as simple as loving God back.  There is no better way of loving God than loving others through the forgiveness that God commands us to do.

The call of God on a person’s life

I’ve wrestled with this long enough.  Time to write it.

I’ve had a few people say to me that God is more interested in who I am, who we ARE as individuals, than he is interested in what I or WE as individuals do.

It’s true, of course.  But there’s a nuance to be considered when it comes to calling.

It’s simply this: in terms of calling, what a person does IS who they are.  If a person serves God to the exclusion of other things, their DOING is inherently part of their BEING.

I cannot overemphasise this matter.

Now, of course, it is also true—just to bring in and hold tensions that are there—that is opposites that are equally true—as in ‘both/and’ truths—it is also true that our identity in Christ far surpasses DOING.  It really does.  God’s less interested in what we do “for God” than our loving others, for one instance, and I’d cite Matthew 5:23-24 as the prooftext there.

BUT—in an article like this there are always buts.

If a person has a genuine calling of God on their life, they will not be able to refuse that call.  They can try all they like, and I can tell you personally, I’ve tried to head toward Tarshish very many times, but neither God nor wise ones around me allowed that to happen.  They said, “You need to repent and make turn for Nineveh.”  Leaving my calling never stuck.

I’d go so far as to say that when you’ve got a calling of God on your life, you can be cast out by “man,” but you can’t be cast out of your calling.  What I mean is “men” may cast you out, but God never does.

I know there are people who feel called but who may not serve well, or who may even do harm and think they’re helping.  Repentance is the sign of the called.  A heart that says, “If I do any wrong, I will repent, seek to make restitution, and restore people and situations.”  That’s actually a hallmark of the calling of God in my view, because what’s inherent to calling is the commitment to ‘do no [more] harm’.

But the thrust of this article on calling is the person IS what they do.  Their being is in WHAT they’re doing.  They are highly operational.  Their intent is set on making a tangible difference, which in ministry terms is often a tangibility delivered in intangible ways.

Not least a person called of God shows their call by DOING, given that their BEING is judged by others and God by how they lived their life, what they DID and how they did it, especially in terms of holiness, faith, and repentance.

This is what happens when a person prays the prayer, “Lord, having recognised Your call on my life, my life is Yours now, I pledge to do everything to follow You.”  One could argue that this calling is every Christian’s domain, yet how few take it seriously.

But the one who hears from God, the one who is affirmed by wise others, the one who is affirmed by called others, the gifted one, receives that call because they cannot deny it.

Such a person will always find a way to serve their God.

“... as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”
Joshua 24:15

Reflecting over a lifetime, one decade at a time

Having been a human being well over fifty years and having had vocations aligned to the psychology of humanity for nearly half my life, I can attest to the fact that basically no human being feels “perfect” at any time.  Being human isn’t ever easy.  We never stand apart from our humanity.  We can never unthink, unknow, or unfeel our way in this life.

Then we die.

Not to depress you, but at this juncture of life—at the end of a year—it’s normal and natural to engage in reflection.  Those who don’t, miss out.

I like to take a “life scan” at the end of each year, and that’s about reviewing our lives at 10-year intervals and imagining what life might hold in future 10-year intervals.  A life scan is a reflective activity designed to ease us into reflecting over our lives to this point, and then to impel our thinking forward to what might be.

Here’s mine for this year:

2022

A very significant year for several reasons.  Mum died.  A week after Mum’s funeral, my third grandchild was born.  The key word I would use for this year is “conclusion” as many things reached a state of conclusion.  Good and not-so-good, but mainly good, and there are even good aspects of Mum’s passing—family were there, and she’d lived a life of love at the very least.  In so many ways, some things that started ten years ago concluded.  But with conclusions there are also fresh starts, so 2023 begins with expectation.

2012

The year I turned 45 was significant because it was also a setting up year.  I qualified as a counsellor at the year’s end, my wife was pregnant with our son, and at the end of the year, after an arduous season of nearly ten years, my prayers were answered in the achievement of a pastoral position of my dreams.  This season was punctuated by a season of hope that lasted months.

2002

Wow, 20 years ago it was a leap back into another life!  I was in my first marriage, leading quite a jet-setting secular life, and my three daughters were in Primary School.  In some ways, it was the happiest and most content life but deep down within I wasn’t living the life of my calling.  I didn’t know it yet, but my life would be turned upside down in 12 months.  From this point in life, climbing the corporate ladder with one of the largest oil companies in the world, becoming a pastor would have been the last thing in my thoughts.

1992

Blast from the past again, here, I was working in mining maintenance on the tools in the hot northwest, I’d been married two years and my firstborn was born in this year.  I was 25 and a powerlifting bodybuilder.  There was no sign at this point of the desire to take up career two or career three.  I was content as a tradesman fixing large mechanical machines.

1982

I was in Year 10 High School this year and it was the year before I commenced trade training.  Music and cricket were big in my world.  I had good High School friends and we usually smoked cigarettes outside school at lunchtime.  By this stage in life I did know I wanted to be a fitter and turner (just like Dad).  At this stage in life, being married and a father in ten years was the farthest thing from my mind.

1972

I was five years old commencing Kindergarten.  Life was very isolated for Mum and Dad up in Dampier with no other family and Dad working a lot of overtime.  My younger brother and I were very active boys who loved to play outside in the heat.  Looking back at the family movies at the time, with Mum gone, I still can’t get over how long ago it was, but how that time seems to have flashed by.

1962

I wasn’t born yet, but my parents were “an item” and my existence was now possible.  Mum and Dad were courting whilst living in a small mining town called Bullfinch.  Dad was an apprentice and he and Mum enjoyed going to the pictures together.  Mum worked for the Bullfinch post office.

~

A life scan doesn’t just look back, it looks forward too.  So, I’ll project forward as far as I reasonably can.

2032

At this point, our son will be an adult, and there will be more grandchildren, perhaps another three, making seven overall.  Being 65, I hope to still be fully engaged as a minister for God whether in the church or secular life or both.  We’ll be 25 years married.  And I’m sure, with ten years more life lived, there will be a range of additional losses to grieve.

2042

I still expect to be working, though part time, especially serving God.  I anticipate I’ll be a great grandfather.

2052

If I’m still alive, I’ll be 85.  Still hope to be serving God in some capacity.  Hope to be married 45 years by this point.

2062

Even though I’ve covenanted to be alive still at this point (till 2067 actually), I really don’t expect to be alive at 92, but I’m willing if God allows.

~

The most humbling thing about life is the older you get the more you realise how short life is.  But when you’re young, a whole lifetime seems like longer than eternity itself.