Heart to Heart: Meeting With God in the Lord's Prayer | Chapter Excerpts
From "As We Forgive, Forgive Us"
Forgiveness is the catalyst of many a great battle between the old reprobate we used to be and the obedient child God is making us. There's nothing mystical about this. When we choose not to forgive, we make a decision to enthrone Self, and Self is not any more willing to share the throne with God than God is to share the throne with Self. To choose against forgiveness is to say that Self's concerns are more important than obedience, and certainly more important than others.
You see, when we become Christians we throw away our old way of life. God's concerns become our concerns. We seek first His Kingdom; we desire to do His will and be changed into His likeness. And the fact is, God's chief concern is for all the others in this world—all the little people who irritate, offend, and hurt us. We can hardly be united with God if we will not forgive those He has forgiven. (Nor can we say that He doesn't understand, He hasn't been provoked and abused as we have—they killed Him and He forgave them.) Furthermore, He does not just forgive them so that He can admire His own magnanimity. He forgives them because He loves them, just as much as He loves you.
Much of the Christian life as Jesus and Paul and others talked about it is a matter of taking God's part toward others, and this nearly always means putting our own part aside. When Jesus told us how to live, when the Holy Spirit inspired Paul and Peter and John to give commands to the Church, they were not bequeathing either a new Law or a bunch of scattered afterthoughts which will make us better than other people. They were showing us how to love. If we will look at all the New Testament instructions in the light of Jesus' new commandment to "Love one another as I have loved you," we will find that, as a dear friend recently wrote me, "Love unites everything both in ourselves and in the body of Christ." Love unites everything; love makes sense of it all. And it is love—true, bloody, Christ-like love—that must come to govern all that we do and all that we are. John tells us that "God is love;" (I John 4:8) he tells us also that "when he shall appear, we shall be like him." (1 John 3:2) One day we will be like Christ. We are on that journey now.
Read More Chapter Excerpts:
Our Father | Father In Heaven | Hallowed Be Thy Name | Thy Kingdom Come | Thy Will Be Done | Give Us This Day | Deliver Us From Evil | Thine Is
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