Freedom in Forgiveness

Daily Gratitude- Year 14 - Day 55: Today, I am grateful for the freedom in forgiveness.

Today's scripture for Lent: 

“If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins." -Matthew 6:14-15

Matthew West's song "Forgiveness" is so powerful. The burden of grudges and unforgiveness is too heavy to bear. It creates more brokenness. It is destructive like few things.

It destroys us like few things. It can harden our hearts until they are nearly impenetrable. The high price of unforgiveness has a Heavenly impact, but it is the truth of the gospel... the very thing we think will make us miserable, truly sets us free.

Forgiveness is one of the most powerful forces on earth. It was the burden we must leave at the foot of the cross. Forgiveness is not an undo button. It releases the hurt, the pain, and the grief. It sets us free.

Today, I am grateful for the freedom in forgiveness.

 

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I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. . . . Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God. (CS Lewis) Mere Christianity, 55-56)