Back on November 11, 2009 I posted a blog on forgiveness. I feel this is a most important subject matter that all need to be aware of today. Without forgiveness our world will always be at war, only forgiveness offers us peace. The following message delves a little deeper into this area...
I would like to talk to you more about forgiveness. Forgiveness is something that we all must face from time to time whether we are the one's forgiving or desiring forgiveness. I want to explore this concept for awhile and see if this is something not only I may need to dig deeper into, but you also. There is far to much pain in our world today caused either by our own irresponsible actions or that of others towards someone else. You may be suffering from a deep hurt in your life that keeps you from fulfilling your potential and enjoying a life of freedom from the pain you are suffering from. Take this journey with me and lets see if we either need to forgive or ask for forgiveness.
Forgiveness is not to be taken lightly. When we look at the scriptures that Jesus gave us concerning forgiving, it doesn't take long before we realize that this command is far more reaching than a mere 'I'm sorry' or a mere 'would you forgive me'. Although these mere request of apology acceptance or forgiveness are real, most are done with our emotions. When we realize that we have hurt someone and need to apologize we usually sense the hurt we have caused someone. Sometimes we like children apologize because we caused someone pain by what we said or done to them and we apologize and ask forgiveness because we do not want to get into trouble, so we try to calm the situation with consoling our victims by saying I'm sorry. The problem is we like children end up doing the same thing again. So that brings up the question, 'were we really sorry in the first place'? In our endeavor to forgive someone who has hurt us we may find that asking for forgiveness based on our emotions may not be sincere enough and may not cut to the core of what forgiveness actually does.
Christ said in Matthew 6:14-15 "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." This command given to His disciples was not a mere request from the Master, this was a condition of our relationship to the Heavenly Father. When Christ was hanging on the cross He made this statement of forgiveness to His Father in Heaven, "Father forgive them for they don't know what they are doing," came after being whipped, beaten, spat upon, mocked, accused falsely and the suffering of hanging on the cross. Christ set the stage for changing the world through His disciples by showing them the act of forgiving was to release those bound by a corrupted world could experience God's love through forgiveness. God at the same time Christ was crucified was showing you and me that He still loved us very much. He expressed His forgiveness through His only Son's sacrifice. So when Christ said to His Father in Heaven "forgive them" He did not base forgiveness on His emotion's, but made a decision to forgive, which is an act of the will. He knew that to forgive would bring the love of God into their hearts. Here we have Christ our Lord and Savior forgiving those who not only crucified Him, but all that were separated from the Father in Heaven. Through this act of the will the love of God through the Holy Spirit was released. In Brian Zahnd's book "Unconditional' the author makes this statement about what forgiveness accomplishes;
Jesus was telling His disciples that to really forgive there are no limits. He is saying that we must always find a way to forgive and suggests that the possibilities of forgiveness are endless. This is an extreme forgiveness, a radical forgiveness, forgiveness that has no limits according to Brian Zahnd in his book Unconditional. You may be asking at this point, does this mean that I have to forgive under any circumstance and if I do forgive does it do away with justice? The answer would be yes you must forgive under any circumstance. Christ while on the cross absorbed all of man's ugliness and ask His Father to forgive, no conditions were included, no 'if' involved. When you do this, remember, you are doing away with vengeance and allowing the love of God to be released through the power of the Holy Spirit. It allows not only for the one who sinned against you to experience God's Love, but it also releases you from a bondage of bitterness and hatred. Justice is not done away with, for justice will still prevail, but God's Love will be exalted in all aspects in any situation. Forgiveness goes so much deeper into the soul penetrating our very essence bringing reconciliation to all involved.
Consider people like Simon Wiesenthal, a holocaust survivor who was faced with forgiving one of the SS soldiers. The following account is from Brian Zahnd's book unconditional. The SS soldier is a twenty-one-year-old German from Stuttgart named Karl Seidl. Karl has asked the nurse to "bring him a Jew." Karl has been mortally wounded in battle and now wants to make his dying confession and he wants to make it to a jew. Simon Wiesenthal was in a concentration camp doing cleanup work in a field hospital near the Eastern front. Karl is dying, he wants to confess the atrocities he has witnessed and in which he, as a Nazi SS soldier, has participated. Most horrifying is his account of being part of a group of SS soldiers sent to round up Jews in the city of Dnepropetropetrovsk. Three hundred Jews, men, women, children, and infants were gathered and driven with whips into a small three-story house. The house was set on fire, and Karl recounted what happened to his confessor in these words. The following is a quote from The Sunflower which is quoted in B. Zahnd's book Unconditional.
The question that comes to the front of one's mind is "should Simon have told Karl that he was forgiven?" The question that we must ask ourself is "should we forgive no matter what the circumstance?" Jesus when He hung on the cross, having been accused falsely, beaten within inches of His life, mocked, tormented, and spat on looks out on the crowd, absorbs all of the selfishness, hatred, vengeance, greed, adultery, lusts, bitterness, jealousy, and all other sins of humanity and says "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do." Are we not called to imitate Christ in every way? Are we not called to absorb the pain and suffering as Christ did from His cross and say "forgive them Father?" Christ, by forgiving those who put Him on the cross stopped the cycle of vengeance and hatred when He not only forgave them, He ask the Father to forgive them. There are no limits to forgiveness. There are no limits on God's love being released through us by the power of the Holy Spirit. When Christ breathed on His disciples at pentecost so they would receive the Holy Spirit, Christ set in motion the power for each of us to absorb the pain and suffering thrown at us by the world and utter the words "I Forgive you."
One other act of forgiveness that most are familiar with. We heard about it in the news just a few short years ago. Brian Zahnd leads into this story in his book "Unconditional" with this intro: "Charles Carl Roberts IV decided that someone had to pay for the loss of his daughter. She had died twenty minutes after her birth. This left Charles full of bitterness and wanting vengeance. There was no forgiveness to be considered. Charles Roberts could have had a good life with his family but instead allowed bitterness over his daughters death to consume him. Roberts was angry with God, angry with life, and angry with himself. In his mind, someone had to pay. Payback was the foundational ideology by which Roberts related to God and to others. Since Roberts could not make God pay, he would instead make others pay by taking his revenge out on innocent young girls for the death of his infant daughter. Here is how Brian Zahnd describes how Charles Roberts acted out his vengeance on the innocent."
If you are suffering from a recent or a past tragedy in your life and find that only bitterness and vengeance occupy your mind and soul, please, stop the pain and suffering now and forgive those who hurt you and release the Love of God into your life and the life or lives of those who hurt you. The Holy Spirit will know how to heal the wounds on both sides. Do not worry about justice, God will bring justice if not in this life, the next for sure. Don't allow your enemy to win, allowing further destruction of your soul by being ruled by hatred and bitterness. Choose forgiveness today and let God do the rest.
I suggest reading the books mentioned in this message to gain a deeper insight to this powerful aspect in our lives, Forgiveness.
I appreciate your comments and or testimonies. Feel free to leave them in the comment section, Thank you.
I would like to talk to you more about forgiveness. Forgiveness is something that we all must face from time to time whether we are the one's forgiving or desiring forgiveness. I want to explore this concept for awhile and see if this is something not only I may need to dig deeper into, but you also. There is far to much pain in our world today caused either by our own irresponsible actions or that of others towards someone else. You may be suffering from a deep hurt in your life that keeps you from fulfilling your potential and enjoying a life of freedom from the pain you are suffering from. Take this journey with me and lets see if we either need to forgive or ask for forgiveness.
Forgiveness is not to be taken lightly. When we look at the scriptures that Jesus gave us concerning forgiving, it doesn't take long before we realize that this command is far more reaching than a mere 'I'm sorry' or a mere 'would you forgive me'. Although these mere request of apology acceptance or forgiveness are real, most are done with our emotions. When we realize that we have hurt someone and need to apologize we usually sense the hurt we have caused someone. Sometimes we like children apologize because we caused someone pain by what we said or done to them and we apologize and ask forgiveness because we do not want to get into trouble, so we try to calm the situation with consoling our victims by saying I'm sorry. The problem is we like children end up doing the same thing again. So that brings up the question, 'were we really sorry in the first place'? In our endeavor to forgive someone who has hurt us we may find that asking for forgiveness based on our emotions may not be sincere enough and may not cut to the core of what forgiveness actually does.
Christ said in Matthew 6:14-15 "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." This command given to His disciples was not a mere request from the Master, this was a condition of our relationship to the Heavenly Father. When Christ was hanging on the cross He made this statement of forgiveness to His Father in Heaven, "Father forgive them for they don't know what they are doing," came after being whipped, beaten, spat upon, mocked, accused falsely and the suffering of hanging on the cross. Christ set the stage for changing the world through His disciples by showing them the act of forgiving was to release those bound by a corrupted world could experience God's love through forgiveness. God at the same time Christ was crucified was showing you and me that He still loved us very much. He expressed His forgiveness through His only Son's sacrifice. So when Christ said to His Father in Heaven "forgive them" He did not base forgiveness on His emotion's, but made a decision to forgive, which is an act of the will. He knew that to forgive would bring the love of God into their hearts. Here we have Christ our Lord and Savior forgiving those who not only crucified Him, but all that were separated from the Father in Heaven. Through this act of the will the love of God through the Holy Spirit was released. In Brian Zahnd's book "Unconditional' the author makes this statement about what forgiveness accomplishes;
It is by the Holy Spirit that the possibilities of forgiveness are expanded to the infinite. We are not called to infinitely forgive on our own. This would be to ask the impossible. Rather we are called to make the difficult choice to forgive as an act of obedience to Jesus Christ, and then to become a channel through which the Holy Spirit brings the love of God into a deeply broken and alienated world.What B. Zahnd is saying in a nutshell is that we are Agents of Reconciliation. We must choose to become this agent by an act of the will to forgive. Some may be asking just how far does forgiveness go? To what extent are we expected to forgive? To these questions we must look at what Jesus told Peter when Peter ask Jesus how often should we forgive someone when they keep sinning against us. Matthew 18:21-22, Then Peter came to him and asked, "Lord, how often should I forgive someone who sins against me? Seven times? "No, not seven times," Jesus replied, "but seventy times seven!"
Jesus was telling His disciples that to really forgive there are no limits. He is saying that we must always find a way to forgive and suggests that the possibilities of forgiveness are endless. This is an extreme forgiveness, a radical forgiveness, forgiveness that has no limits according to Brian Zahnd in his book Unconditional. You may be asking at this point, does this mean that I have to forgive under any circumstance and if I do forgive does it do away with justice? The answer would be yes you must forgive under any circumstance. Christ while on the cross absorbed all of man's ugliness and ask His Father to forgive, no conditions were included, no 'if' involved. When you do this, remember, you are doing away with vengeance and allowing the love of God to be released through the power of the Holy Spirit. It allows not only for the one who sinned against you to experience God's Love, but it also releases you from a bondage of bitterness and hatred. Justice is not done away with, for justice will still prevail, but God's Love will be exalted in all aspects in any situation. Forgiveness goes so much deeper into the soul penetrating our very essence bringing reconciliation to all involved.
Consider people like Simon Wiesenthal, a holocaust survivor who was faced with forgiving one of the SS soldiers. The following account is from Brian Zahnd's book unconditional. The SS soldier is a twenty-one-year-old German from Stuttgart named Karl Seidl. Karl has asked the nurse to "bring him a Jew." Karl has been mortally wounded in battle and now wants to make his dying confession and he wants to make it to a jew. Simon Wiesenthal was in a concentration camp doing cleanup work in a field hospital near the Eastern front. Karl is dying, he wants to confess the atrocities he has witnessed and in which he, as a Nazi SS soldier, has participated. Most horrifying is his account of being part of a group of SS soldiers sent to round up Jews in the city of Dnepropetropetrovsk. Three hundred Jews, men, women, children, and infants were gathered and driven with whips into a small three-story house. The house was set on fire, and Karl recounted what happened to his confessor in these words. The following is a quote from The Sunflower which is quoted in B. Zahnd's book Unconditional.
"We heard screams and saw the flames eat their way from floor to floor... We had our rifles ready to shoot down anyone who tried to escape from that blazing hell... The screams from that house were horrible... Behind the windows of the second floor, I saw a man with a small child in his arms. His clothes were alight. By his side stood a woman, doubtless the mother of the child. With his free hand the man covered the child's eye's... then he jumped into the street. Seconds later the mother followed. Then from the other windows fell burning bodies... We shot... Oh God!"Simon never spoke during the several hours he listened to this man's confession's, Simon did hold the soldiers hand and brush away flies. Simon gave the soldier a drink of water. Simon never doubted Karl's sincerity or that he was truly sorry for his crimes. According to Simon, the way Karl spoke was proof enough of his repentance. Karl, after his long confession said this:
"I am left here with my guilt. In the last hours of my life you are here with me. I do not know who you are, I only know that you are a Jew and that is enough... I know that what I have told you is terrible. In the long nights while I have been waiting for death, time and time again I have longed to talk about it to a Jew and beg forgiveness from him. Only I didn't know if there were any Jews left... I know that what I am asking is almost too much for you, but without your answer I cannot die in peace."Simon Wiesenthal made up his mind and left the room in silence. All the long hours Simon set and listened to Karl, Simon never said a word, he just listened. Karl Seidl died that night never hearing the words "I forgive you."
The question that comes to the front of one's mind is "should Simon have told Karl that he was forgiven?" The question that we must ask ourself is "should we forgive no matter what the circumstance?" Jesus when He hung on the cross, having been accused falsely, beaten within inches of His life, mocked, tormented, and spat on looks out on the crowd, absorbs all of the selfishness, hatred, vengeance, greed, adultery, lusts, bitterness, jealousy, and all other sins of humanity and says "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do." Are we not called to imitate Christ in every way? Are we not called to absorb the pain and suffering as Christ did from His cross and say "forgive them Father?" Christ, by forgiving those who put Him on the cross stopped the cycle of vengeance and hatred when He not only forgave them, He ask the Father to forgive them. There are no limits to forgiveness. There are no limits on God's love being released through us by the power of the Holy Spirit. When Christ breathed on His disciples at pentecost so they would receive the Holy Spirit, Christ set in motion the power for each of us to absorb the pain and suffering thrown at us by the world and utter the words "I Forgive you."
One other act of forgiveness that most are familiar with. We heard about it in the news just a few short years ago. Brian Zahnd leads into this story in his book "Unconditional" with this intro: "Charles Carl Roberts IV decided that someone had to pay for the loss of his daughter. She had died twenty minutes after her birth. This left Charles full of bitterness and wanting vengeance. There was no forgiveness to be considered. Charles Roberts could have had a good life with his family but instead allowed bitterness over his daughters death to consume him. Roberts was angry with God, angry with life, and angry with himself. In his mind, someone had to pay. Payback was the foundational ideology by which Roberts related to God and to others. Since Roberts could not make God pay, he would instead make others pay by taking his revenge out on innocent young girls for the death of his infant daughter. Here is how Brian Zahnd describes how Charles Roberts acted out his vengeance on the innocent."
Charles Roberts's soul had become a tornado of destruction, and on a sunny fall morning he entered a small, one-room Amish schoolhouse armed with a .9mm handgun, a 12-gauge shotgun, a .30-06 rifle, two knives, and six hundred rounds of ammunition. Driven by hate, Roberts had ceased to be human and had now become a monster desperately trying to erase the image of God from his soul. In the schoolhouse there were twenty-six students and a teacher. Earlier that morning the class had prayed the Lord's Prayer. Children's voices praying: "Fogive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us... deliver us from evil." Entering the schoolhouse, Roberts ordered the children to lie face down at the front of the room near the blackboard. The teacher and the boys were allowed to leave. He kept the ten girls, ages six to thriteen. Roberts then barricaded the doors, bound the girls with duct tape, and announced, "I'm going to make you pay for my daughter." At 11:05 a.m., three shotgun blasts were followed by rapid-fire pistol shots. Charles Roberts had shot all ten girls in the head. Five died, five survived. Roberts completed his descent into the abyss by turning the gun on himself..."
Unspeakable evil had invaded tranquility and brought life-shattering tragedy to the Amish community of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. It came in the most hideous form of all, child sacrifice, the slaughter of the innocents... This could have been the end of the story. It could have been only the horror story of a madman and his senseless massacre. But this was not the end of the story. As the world shuddered from news of the Nickel Mines tragedy, the world would soon be stunned by a demonstration of radical forgiveness, forgiveness that transcended tragedy.
Within hours of the killings, a group of men from the Amish community went to Amy Roberts's house to express... forgiveness! They brought gifts of food to Amy and her children, telling Amy they had forgiven her husband and held no animosity toward her.
Only forgiveness. The Amish had only one way to respond to the most wicked of all transgressions: only forgiveness. There was no talk of reprisal, revenge, getting even, or making someone pay. Only forgiveness. They imitated Christ by offering only forgiveness. They took up the Sermon on the Mount by demonstrating only forgiveness.Do not worry about justice, justice will prevail, whether here on earth or at the judgement seat of Christ. Only you have the power within to forgive and absorb the bitterness and hatred by stopping the vengeance that lurks at your hearts door. We can choose to live our lives full of bitterness and hate, seeking vengeance or we can choose to forgive and stop the cycle of hatred, bitterness and the act of getting even.
If you are suffering from a recent or a past tragedy in your life and find that only bitterness and vengeance occupy your mind and soul, please, stop the pain and suffering now and forgive those who hurt you and release the Love of God into your life and the life or lives of those who hurt you. The Holy Spirit will know how to heal the wounds on both sides. Do not worry about justice, God will bring justice if not in this life, the next for sure. Don't allow your enemy to win, allowing further destruction of your soul by being ruled by hatred and bitterness. Choose forgiveness today and let God do the rest.
I suggest reading the books mentioned in this message to gain a deeper insight to this powerful aspect in our lives, Forgiveness.
I appreciate your comments and or testimonies. Feel free to leave them in the comment section, Thank you.
