I have been thinking a lot and reading a lot about this topic of forgiveness. If ever there was a quality that this world cannot understand or make it's forgiveness. Someone once said it is the very breath of Heaven. Kingdom style life cannot be lived without an operation of it. I'm reading a book right now that states the secret behind forgiveness is that it confronts and has the ability to set you free from .... your pride. If there is one thing that runs polar opposite of all things God its pride. The elevation of yourself.
Some have proposed that there are two types of personalities that come into play when we talk about forgiveness. When it comes to forgiveness, people usually respond to others with either comfort or truth. Comfort people( or mercy driven people) find it easy to forgive others but not themselves. Truth people (or justice driven people) accept forgiveness easily but don't find it as easy to forgive others. Those who are mercy-driven say, "I should be better than this,." Justice-driven people say, "I am better than this." The problem is that both of these are driven by pride (not the "I"-word), and pride in any form shuts out God.
Jesus Christ taught frequently about the need for us to forgive, even those who turn against us. His response to the people who betrayed and killed him modeled forgiveness for us. Psalm 85:10 melds both of these mercy-driven and justice-driven forgiveness processes together:
"Mercy and truth have met together;
righteousness and peace have
kissed."
Several questions keep rattling around in my head:
- Am I mercy-driven? Or am I truth-driven?
- Where is my pride in this?
- Who do I need to forgive today?
- Where do I need to accept forgiveness?
- How can I make forgiveness a way of life instead of an instance-by-instance act?
Recently, I was deeply moved by an essay entitled Starting Life All Over Again by Samuel Howard Miller that begins with these words:
It is the rare person who, looking back over his life and seeing what he has done to it, hasn't sighed for a chance to redeem what he has cheaply used or carelessly ruined. If only somehow, somewhere, there was a way to live again the days we have darkened with our blind haste - the innumerable occasions when our indifference trod on all the pearls of God’s graciousness; the times when our pride, or our fear, or our meanness poured the acid of contempt over the fair countenance of another’s soul! If this grace were ours, how we would leap to the chance!
Source: Samuel Howard Miller, "The Life of the Soul" (Harper, 1951)
