Forgiveness:
Forgiveness is something a lot of people do not receive or understand. Forgiveness is something that you give and receive. Forgiveness is something that is given meaning that there has to be something behind it happening. Forgiveness holds hands with love. To understand forgiveness you first need to understand love. What is love?
Love, Agape, Phileo and so many other words. Love is something that no matter what time in space you are born or where you think that you come from you know love at one degree or another. Love is God and this is proven time and time again in more than one way and in more than one belief. The love that is God surpasses our ideas of how to love and what love is. This is when you love people for no real reason to love in the first place. I believe that you are learning love from God’s heart.
Love holds no grudges nor does love want revenge of any sort. That is an aspect that is hard for a lot of people to understand. “How can you not be mad at them? They did that to you! You should want something in return?” It is human and a very simple way of thinking about how to deal with pain and be wronged by someone or something. Love is not going to be walked on. Love is not just going to lay there. Love is an overcomer. So then the question here becomes does Love get revenge?
And the answer is NO! Love does not hold a grudge or wants any kind of revenge. Love wants Justice. Justice for the person being wronged and for the person who is doing the wrong in the first place. Love looks at every being that it has made as a child of its creation which in all reality is fact. Love made everything and everyone. Love looks at the bad guy as it’s son as much as it looks as the knight in shining armor as it’s son. Love doesn’t see skin colour nor does it see rank or human level of worth.
All love sees is: “That is my little boy who I watched play in the streams on his grandparents property.” Love knows that that boy is now a grown man setting fire to a building that he knows nothing about. This man is forgiven as he is burning down that mom pop restaurant or store. This is also true with anyone that is or was. Love looked at Hitler as once it’s little boy. (Sadly still does- Just doesn’t see him that much anymore)
Now I am not saying that Hitler is in heaven. By no means! I am not the judge in this issue nor do I know. But I wouldn’t be surprised where he went. Forgiveness is as fast and if not faster than the act that forgiveness is needed for. As you the murder is stabbing the victim. As you the victim is being stabbed. Love has already forgiven. Love is there not to force or stop the freedom of the act but to urge and hope the best outcome comes to past.
They ask God “Can God create a boulder that he can not move?” The men who asked this were very rich powerful men that didn’t want Jesus or God. So they built the belief of what we now know as atheism. They laughed saying that God is not real because he could not make a rock that he could not move. They sat in their large chairs and laughed and mussed themselves with the wish that God could not be real because God could not make something he could not move. That would mean that God is not real. Their thinking was if God was real he would be able to do such an act.
Rich old white English men! He did make a stone that he could not move. Not because he couldn’t but because he said he wouldn’t. God set a limit to Godself. God said I will give free will to all mankind and this is the stone I can not move. The only way that I will ever be able to move this stone is if the human being of his or her own will hands it to me.
THIS IS LOVE!
So in this love becomes real forgiveness. First the realization that you need forgiveness and that that is a good thing. It is a good thing. Second forgiving those that have wronged you. That is a hard pill. I know it is. Not just forgiving them but loving them as though they never wronged you in the first place. As though that bullet wound never happened or as though that cut and so on never occurred in the first place.
Forgiveness is just an easy way of saying let it go. That anger is far less valued then the great relationship you are building with whoever it was that hurt you. See the thing is Love is not lonely by NO means. God/Love doesn’t need you at any level or in any way. Love/God WANTS you. I knew it was odd when I first heard it too. “Love/God wants me? HA!” I said “Why would God/Love want me? What would be the point of being wanted by God?” I asked. Well it didn’t go that way lol.
I was a Christian long before I came to this. A baby but still a simple believer. Love doesn’t want us to build an army or to fill heaven. Love wants us because for Love a lot of time it is like Love is watching us and we don’t know it or even care. Love is amazed at it’s own creation. Yes God made a rock that he could not move. But those rocks keep moving without him. Love Cherishes it so amazingly. That more than we know he is overjoyed at some of the simplest things that we do. Just because He watched us climb in life to do it in the first place.
Jesus said more than once in the Bible to become overcomers. To stand firm and to not be afraid and we are not overcomers on our own. We get in ruts and live life like everyone else and follow the lines and stand where we are told to stand. Love doesn’t want a robot. This is where the world and humans get it so upside down.
We are told and taught that it is a good thing to be just like my neighbors but the truth is Love created everyone with their own heart and wishes. No one in the world is going to be the exact same as their neighbor. We are all different from thoughts to height to skin colour. We might be all one race of humans but we are still all different.
The stone that moves on its own. Watching Love raise It’s hand and saying to the Stones passing by “I am here. I love you and want to be with you. I can give you so much better and freer than this world has to offer you.” The stone people just hear and move on. Saying to themselves “I need to do this to do this to do this to get this and I might have enough to get this that might help me be more like Jane or more like Tom.”
Overcoming and Forgiveness is something a lot of us know very little about. Stone people that can only look at the ideas of freedom never tasting such delights as freedom. So then does Forgiveness equal freedom? It does honestly. Forgiving someone does not only allow you the forgiver to be free of holding on to the memory of that debit but it also allows the person that was wrong to become right once more.
It moves aside to let healing happen for both parties. Something a grudge or revenge could never do. Love loves that more than anything else. Allowing the reconciliation to be alive in the matter that is at hand is like watching a bird fly in the sky. The bird hasn’t a care in the world. The bird is happy doing as it will. Though I wish they wouldn’t do it next to my window at four in the morning lol. But that is the truth. The bird is free to do it at any time it wishes.
And now because of this act of love in forgiveness both members are now free to be who they were made to be in the first place.
Pastor John
