Forgive God?


            Have you ever felt the need to forgive God? That is a rather audacious thought, forgiving the forgiver?  However, if you have gotten angry with God, you have apparently felt he wronged you in some way, right? When someone does us wrong we must choose to either forgive or carry the grudge. If we get angry with God and stop speaking to him, we are carrying a grudge, we feel wronged.

            Put simply, we either believe in God or we don’t. Our relationship with God is a lot like marriage, it’s for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer and any other set of opposites we want to throw in there. Like it or not, if we believe in God, we believe in his perfection too. We live in a sin filled world that can twist our thinking to believe we deserve a stress-free, worry-free, illness-free, whatever-free life. If we are honest with ourselves we know all we really deserve is death. We do serve a loving, living God. He gives us mercy, grace and forgiveness, without reservation. He carries no grudges with us. He moves our sin as far as the east is from the west. Psalm 103:11, 12 “For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.” Check this out: deserve versus do serve. The prefix de means to remove or opposite which would indicate that we feel God should serve us but when we do serve, we serve God, as it should be.

            Forgiveness is as much (if not more so) for the forgiver as it is for the forgiven. Forgiving someone releases us of the bondage of anger; it frees us to go forward with our lives. Maybe you have met someone who can forgive other people easily but they are still sporting a grudge with God.  Instead of forgiving God though, they (we) need to ask for his forgiveness and let go of the grudges.  Whatever we are going through, good time or bad, we can trust God to walk beside us we do need to remember that God has good manners and awaits our invitation to walk with us. Reach out your hand and ask him to hold it, you’ll be glad you did.
Posted by

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How are you?

Image
            When I wake, one of the first things I do is say, “Good morning God!” Some days are more enthusiastic than others. When I greet another human being, I usually follow that greeting with, “how are you?” This morning it occurred to me that I don’t ask God how he is. I have been contemplating this idea, how are you God? Obviously, given his attributes of omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience it is easy to follow the train of thought that he has everything in check. Despite that; I think of him in human terms and I can’t help but feel he is; not mad but disappointed (cringe). When he looks at creation, like a parent gazing on the wreckage of a kid’s toy room, wouldn’t there be disappointment?             As I contemplated that, my meandering mind led me to consider guilt. The guilt that leads to the disappointment of others. Every culture I have known lays claim to guilt; Lutheran guilt, Catholic guilt, Jewish guilt, Italian guilt and so on. Truth be told, we’re all guil
Read more

Out of the Mouth

Image
  Genesis 3:14 “God said to Moses, ‘I AM who I AM.’ This is what you are to say to the Israelites: “I Am has sent me to you.”             I feel the need to make a disclaimer statement up front as I can see what I will write in these next few sentences could be misconstrued. This writing is not claiming that man is God although I will say, that if you have claimed the Holy Spirit lives in you, that identifies that God is in you too.             How many times a day do you use the phrase “I am…”? Probably much more than you or I realize. This is how God identified Himself to Moses. “I AM who I AM” We often refer to God as the great I AM, which He is. Going back to how often we use the phrase, for myself those two words are often followed with denigrating words like; so stupid, so foolish, so dumb, so angry, so hurt, so fill in the blank. What if each time we thought about those two words and how we identify ourselves we replaced “I AM” with “God is” most of us (I make this assumptio
Read more

Masterpiece

Image
              As a young person, I was fond of painting, not great at it but reasonable. I set it aside when I fell in love and got married. In these days of isolation I needed to find some other ways to occupy myself other than baking and decided to get back to my paint brushes.   To get used to handling the brushes again I got myself a paint by number,             If you have never tried one of these let me give you a little insight. You receive a canvas with an image divided up into numbered areas and little pots of paint with corresponding numbers. Then you begin a sort of scavenger hunt trying to fill in all the spots of a particular number. Sounds simple enough, however some of these areas are so tiny they are easily overlooked. The tiny spots are important though, they give that little flourish that can draw the eye or round out an object.             Why do I tell you about this? As I dove into this project, a great life analogy was revealed to me and I do love a good word
Read more