Daily Devotional

 Matthew 6:14

"For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you."

Forgiveness, what a difficult thing for us humans to do. Yet we long desperately for it when we are in need of it ourselves. We sinful sheep are such a contradictory and hypocritical lot, are we not? I think in our own experience we can attest that the act of forgiving someone is not in our nature, not our sin nature anyway. When we are or feel wronged, the last thing we want to do is forgive. We would much rather seek justice or sometimes revenge, but this is not what God calls us to do.

Remember as Christians we are to be set apart, salt and light in this dark world. We are called to be different and to be Christ-like. Christ has forgiven us of our great and many sins against Him so who are we to not forgive the little things around us.

Now I can already hear someone saying “little sins? You don’t know what someone did to me!?” You may have been wronged in a way that you believe is unforgivable, and as humans we can be very awful and do terrible things to each other. But we are not called to forgive some things, or some people. We are to forgive as Christ forgave. Let’s try and put this in perspective.

I was privileged to attend a number of conferences in college called “Resolved.” One of our speakers was John Piper, speaking on Christ’s act of salvation on the cross and he was describing just how great an offense our sin was to God. I’m going to paraphrase here a little but what he essentially said was that the gravity of our sin is measured against the dignity of the one you are sinning against. And in the case of God, it is an infinite dignity. Therefore the gravity of our sin is also infinite! Wow, think about that the next time you tell a lie. You might think it a little thing, but to God it is infinitely bad.

So by comparison, if God can forgive us of our sin, sin that to Him is worse than anything we can comprehend, over and over and over again. Shouldn’t we be able to forgive each other? Kind of helps put Romans 6:23 in perspective “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.” Nothing we do here on earth to each other is ever so bad that we cannot forgive each other, if God could forgive us!

Thanks be to God!
New King James Version (NKJV) Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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