What a great morning we had at our last meeting! We were small in number, but I believe God met with us and I was encouraged. I have been reflecting on the chapter that we read in “Don’t Waste Your Life” called “The Goal of Life-Gladly Making Others Glad in God.” Our discussion on forgiveness was very thought provoking in that how are we to make others glad in God if we are not properly understanding God’s forgiveness. If we do not understand God’s forgiveness, we will not demonstrate proper forgiveness towards others. If we are not demonstrating God’s forgiveness with others, how will we ever succeed in making them glad in God? I thought this was a great paragraph that we read and wanted to post it here to get more thoughts or just post it for you to meditate on.
Why do we cherish being forgiven by God? There are answers to this question that would dishonor him, because there are benefits from forgiveness that a person may love without loving God. We might say, “I cherish being forgiven by God because I hate the misery of a guilty conscience.” Or ” . . . because I hate the prospect of pain in hell.” Or ” . . . because I want to go to heaven to see my loved ones and have a new body with no sickness.” Where is God in these reasons for cherishing forgiveness? In the best case he is there in all these reasons as the real treasure of life.
If so, then these delights are really ways of cherishing God himself. A free and clean conscience enables us to see more of God and frees us to enjoy him. Escape from hell at the cost of Christ’s blood shows us more of God’s commitment to merciful holiness and his desire for our happiness. The gift of seeing loved ones highlights God’s wonder in creating relationships of love. Getting a new body deepens our identification with the glorified Christ. But if God himself is not there in these gifts-and I fear he is not for many professing Christians-then we do not know what forgiveness is for.
Josh
