Forgiving – Sunday, September 13, 1981
All of us make mistakes. Sometimes we fall short of our best intentions. We are occasionally short tempered and irritable when we meant to be calm and kind, stingy when we meant to be generous. In fact, life teaches us that to be human is to blunder, having a marvelous set of ideals in our mind and living somewhere beneath them.
Since we know that about ourselves, it should be no surprise, then, that others are as fallible as we are. They don’t always live up to their best intentions, either. They wrestle with life and at times fail. And sometimes in their shortness of sight, their tremblings under pressure, they may bruise or disappoint us. We are all vulnerable to the pain inflicted by another when he’s being less than he meant to be.
A barbed word may snag our serenity. A criticism may wound us to the marrow. That is when we have one of those rare opportunities to be like the Lord and forgive.
“Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,”1 uttered the Christ, while still hanging from the Cross, and the Romans, indifferent to His pain frolicked around Him. Most of us know, too, what it is to be forgiven by the Lord when we turn from dark feelings to let His face shine upon us. His forgiveness is like a sweet amnesia. When we turn to Him again, He’ll remember our weakness no more. In fact, the world He has created seems to echo with the concept. Forgiveness is the intensified fragrance of the flower we’ve just crushed within our hand. Forgiveness is the green shoot that struggles up in a charred forest.
But while we understand the Lord’s forgiving us, it may seem harder for us to forgive another, especially while we are still smarting under his heel. When we struggle to forgive, it may be time to remember Henry Wadsworth Long fellow’s words, “The little I’ve seen of the world teaches me to look upon the errors of others in sorrow, not in anger.”
Struggling humanity. How much we need to forgive one another, and what a spiritual lift it is to the torn heart, not only to be forgiven, but to truly learn to forgive.
1 Luke 23:34
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September 13, 1981
Broadcast Number 2,717