Matthew 18:35 Forgive your brother from your heart.
Forgive our husbands. Forgive our children. Forgive our friends. Forgive our pastors. Forgive our neighbors. "Forgiveness is not the absence of anger or sin. It is not feeling good about what was bad" (John Piper). Some of you have friends and family who have treated you very wrongly. We are commanded by God to forgive them---the command doesn't say we have to trust them again, does it? "We are not bound to trust an enemy but we are bound to forgive him." (JP) I stood at the grave of my brother and one last time, I asked God to forgive me for all the ways that I had wronged this disturbed deranged guy. Six people showed up for this Mississippi funeral. I almost didn't make it as I boarded the wrong plane out of Washington DC. I so wanted to stand there in the Presence of my Good God and put to rest the demons that haunted me through the years. My brother's footsteps! My brother's death didn't bring me the closure I thought it would and he still haunts me even to this day. And I forgive him, once again. But, fear has no power over me. My God's Love is casting out the fear, day by day, little by little. Nothing went away and died in that funeral procession, but I die daily. And I forgive him from my heart, this day forward. By the Grace of God! 2 Cor 12:9 - His Grace is enough. My haunted hunted self is too much for people. Doesn't matter. He is enough. May I never forfeit the Grace of God and shut it down because of the pain. (Jonah 2:8). I forgive my brother's footsteps from my heart!
We forgive (our husbands, our children, our friends)
when we strive against all thoughts of revenge,
and wish well to them,
and grieve at their calamities,
and pray for them,
and seek reconciliation with them,
and show ourselves ready on all occasions to relieve them.
Thomas Watson
I'm at the end of my rope.
ReplyDeleteTying a knot and holding tight.
Good News...
He is holding me tight!
Psalm 46:1
HE is the God-of-this-Tight-Place. What washes over my brain as I sleep is how tight things are for me right now. Last night, the dream came sneaking round the corner. Remember that line from Bobby Darin's song---could that someone be Mack the Knife? It's a recurrent recumbent dream. Slumber in the tightest places. I must enter the 20-inch doorway into my one-room home down underground where we were celebrating something, surrounded by many sardines, uh people. Claustraphobic! I awaken in terror, sweating, physically shaking, and rip off my pj's. And I cry out to the God-of-my-Tight-Places. In the past 24 hours, Psalm 46:1 has been shared with me six times. A very Present God in my tight places. Been thinking a lot if I'm living in the present. He's here but where am I? And He says to me 2 Cor 12:9..."My Grace is sufficient for this tight place." So I'll push through and hold fast to Him knowing really that HE is holding me together Col. 1:17.
Bev, reading your posts today, I am sitting here with tear-filled eyes. I feel your pain, your struggle with forgiveness, and your determination to trust God completely through all of it.
ReplyDeleteAs I struggle with issues of my own, I often fail, but this morning I woke up with the realization, we are not promised a happy, stress-free life.
The more problems we face, the more we trust Him, the more we grow in love and for preparation to enter His presence.
I know it sounds crazy, but I really look at this body as a rental, just using it for the short time I am here on earth. I am a spirit, walking around in this rental body, learning, growing and waiting for the day my spirit will be joined with His spirit forever.
I love you, dear sweet pearl sister. You are a pearl of great price. Thank you again for sharing your heart.
Praying for you Bev....hold tight...He's holding you tight.
ReplyDeleteIf I had not met Larry and his hard questions to me, I would be in deep darkness with fledgling hope. But I walk in the darkness & have no light sometimes and I can reach out to a Hand in my darkness and rely on God and hope - Isaiah 50:10. I'm thinking this morning of what Larry wrote in Galatians on p. 255 as I face my own flesh. "It's what's happening IN you that matters, not what's happening TO you. My Son has set you free to make choices that will release you from your compulsions. Only when you see deeply enough into your heart to recognize the corruption beneath the compulsions will you discover freedom. Pray like David: Search ME O God...see if there is any offensive way in me. Psalm 139:23-24 Message." I love you all because you do see with eyes that most don't. You look beyond your pain to that "Holy Desire" in your depths. The holy desire that "will expose every other desire as less, every other satisfaction as unworthy to be compared with the satisfying joy of loving others with divine power." p. 255-256. I can say that somewhere on life's road, I let go and loved my brother, loved my parents. Very grateful to be walking this journey with each of you. We are all a mess, glorious messes. I like what Frederick Buechner said one time: "When I have the feeling that someone is trying to set me a good example, I start edging toward the door." Too many people today write to tell us how to love, how to find joy, steps to peace. I feel like you guys walk with me. No lectures here. No answers over here. No example to follow. No steps to freedom. No fixes, quick or cement. Beautiful women you are to let God pour out of you. Psalm 50:2. I'm not like I was even yesterday. Thank You!
ReplyDeleteWhy am I so verbose these days???
ReplyDeleteWonder what's going on inside of me? Not what's happening to me.
Bev, my heart aches for you. I pray to our Heavenly Father, Elohim, Jehovah Jirah, the God for Grace and Peace. Thank you LORD for continuing through the dark nights for Bev to make a way when their seems to be no way...
ReplyDeleteThank you Bev for sharing your heart and being faithful to post the entries for this blog. You are indeed a PEARL of Great Price and the I am blessed to be in community on this blog. The truth at some time or other we all have big issues that require God's amazing Grace to allow true forgiveness to happen. Marty Sholars taught several years ago that most of us if we have made it to adulthood have some kind of scar on our bodies. That is to remind us that life can hurt but God heals and sometimes scars are left so we will not forget but always seek forgiveness and mercy.
James 2:12 So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. 13 For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.
MERCY TRIUMPS OVER JUDGMENT.
Loving you and praying for the bright light of God's Mercy and Grace to fall all over you and bring peace through the night of your storms.
This is a Song I must Sing Praying God's Grace Mercy and Peace as you walk through these experiences.
Sylvia
“He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me.” Psalm 18:19 (NIV)
ReplyDeleteI was already crying before I came over here, and well, I'm so blurry eyed I can hardly type. Without a doubt, forgiveness is only possible through Christ. My tight place this morning is for my suffering friend, a mother with cancer whose daughter's greatest fear was losing her mom. So subconsciously, she created the very circumstances that would cause her to lose her mother, not in physical death but in the death of lost hope.
Forgiveness is the first step back to healing. Forgiveness takes away the tightness. Heal us, Lord. Help us to forgive.
Annette, I love your heart for K and C. I read a quote this morning from Buechner, my favorite author, and I thought immediately of you. "Courage is his who with his scalp cold with fear yet acts courageously." I thought of you getting out of your car to go in to offer courage to your friend's daughter. You are a very courageous friend in what you are doing. You offer courage. I know! You have done it to me. And it happened again last night.
ReplyDeletePraying Bev. What a day...woke up a little teary thinking 2 years ago I told my dad I love you, not knowing I would not see him again and then my great-nephew arrives this a.m. bringing tears of shear joy!
ReplyDeletealso my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart."
Even with Jesus as Lord and Savior, there is no wholeness in body, mind or spirit without forgiveness.
Lord help to freely forgive and never hold a grudge.
"You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?' And in anger his master delivered him to the jailers,until he should pay all his debt. So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart."
ReplyDeleteOh may I forgive from the heart! Have I extended forgiveness, yet in my heart still hold on to the offense? Have I truly forgiven? I then in turn have to seek forgiveness for my own hard heartedness. "Watch over your heart with all diligence for from it flow the springs of life." Pvbs 4:23
He hung there on that cruel cross.
ReplyDeleteThe smell of death...
The numbness in His Hands...
The silence of His Father...
The taste of blood on His lips...
And through His swollen, beaten eyes, the twisted, demonic grins of His captors were the glimpses He had of His greatest work of creation...man.
And instead of choosing to hate and seek revenge, He forgave them.
Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. Luke 23:34.
Bev, you are soaring up higher. The crosswinds for an eagle only lift them up to higher levels of soaring.
I choose to have mustard seed forgiveness this day towards those God has brought to my feet for a touch of His Grace. It will take His power to increase my ability to forgive...and He will accomplish that in me. He will. I see it every day. He tenders my heart towards those who hurt me. I hurt for them to know Christ more intimately, to be humble and obedient towards Him.
It helps for me to know that the enemy is the one deserving the weight of our offense...the enemy of darkness.
All it takes is mustard seed faith to forgive, just a mustard seed size of willingness. It is His work in us that brings the harvest.
"So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart."
I pour it out as an offering this night, Jesus. I choose to forgive and I choose to love. Not by my might, but by Your power in me to do this. I believe, Lord, help my unbelief.
Oh, Annette (Abba's Girl), I'm so sorry for the loss of your dad and without a notice. Oooh. And then today's arrival---how beautiful. Orchestrated from Above. For you. You have such a tender and beautiful heart. So thrilled you are walking with us this year. It's as though you have always been here, my friend!
ReplyDeleteDeborah, I knew you'd show up today with mustard seed forgiveness! And the seed of the kingdom is growing in you and one day that mustard seed will be a stately tree where birds make beautiful handpicked creative nest homes in your branches. Becoming fully alive! I Cor 2:7
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