Forgiveness: My command to you is: love your enemies, pray for your persecutors. This will prove that you are the sons of your heavenly Father, for his sun rises on the bad and the good, he rains on the just and the unjust. If you love those who love you, what merit is there in that? And if you greet your brothers only, what is so praiseworthy about that? In a word, you must be made perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. Matthew 5:44 If you forgive the faults of others, your heavenly Father will forgive yours. If you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive you. Matthew 6:14 Be on your guard. If your brother does wrong, correct him; if he repents, forgive him. If he sins against you seven times a day, and seven times a day turns back to you saying, ‘I am sorry,’ forgive him. Luke 17:3 What does forgiveness really mean? It is not just human fairness; it is excusing those things that can’t readily be excused at all. In a way, it is even more than that. When we excuse someone, we brush his mistake aside and do not punish him for it. When we forgive, we not only pardon a failing or sin, but we embrace the sinner and seek to rehabilitate and restore him. Our forgiveness may not always be accepted, yet once we have reached out our hand we cleanse ourselves of resentment. We may remain deeply wounded, but we will not use our hurt to inflict further pain on others. If we re-visit a negative memory in the sense of chalking up another person’s wrongs to us, it becomes a grudge. It doesn’t matter if the cause of the grudge is real or imagined: once there, it will slowly eat away at us until it spills out and corrodes everything around us. We all know bitter people. They have an amazing memory for the tiniest detail, and they wallow in self-pity and resentment. On the outside they may appear to be calm and composed, but inside they are bursting with pent-up hatred. These people defend their indignation constantly: they feel they have been hurt too deeply and too often, and that somehow it exempts them from the need to forgive. But it is just these people who need to forgive most of all. Their hearts are sometimes so full of rancor that they no longer have the capacity to love. They put up that “wall” and most of all don’t love or forgive themselves. ~The man who opts for revenge should dig two graves~ ~People ask my advice; I say; “Pray and Forgive, Pray and Forgive.”~ Mother Teresa ~It may be infinitely worse to refuse to forgive than to murder: murder may be an impulse of a moment of heat, whereas not forgiving is a cold and deliberate choice of the heart~ ~It is not right to try to remove all suffering, nor is it right to endure it stoically. Suffering can be used, turned to good account, for the Glory of God. What makes a life happy or unhappy is not outward circumstances, but our inner attitude to them~ above from the Book: Seventy Times Seven: The Power of Forgiveness We only have one life and what you do with it is your choice. No matter what you have been through, it has brought you HERE, to this point in your life. And it’s a pretty good place if you are reading this !
Posted on: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 17:17:15 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015