Forgiving As We Are Forgiven, Pt. 4 — A ‘Time With God’ Devotion

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Transcript

Good morning. As you start this day, you know that the best way to start every day of your life is by taking some time with God. There is no relationship more important in your life than your relationship with God. He is the one who will be with you through thick and thin, whether things are going great or whether you’re really struggling and hurting and you don’t understand.

He is there for you. He’s there with you.

And your life is a mess when you leave Him out of it.

But your life comes together in order and meaning when you put God at the centre of it. It doesn’t mean life becomes easy, but life becomes meaningful, and you start to understand even the difficult circumstances of life and how they fit into what God is doing in your heart and life.

Well, that’s what we do each weekday morning at this time. We start our day with God, and we open the Bible and listen to what He has to say to us, and it’s so often just what we need. God speaks so practically into our lives, and we’re talking this week about the topic of forgiveness and what could be more relevant to every single one of us than this topic.

Forgiveness is essential for our lives

It doesn’t matter if you’re a person who tends to always have nice relationships or if you’re a person who seems to be in conflict all of the time. Regardless, you constantly are encountering circumstances and relationships where you need to forgive.

Forgiveness comes more easily to some than to others, but whether it’s easy or not for you, you need to grow in this area of your life, giving forgiveness to the people around you. It’s hard, isn’t it, to forgive when you don’t only feel wronged, but you have actually been wronged.

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When those feelings rise up, forgiveness is the last thing that springs into your mind. And yet forgiveness is there at the forefront of God’s mind. We saw yesterday that offering forgiveness costs you. A giver pays the price for a gift, and a forgiver pays the price to give forgiveness.

But the reward is greater than the cost. Well, it’s the same with receiving forgiveness. Receiving forgiveness also costs you something and also rewards you.

Listen to what Peter says in 1 Peter chapter 5. He’s in a section where he’s talking about older people in the church and their relationship with the younger people in the church. He gives instructions to the older people and then to the younger people, and then he concludes it with this:

All of you clothe yourselves with humility toward one another. Because God opposes the proud but shows favour to the humble, humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand that He may lift you up in due time.

Well accepting forgiveness can be as hard as offering forgiveness sometimes can’t it. Because it costs you your pride and there’s nothing that is more dear to your fallen sinful nature than your pride.

We don’t want to accept forgiveness because it means we’re accepting that we were wrong in something and that’s difficult to do. But I want to say to you that if you remain proud, God is opposed to you.

I mean that’s what it says. This is Peter quoting from the Old Testament, and that verse in the Old Testament is quoted again and again in the New Testament. It’s such a foundational principle. God opposes the proud but shows grace to the humble.

So which are you when someone offers you forgiveness or when you need to be the one who initiates and asks for forgiveness? Why is that so hard? Because we’re proud. That’s it. We’re too proud to ask for forgiveness, and so we lose so much. You think about how many people who have been married.

Have stuck to their guns and never asked for forgiveness, and they think they are winning, but they come to the end and they say, in reality, I lost everything. Don’t be that person. Be a person who readily asks for forgiveness and receives forgiveness.

I’m John North.

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