Forgiveness

Last night, I was reading a book by Jeremy Pearsons called "Hello My Name is God."
It was one of those moments when you read something and you realize that through those words, God is trying to teach you a lesson.

Here are those words:

You are going to see that His mercy has been extended to you time and time again, and if you truly want to be a carrier of His divine nature then mercy must be your response, too.

God changed the rules, and mercy found us in the crowd. He changed the rules for us! The extent of that must really sink in - the fact that it's not a one-time deal and that mercy has endured in your life. It has endured your failures again and again.

Why did I need to hear this? Because, at Madison's Birthday party, Morgan left to go to work and I was so angry with him. In fact, if you read my Birthday post when I first wrote it, you would've read all about that. However, I took that part out after I learned this lesson. When I was so angry with him, I was thinking to myself these things:

He's never going to change. I keep forgiving him every time and he still continues to mess up and hurt my feelings. If he really cared about me, he wouldn't do these things.

Then I read those words in that book, and I had a revelation. I realized that I do the same thing to God, don't I? I never change. I keep messing up. I love Him more than anything, but I continue to sin over and over again. I continue to place other things higher on the priority list above Him, but He continues to forgive me. He has endured my failures again and again and He still forgives me. He doesn't just say, "Well, she's never going to change and I'm really tired of forgiving her when I know she's just going to mess up again, so I'm just going to forget about her." (Thank goodness He doesn't say that!)

I realized at that point, that He was showing me and teaching me about unconditional love. How many times have I hurt Him and messed up royally, but He still forgives me because He loves me. If He can endure my failures again and again, then I realized what He was trying to teach me is that mercy must be my response too.

He was saying to me, "Kristin, how many times have you messed up and I always forgive you, even though I know it will only be a matter of time before you mess up again. It really is no different than you and Morgan. You're doing no better. And you can extend that same forgiveness to Morgan that I've extended to you."

You see, it wasn't necessarily what Morgan did that made me so mad, it was that he did it again. I kept being angry because all I could think of is that if I forgive him, he's just going to do it again. But the Lord showed me that whether he does it again is irrelevant. He commands me to forgive in the same way that He has forgiven me for the millionth time for the same exact thing. That's what unconditional love is all about.

And for the record, I know there are plenty of things I do to Morgan that he has a hard time forgiving too. I'm certainly not trying to pretend that I'm perfect.

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It's funny too, that today in church, our Pastor just happened to say that it's so easy for us to receive forgiveness, but forgiving is so much harder. That is so true. We were talking about how we should pray like Jesus prayed today. We must realize how holy God is and seek His priorities over our own. He already knows what we need before we even ask Him.

The closer we get to God, the more we realize our sins. When we pray, we should seek God's pardon for our sins. But, once we are saved, forgiveness is ours.

In Luke 11:1, the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray. This is the only time you see them asking Him to teach them something. He responded by telling them how they should pray, by seeking these 5 things:

1. Seek God's presense with a worshipful heart.
2. Seek God's priorities over your own.
3. Seek God's provision for your daily needs.
4. Seek God's pardon for your sins.
5. Seek God's power to overcome temptation.

So, I thought it was so neat how God used that book to teach me a lesson about something that I was having trouble learning at that very moment. I get so excited when that happens!