Archive for redemption
When It Seems Too Late
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On the day after Thanksgiving, I awakened to my 2:45 a.m. alarm. I slipped out of bed and tiptoed into the bathroom, trying not to awaken my husband. The night before, I had laid my clothes, my shoes, my jewelry, my phone, my coupons, and my small shopping purse, which goes over my head and across my body so as not to be in the way of the day’s serious work. I quickly dressed for the day’s task, right down to my tennis shoes which are my personal requirement for a major shopping day. I downed a cup of coffee faster than you could say Black Friday.
My daughter and I arrived at the mall at 3:05 a.m. to snag the best deals at Belk, a local department store, which had opened at 3:00 a.m. To my dismay, there were no parking spots left in the front of the mall. None. Apparently all the folks who had hit the 12 a.m. sales at Wal-Mart and Target and Best Buy were now at the mall. Not to be outwitted, I found a place to park behind the mall even though there were no entrances there to any anchor stores. After all, with my tennis shoes on, I could walk/run the length of the mall in a minute flat.
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Do You Need to Forgive Yourself?
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What is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done? What is the worst mistake you’ve ever made? What is the greatest harm you’ve ever committed to another human?
Do you have your list? Did the pictures in your mind come up faster than high-speed internet?
Most of us don’t have any trouble recalling the worst moments of our lives. I imagine that when I asked those questions, you not only recalled the “bad” things you have done, but you also reconnected to some feelings of shame and guilt.
A foundational truth of Christianity is that we come into relationship with God through forgiveness based on the work of Christ. We maintain the flow of fellowship both with God and man by confessing our sins and appropriating the purifying work of Christ into our daily lives.
While we may understand the role of forgiveness in our Christian walk in relation to God and to others, we may find it harder still to be aware of the need to forgive ourselves.
Woven into the fabric of our core belief system may be the unspoken, and often unrecognized, belief that refusing to forgive ourselves shows God that we realize what dirty rotten sinners we really are and agrees with God that we don’t deserve to be forgiven.
And while we are sinners and don’t deserve forgiveness apart from Christ, through Christ we become righteous and through his grace, we are offered forgiveness. Living in that forgiveness means that we acknowledge that God offers us radical, undeserved forgiveness and we cannot make ourselves more deserving of that forgiveness by holding ourselves prisoner to past mistakes.
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A Holy Invitation
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Getting to the Heart of Things
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A most terrifying and at the same time, comforting, thought is that Jesus knows our hearts. When we face the truth about our own heart, we find two things. We find that, at times, our heart is desperately wicked, strays from God, and seeks our own way. Concurrently, we find that our heart is good and has been changed by God Himself.
We have two natures. The Scripture refers to this as the old nature and the new nature. Our journey with Christ invites us, with the Spirit’s help, to crucify the old nature and its desires and strengthen and feed the new nature.
This journey into our own hearts is initiated by God. I have found that as I know more and more about the truth of my own heart and am able to name my own sin, struggles, and woundedness, I am able to find more of God’s heart. In other words, the journey to know my true heart leads me deeper into knowing God’s heart and vice versa.
In John 21, we find an exchange between Jesus and Peter which has been the topic of many sermons, Bible lessons, and discussions. I’ve been meditating on this passage since last night. This morning, I kept feeling challenged by God that there was much more there than I’d seen before. I invited His Spirit to speak, to teach me, to open my eyes.
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The Starting Point
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Sometimes the processes of our lives could be best represented by a circle. We start at a certain point, sure that we have all the answers, cocky, self-assured, ready to conquer the world and move aside all the poor fools who have so much less understanding than we do. However, life with its hard knocks and deep valleys, has a way of enlightening us and leveling the ground of our self-importance. We often find that we weren’t quite as “right” as we first thought. We come full circle and learn to see the wisdom in some of the ones who have gone before us in this journey called life. We experience hurt and pain. We are wounded.
And a most peculiar thing happens for those who open their hearts to learn. We find that our wounds have the potential of becoming a source of healing for others.
I suppose that we have two basic choices when life wounds us – and it always does in one way or another. We can shake our fists at the pain, curse those who brought it, and become angry, resentful, and bitter, demanding payment from the world and life itself for surely we deserve retribution for the wrongs committed against us. Or we can allow God to bring beauty out of our woundedness.
If we are to truly make a difference in this life, it seems to me that the starting place for that is the place of our woundedness. Why would such a thing be true?
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