Apr 3, 2023
I have a gift for you today, something that will provide you
peace in a way that few things can.
That gift is the awareness of the power of forgiveness Forgiveness from AJ Boncore interview on
RealMenConnect podcast, he said there are 3 levels
of forgiveness
Upward, Inward, Outward
Unforgiveness is like drinking poison and expecting it to kill
someone else
My thoughts
Need the first two to get to the outward
Ideally we’d get the first two as done deal, and focus on
outward the rest of our lives, but reality is we need to continue
to experience the first two daily to get to the third.
We need to ask for forgiveness from God and repent of our
sins, and we need to regularly forgive ourselves. 1 John 1:9
says "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to
forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from
all unrighteousness. "
so in that verse we are told of the importance of confessing
our sins and it also assures us that we will be forgiven.
This was made possible by the once and for all sacrifice of Jesus
Christ.
I don't believe our salvation is dependent on repeatedly
asking for and receiving forgiveness. Yet it's clear
confession and repentance is a part of the daily Christian walk
that we should all be living out.
On the outward journey, forgiving others, another tip I got
from the AJ interview was the power of writing a letter. I also
learned this through some counseling I had the last few months. I
was challenged to write a letter to someone in my life, my father,
that I needed to forgive. My father is no longer alive, so I didn’t
actually deliver or read that letter to him, I read it to my
counselor as if he was that person. It was very powerful to write
down what I needed to forgive including how that person’s actions
and lack of action impacted me.
To dig deeper on this topic of forgiveness I encourage you to read the
books Total forgiveness and forgiving yourself by RT
Kindell. I will probably expand on this topic of forgiveness
drawing from those two books in the future.
Currently I have in my pile of books I want to read Forgiving
Forward, a gift from my friend Allen. I’ll let you know after I
read it my thoughts on that. I also encourage you to listen to the
AJ Boncore interview in its entirety. Link in
the show notes.
So, in your quiet time with God, be sure to confess your sin
that the Holy Spirit is convicting you of. At the same time,
be sure to forgive yourself and especially let go of your sins from
the distant past that are haunting you. If you continue to
beat yourself up over sins you've already been forgiven, the Devil
is winning and you are arguably making the statement that you don't
believe Christ sacrifice was good enough and you therefore have to
finish the job by punishing yourself. Stop doing that.
As Paul says in Phillippians 3:13-14 "Brethren, I do not count myself to
have apprehended; but one thing I
do, forgetting those things which are behind
and reaching forward to those things which are
ahead, 14 I press
toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in
Christ Jesus."