The Forgiveness Credit Card


Don't leave home without it. If you do not forgive others, God will not forgive your errors.

There is an odd aspect here that I think bears a look. It is not quite accurate to say that we forgive God, for he surely does no wrong, but we may become very angry at what he does or leaves undone. There are examples in the Bible of people bitter or angry at God, lest you think yourself the first.

If we think hard enough about it, we will see that we already know that God works all things to good and when we cross the divide of death and see things from his eternal perspective, we will agree he did the right thing. We will see our anger at him as smallminded and shortsighted.

Essentially we are trusting him to pay off the balance due. Of the harms and hurts we have endured he has said, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay." But to us, those who turn to him, he has promised his forgiveness for the sake of his son. Further, he has promised us that in the world to come he will wipe every tear from our eyes. The way to deal with anger at God is to look forward not back.

Looking forward not back may also be a good plan for setting aside anger and cross-purposes between Christian denominations. Whether they like the idea or not, Baptists and Pentecostals are going to be in heaven together and it will be marvelous. They really will be glad of one another, for love is like that. It can make you treasure someone with whom you would seem to have little in common. Catholics and Presbyterians, Orthodox and Anglican, a whole menagerie of curious theological slants--all their arguments silenced by the presence of the One their theologies speculated about.

Let's try to make the present world more like the world to come, reevaluate what we think of other Christians on the basis of what they shall be not what they are, so that how we deal with them is, more so than we now do it, done on earth as it is in heaven.

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