Forgiveness
is offered to us in Christ. We are completely forgiven of all of our
sins past and present. Forgiveness is really at the heart of
understanding the gospel and having an assurance that we are loved by
God. We are sustained by God through Christ work on the cross and so we
can persevere as sinners in a world of uncertainty, lack of forgiveness
or even understanding forgiveness.
Forgiveness is not earned by
us. It was earned already by Christ when He took on sin and guilt and
paid the penalty encouraged as a result of sin. He satisfied the wrath of
God for sin on our behalf so that we could be set free of that legal
obligation in punishment. Christ is our satisfaction from the moment we receive the Spirit to when we are glorified. We rest in Christ for our
forgiveness.
Satan is the accuser, he is always questioning sinners as
to their commitment to Christ. He comes as an angel of light to use
scripture and people around us who do not understand
forgiveness to try to convince us that there is something extra that we
need to do in order to be forgiven. He twist scripture so that we will
not understand fully what forgiveness is so that we are always
questioning the power of the gospel to effect our present attitude. We will withdraw from our Father and be engulfed in guilt. This deli-ma is more common in christians circles than any other aspect of
christian experience. Understanding forgiveness is so central to
assurance and having a vibrant relationship with the Father that it is
the underlying root of all hardheartedness.
When we were first
awakened to our sin, we became aware of our state of helplessness and we
saw that our only hope was to trust in Christ . We had a profound
experience of forgiveness that lasted days, or weeks of just being
unburdened and we were comforted, and at peace, and Christ was so real
to us in those first hours of new birth. Then one day it was as if we
had began to revert back into a pattern feeling guilt and not having the
assurance we enjoyed when as in those first times of love for Him.
One
of the reasons of getting in this guilt disposition is that we become
self centered in the joy of experiencing salvation for the first time
and we begin to think that we had something to do with being forgiven.
We began to think that we could go back to being under the law so that
we could be kept from departing from Christ . Our struggle was a
result of not really understanding the extent of Gods grace and not
having a deep knowledge of that grace. We needed to grow in our knowing
Him in all of our experiences. We needed to have fresh assurances of His
forgiveness and as we were assured and growing in the knowledge of the
truth, desiring to be filled with all knowledge, praying to be led more
and more into the truth we would gain a more profound understanding and
appreciation of just how deep and wide was the goodness of God , the
love of God and the faithfulness of God.
All of these assurances
are a result of experiencing His forgiveness anew. And in experiencing
His forgiveness anew we are given a supernatural peace. He speaks
peace to our hearts. So forgiveness is not just an intellectual grasping
of scripture but it is experiencing a deep relational communication
of that forgiveness as we grow in the word as we focus on the
greatness of God and as we have spiritual fellowship with one another. To
really gain a grasp on forgiveness we need to have a vision of the
freeeeee grace of God in Christ Jesus. The freeness of the grace is
equal to the bigness of God. If we have a small God then we will have a
very shallow view of forgiveness. If we have a big God we will have a
profound view of assurance and forgiveness.
Forgiveness is like
being rapped up in the arms of the Father, having a sense that His arms are around you and He is so sweet to you. He comes in a
manner that pulls away the chains of sin, by giving us a sense of
freedom from sin in granting us the grace of forgiveness in a renewal
sense. We are so over come with His goodness that our desires are rapped
up in praising Him and extolling Him all of our days. We are habitually pleased in our desiring more of Him, we seek Him as a person, we long
for Him in our mourning over sin and we desire Him more than life itself.
Those desires are very essential to understanding assurance and being single minded with our hearts responding to what our minds know is true.
Look, the eternal God who fills all things, who is all powerful, who is
all knowing dwells in us! Really, really, really! Our desires could
never be fulfilled in this life, because we would be swallowed up by His
power if He ever showed us His absolute presence. But yet we are in a
sense swallowed up by growing in our desires for Him so that what we
know about that power leaves us with a more depressing view of our lack
on the other side. We are as it were driven on by an understanding that
there is no where else to go except to desire Him more and more.
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