Forgiveness-Selah97-CMAW199

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."