Who Needs Forgiveness?نموونە

It is my experience that many people have never been honest about their real moral condition and do everything they can to avoid being confronted by God as he is in the Scriptures. 

They hide behind the weak excuse that there is no God and that the Bible is a contradictory book full of paper promises. They try to rationalise their unbelief by saying that the Christian message is irrelevant to modern Man. 

Yet, deep down inside those same people may be disturbed and deeply unhappy. They may be empty, lonely, frustrated, vulnerable, unstable in their relationships and have no personal sense whatever of a meaning to life. 

The extraordinary thing about the Bible is that it actually gives clear and unequivocal answers to these issues! It gives us insights regarding Mankind which are not just psychological. 

Why then won’t we read this Book? Why don’t we search it and mine its resources? Why do so many dismiss it and refuse to even open its pages? Could it be that we all instinctively know that we ought to believe in God and that we ought to relate to him—and to others—with genuine selfless love? 

Is it that no matter how much we rationalise, we all know that this is how life is meant to be? Since the Bible confronts us with a God who is both holy and just, and because it faces us with our moral responsibility to know and love him and to love our neighbours as ourselves, we stay well clear of its teaching!

To my Christian readers I would say, we—of all people—ought to be deeply aware that everything we do and say and think is ultimately related to whether or not we are living in a realised experience of God’s total forgiveness. 

Sadly, many churchgoing, professing Christians do not seem to know they are forgiven. I was speaking one Sunday morning on forgiveness and the moment the service was over an elderly man came rushing up to me: ‘Young man, do you mean to tell me that God has forgiven my sin? I’ve been going to church all my life and didn’t know that!’ 

On another occasion a gentleman who had recently come into the blessing of forgiveness through attending studies on Romans asked the sad question: ‘Why hasn’t someone told me this before? I’ve lived with my guilt through forty years of hell.’