Who Needs Forgiveness?Sýnishorn

Only God’s total forgiveness frees us to live as he intended from the beginning of time, enabling us to fulfil our created role in his great plan for his wider creation.

Forgiveness is the only basis upon which we can be sure of one day standing before our Creator—face to face— with a clear and tranquil conscience. If we have the slightest doubt about our total cleansing from sin through the Cross, then we will have no confidence before God here and now, and will certainly fear to face him on that great day of reckoning which lies ahead. 

Guilt will rise to the surface and paralyse us. We may have the desire to do what is morally right, but will lack the power to resist temptation. As we pray, we will be drawing near with our lips but our heart will not be in it—a faith to believe that God is both hearing and answering our prayers will be lacking.

Men and women, boys and girls need to know God’s total forgiveness. It has been said that a partial forgiveness from God, a grudging forgiveness, a conditional forgiveness or an uncertain forgiveness would be useless. 

These would only tantalise and mock us. We would never know where we stood in our relationship with him. But when we know we are totally forgiven, then loving God comes as a natural result. 

On the other hand, if we see God as having only partly or conditionally forgiven our sin, then we will have a difficult time loving him. If we think forgiveness is contractual (God will pardon me if I do this or that), then our attention will be focused on our own guilty failures rather than upon Christ and his cleansing power.

The conclusion we will inevitably draw from such a relationship is that God is pleased with us when we don’t sin, and angry with us when we do! We will be measuring our relationship with him by our ‘performance’ rather than by what Jesus Christ has done for us on the Cross. 

We will come to think that our pious mode of living—rather than his sacrifice for us—is the measure of our ongoing acceptance by God. As a result, we will set up a program of works (of not sinning and of doing good) in order to gain God’s favour. 

This self- righteous, ‘do-it-yourself’ program may well be an unconscious act on our part, but it will have betrayed a false and deficient understanding of God’s way of accepting sinners. It would simply prove that we have never really known his wonderful and free forgiveness!