7604	Forums / Main Forum / Forgivness Anonomous	on: April 06, 2007, 03:26:14 AM
Forgiving of others depends upon us understanding forgiveness. Most of us seldom have a really deep understanding of forgiveness so we use our performance to forgive others. Forgiveness is something that Christ alone has accomplished at the cross. Because He has completed the work , our going to Him for forgiveness is absolutely free. We must come before Him and as we are seeing our sin we must place it before Him. We must sense His divine cleansing at the cross. Forgiveness does not depend upon a feeling but it is a reality. When we meditate upon His bigness we can begin to see ourselves as unable to forgive without His grace. Forgiveness is not found in some little trick we try. Its found in the free flowing grace of Christ alone. We are sinners because we are in Adam. We are seen in Adam , that is we would have done the same thing he did if we were in the garden. His sin was imputed to our account as a result of the fall. We are sinners from our birth. Sin is much deeper than just the feeling of guilt. It goes down into the areas that we are blinded to. We are so corrupted with sin that some time we experience a load of guilt, by sin that outnumbers the hairs of our heads. When we begin to mortify sin we begin to morn over our sin. We must hate sin more than we hate our feeling of remorse. Our feelings of guilt remind us that sin has consequences and we are always going to face them on the inside as long as we are in this corrupted state. If God were to judge us by our sin, we would be consumed in a second. But because of Christ we are not treated as our sin deserves. The problem is that we do not understand the depth of our sin rather than dealing with the feelings of guilt we need to go deeper than this. We need to be raise by our view of Gods beauty and holiness so that we see our utter inability to do anything about sin. We cannot bring one act of righteousness before a Holy God in order to receive forgiveness. We cannot wash our sins away. Religion will lead us to think more highly of ourselves than we ought and it will cause us to look to someone or something else to relieve the guilt feelings. Christ is the only remedy for sin. It is only when we turn to Christ away from ourselves and trust totally in His substitutionary atonement that we can truly be forgiven and that is for all time.Because forgiveness depends upon His work, and what He does is final. Some times God withdraws His graciousness in our lives so that our struggle with sin will increase. He does this so that we will be drawn together in the body of Christ by being humbled. Our unity depends upon our seeing how sinful we not being able within our selves to make christian unity possible. We need the streams of mercy to be united to one another. We cannot unite in a program or a little psychological trick. We can only be united with we are brought down from ourselves and glory in Christ alone. We are all at different experiences in our lives. If we are experiencing a time of refreshing and God is showing us the wonders of His grace then we need to carry the burdens of our brothers and sisters. We need to take them to God in prayer and pray that God will bring revival. We need to show them free grace. We cannot show people free grace if we have a system in place to get forgiveness on our own. We will only lead them down the path of self forgiveness and pharisee-ism.