Forgiving and Reconciling, Part III: Wherein We Admit That We Of All People Have No Right To Be Bitter Towards Anybody

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Pastor Foley

God sets us believers free from the power of sin but not from the sin-stained story of our redemption. We’re not set free from that story because God wants us and others to see Christ Jesus continually displaying his gloriously unlimited patience toward us in real time, in actual human history.

Our sin-stained history, when it is ever before us and others, ensures humility. When we have amnesia about our misdeeds, it makes for bad theology and no sanctification and it leads to a hypocritical contempt of our fellow sin-strugglers. 

As Pastor Brian Tubbs says, “Flawed, sinful human beings do not have the moral right to hold grudges or bitterness toward others.”

What he’s saying is that we’re often bitter toward those who sin against us because we judge them outside of the context of our own sin-stained story of redemption. Reinhold Niebuhr, the Christian ethicist, says, “There is no deeper pathos in the spiritual life than the cruelty of righteous people.… Their pride is the basis of their lack of mercy.”

Robust memory of our sins is the antidote to pride.

So when it comes to rendering a verdict on our guilt, God does not remember our sin.

But when it comes to telling and bringing to completion the story of our redemption, God remembers every detail of our sin, transforms it through his grace, and enters the whole story into the public record. Christian marriage and family therapist Larry Barber puts it like this:

God does not forgive us by forgetting our sin. In fact, the Old Testament is a record of the history of God’s dealings with the nation of Israel, and a significant portion of that history involved the sin of the nation and its rebellion against God. Certainly one of the reasons God inspired the biblical authors to record the history of Israel was so that later generations would remember what had happened in the past.

The Bible tells us that God is the sovereign, transcendent creator of all that exists. Nothing happens to us that He has not ordained. But He does not author the events and experiences of our lives and then forget that they ever happened. God’s purpose is that we learn from the experiences that He has willed.

So God remembers sin forever, but only for our sake, and for the sake of those crushed by our sin. His mercy takes away not only the sting of death (like Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:55, “Death, where is thy sting?”), but it also takes away the sting of a history that is not saturated in his grace—a history stuck in sin.

When our sinful history is saturated in his grace, it makes it possible for us to bear our sin-stained past and present, because it turns that sin-stained past and present into a field of future hope. 

So forgiveness demands memory. And it demands God’s ongoing judgment as well—not merely a sinner’s one-time passage through a terrifying turnstile of judgment, but a redeemed believer’s lifestyle of accepting God’s ongoing retelling of our stories, the parts that make us look good and the parts that reveal us to be really quite bad after all.

God insists that we, his redeemed ones, remember our past quite openly and publicly, with full admission of and contrition for sins past and present. But part of what he calls us to do is to remember our sins without condemnation of ourselves or anyone else. That’s how his glory shows through. That’s how people come to realize how merciful he really is. And God calls us to tell our stories as “in process”—that is, with full faith that God is redeeming us.

In his mercy, God does not cut the cord between us and his judgment at the moment he forgives us. Instead, he cinches the cord permanently. God’s ongoing judgment of us is the anchor that prevents us from falling back into the waves of pride, amnesia, and condemnation which we had fallen into and from which he is saving us. It is only when we are permanently secured by the ongoing judgment of God that sin can be addressed by anyone—God, the offender, and the offended—with something other than pain and regret and anger.

And that–as we’ll talk about in Part IV of our series–gives us a whole different way to react to the sin of others.

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Forgiving and Reconciling, Part II: Wherein We Hear The Good News That God Who Does Not Remember Our Sins Does Not Forget Them Either

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Paul says in Romans that there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. But we should never misunderstand this and say that there is no judgment.

To the contrary: If we want to be forgiven and healed—if we and those we hurt are to be set free from our sin—then the evil in us needs to be named and judged by God, not hidden or downplayed or forgotten.

The doorway to hope in Christ is willingly naming with God and before others the evil in ourselves. And we do this honestly and humbly, not reluctantly or with exaggeration. And we know that he is judging—that is, setting right—the mess in us by the finished work of his son, Christ Jesus and by the present power of the Holy Spirit.

This is why from the beginning of the salvation process to its culmination (when we become fully mature in Christ), we stand before God—and before our fellow human beings—with our arms at our sides. We make no effort to justify ourselves or explain ourselves or defend ourselves or even humiliate ourselves. We don’t fear God’s judgment. We seek it and welcome it! And we don’t fear people’s disdain. Instead, we trust Christ and the Scriptures that when we willingly receive God’s judgment in Jesus’ name, we enter the narrow path to the wideness of God’s mercy.

This is very different than how most of contemporary Christianity typically regards God’s judgment. It’s often seen as a jagged metal turnstile which we pass through one single terrifying time on the way into Salvation Acres. Then after we pass through, God regards us as justified—or, as some folks like to say, “just-as-if-I’d-never-sinned.”

And that’s a glorious truth so far as it goes. Like Peter says in Acts 10:43, “All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

But here’s where error creeps in: This idea of “just-as-if-I-had-never-sinned” becomes for many Christians not only an assurance of forgiveness (which it’s intended to be) but also justification for an end to ongoing repentance (which is the opposite of what God intends).

If you think about it like a courtroom, many Christians get so excited that God overturns their guilty verdict that they move for a dismissal of the evidence. We’d rather our fellow human beings not know how bad we’ve been. So God’s forgiveness becomes a gateway into a field of spiritualized denial as Larry Barber, a Christian marriage and family therapist, puts it.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls this cheap grace—the idea that “my only duty as a Christian is to leave the world for an hour or so on a Sunday morning and go to church to be assured that my sins are all forgiven.” Bonhoeffer was the pastor who stood against the Nazis during World War II when most German Christians didn’t. And he said that cheap grace was a major reason why most German Christians joined in lockstep with the Nazis.

And we Christians today are not that different from the German Christians under Hitler. Methodist Bishop Gregory Jones says that we Christians today often forget that Christ justifies the sinner, not the sin. Or, put a little differently, we forget that Christ saves us from our sins, not in our sins. Jones says:

A Christian account of forgiveness ought not to simply or even primarily be focused on the absolution of guilt; rather, it ought to be focused on the reconciliation of brokenness, the restoration of communion—with God, with one another, and with the whole Creation. Indeed, because of the pervasiveness of sin and evil, Christian forgiveness must be at once an expression of commitment to… “unlearn” sin and learn the ways of God (from Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis).

So when Scripture says that God remembers our sins no more (like in Isaiah 43:25, Jeremiah 31:34, Hebrews 8:12, and Hebrews 10:17), this doesn’t mean that he forgets our sins. It means that he has dealt with them conclusively—in the cross of Christ, he’s solved the problem. He’s setting everything right. He overturns the guilty verdict, but don’t miss this part:

He orders the evidence of our sin preserved.

That is, he doesn’t forget. He doesn’t just overlook. And he doesn’t want you or others to forget or just overlook either. That would take away from his glory and our growth in the image of Christ.

Like Paul said in 1 Timothy 1:16, his patience in saving us glorifies him! He doesn’t use your sin against you in the future—that’s what it means to say he remembers it no more—but once he forgives you he calls you to remember where you came from and where you really are presently at. And he calls you to submit yourself to him as he goes about his business of healing every one of your broken relationships, drying every tear that you have cried or caused others to cry, and bringing every glory to his name.

Some of that work isn’t completed on this side of glory. But he’s not waiting to begin. The kingdom of God is at hand. The king is already judging—setting things right that sin and death and evil have corrupted in you and through you.

And one thing that all of this ought to do for us is to cause us not to look down our noses at those who have sinned against us but rather, empathetically, across the aisle, as we’ll talk about in Part III of our series on Forgiving and Reconciling.

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Forgiving and Reconciling, Part I: Why We Ought to Look Forward to the Judgment of God Like Kids Look Forward to Christmas

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Pastor Foley

THE JUDGMENT OF GOD.

It sounds like an ominous topic, doesn’t it? Something we should hope we never face. Something that we’re fortunate that Jesus saves us from.

But wait a minute—it’s not the judgment of God that Christians should fear. It’s the wrath of God. And it turns out that the wrath of God is what we face when we run from the judgment of God. 

The judgment of God is something that all flesh should welcome—and long for!

Remember in the Old Testament book of Judges: Judges are those raised up by God to free the Israelites from bondage—bondage that they blundered into of their own accord.

God’s righteousness works the same way. It’s first and foremost God’s way of setting the world—and all of us within it–right. So far from being something we run away from, it’s something we should run toward. And that’s what our new blog series this month on the Work of Mercy of forgiving and reconciling is all about. 

The judgment of God is joined at the hip to God’s forgiveness of us–and it’s the wellspring of our forgiveness of others. That’s why our foundational Scripture in this series is found in 1 Timothy 1:15-17, where Paul talks about the judgment of God and why we should welcome it and never run from it.

This is how Paul starts, in 1 Timothy 1:15:

Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst.

Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. That’s his judgment, his righteousness—his setting things right. The foundation of his forgiveness.

When we read 1 Timothy 1:15 it’s hard to overlook Paul’s comment in that verse about himself—the part where he says that he is the worst of sinners. It sounds like an exaggeration, doesn’t it? 

But it’s actually not–and it’s actually key to understanding everything we’re talking about here about why the judgment of God is a major league part of God’s good news for us.

Paul persecuted Christians—which is to say, he persecuted Christ’s own body—which is to say, he persecuted Christ. Remember, Christ says to him on the Damascus Road, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” 

Paul persecuted Christ himself. That makes him quite reasonably the worst of sinners. And yet one of the most important things for us to see about this passage of Scripture is how readily Paul accepts this truth—God’s judgment—about himself. Paul doesn’t deny this truth, justify it, downplay it, explain it, glorify it, or attempt to change the subject. He simply states it. He just accepts it. Totally.

And then Paul goes on to point out that because of Christ Jesus, Paul’s acceptance of the judgment of God has opened the door to God’s mercy to Paul—and God’s transformation of Paul—in Christ Jesus. Check out 1 Timothy 1:16-17:

But for that very reason [Christ coming into the world to save the worst of sinners] I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe on him and receive eternal life. Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen (1 Timothy 1:16–17).

What you see here in Paul—our acceptance of God’s judgment leads to God’s mercy in Christ Jesus—is the very essence of what Christians call justification by faith. And this is why we welcome and plead for God’s judgment—because in Christ, God’s mercy follows God’s judgment for all who put their trust in Christ Jesus.

That’s God’s forgiveness in a nutshell, as we’ll see in the posts that follow. 

Where we’ll turn next is something that sounds weird but turns out to be great news, namely:

The God who remembers our sins no more never forgets our sins.

And he doesn’t want us or anyone else to forget them either.

We’ll explain why that’s great news in Part II of our series on forgiving and reconciling.

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