Speak Blessing Over Your Family

How to Grow in Your Faith: Live in Grace

by Charles Crutcher

One of the most challenging ways to grow in our faith is to learn how to forgive. I don’t say this lightly, for it’s been difficult for me also, but one cannot follow Jesus and expect not to be challenged in this eventually.
Maybe you read the first two sentences and it brings up some bad memories for you? My friend, I do not know all that you have been through just like you don’t know all I have been through, but if I can say something to you that will only help you, it is this: forgiveness doesn’t free the one whom hurt you, but it sets you, the prisoner, free.

If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins.-Matthew 6:14-15

Jesus speaks of the only way God won’t forgive us: it’s when we hold out on others. Either through a painful tragedy, a significant wrong, a spouse who cheated on you, a person who beat you, or someone who took a life from you, it would seem that the worse thing that humans can do to one another is to hurt each other.

Forgiveness is one of the cruxes of Christianity

For me, the first time someone hurt me, I’ll be honest, I didn’t like how it made me feel about myself. Growing up, I’ve been hurt more times than I’ve been loved. In my formative years, I chose to shut down, to hide out, and to find ways to avoid people. I did this because of the constant abuse of being a new kid in school where bullying was the norm, while my parents moved around from place to place. Instead of finding places to fit in, I found myself an outsider and not by choice. Instead of acceptance, I found judgment. I wish I could tell you I found this in a church at the time, but that simply isn’t true.
Some of us have been hurt deeply by the very ones we thought we could trust the most: family. There is something about the very people who share most of our genetic markers, the same blood, which when they betray us, makes us feel even more cast out. It can seem almost singular in occurrence to us, but after 4 decades on this rock, I must inform you, this is very common and actually prevalent in our world. The very first murder was Cain killing his brother Abel. Sin is in our blood, but still, it feels deeply personal when our family is the very ones who exploit us. How can we forgive such wrongs at the husband who cheats, the abusive spouse or parent, the addict who chooses drugs over the family or the dad who walks out on us?

Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.-Nelson Mandela

Forgiveness doesn’t mean letting the person who wronged you off the hook, it means letting yourself off the hook. You don’t have to carry the weight or the burden of what they did to you, nor let it define who you are. In fact, if you choose grace, then it will become what people know about you. It’s irrational to our culture that still sees ‘eye for an eye’ as a way of life.
I’ve swallowed the poison and longed for the other person to acknowledge what they did to me was wrong, hoping either to tell them I don’t forgive them or to make them pay for it. But after spending some time watching those who knew Jesus and how they responded to atrocities committed by others I noticed something: they seemed more capable of love and joy than those who carried the sacks of bitterness around them.
Does forgiveness mean forgetting what another has done? Hardly. If the person continues to be abusive, walk away, or if they repeat the same patterns after you’ve given grace, it doesn’t mean you continue to allow that to happen. Many years down the road, there may be an opportunity for you to be able to see that you allowed it to rest and that you learned from it, but never go back to those memories in order to feel those hurt feelings intentionally as some people are prone to do. There comes a place in our pain where most get stuck, thinking what happened to them defines them and they associate it with their lives. This is extremely dangerous.

Those who say they will forgive but can’t forget, simply bury the hatchet but leave the handle out for immediate use. -Dwight L Moody

Scandalous Grace

So, who do you consider to be unforgivable in your life? Maybe they did something so bad it landed them in jail or with a death sentence. Maybe the person took their own life and the lives of many people who lived around them went with them as they found the quicksand of grief.
Jesus loved and forgave anyone who asked for it, or needed it so badly, He simply forgave them, sometimes even without them asking. We do not know what sins the man who was lowered through the roof that day by his friends who could no longer walk, but we do know he didn’t ask to be forgiven, yet that’s the first thing Jesus gave him before he was healed. There was a lady who was thrown at Jesus feet where her accusers already had stones in their hands ready to make her pay for her adultery. Imagine the fear she felt and the tears she was more than likely shedding for her mistake. When Jesus stood up to the men who accused her and ask the person with no sin to casts the first stone, they left. Jesus again asked her where her accusers were and simply told her not to do that anymore and I think He did it in such a loving way she knew He wasn’t defining who she was by what she did. That’s scandalous grace and furious love.
The thief, next to Jesus on the cross, knew his time was short and didn’t ask Him for forgiveness because the man didn’t know it was possible. Yet, when he asked Jesus to remember him in His kingdom, Jesus told the thief he would be in paradise.

Because salvation is by grace through faith, I believe that among the countless number of people standing in front of the throne and in front of the Lamb, dressed in white robes and holding palms in their hands (see Revelation 7:9), I shall see the prostitute from the Kit-Kat Ranch in Carson City, Nevada, who tearfully told me that she could find no other employment to support her two-year-old son. I shall see the woman who had an abortion and is haunted by guilt and remorse but did the best she could faced with grueling alternatives; the businessman besieged with debt who sold his integrity in a series of desperate transactions; the insecure clergyman addicted to being liked, who never challenged his people from the pulpit and longed for unconditional love; the sexually abused teen molested by his father and now selling his body on the street, who, as he falls asleep each night after his last ‘trick’, whispers the name of the unknown God he learned about in Sunday school.

‘But how?’ we ask.

Then the voice says, ‘They have washed their robes and have made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’

There they are. There *we* are – the multitude who so wanted to be faithful, who at times got defeated, soiled by life, and bested by trials, wearing the bloodied garments of life’s tribulations, but through it all clung to faith.

My friends, if this is not good news to you, you have never understood the gospel of grace.-Brennan Manning

What I think is normal for us is we want to hold out grace for those who offend us, but we definitely want grace extended to us when we need it. Have you ever failed? Have you ever hurt someone so bad you couldn’t look them in the eye and walked away because of the shame you felt? Have you ever done something you weren’t proud of and you knew that there was no way possible to make up for what you did?
I have.
I’ve hurt those who are closest to me with my words and actions. I wish I could say that I haven’t, but that’s not true. Even now, I’m rough around the edges, but I still hold onto hope God will help a wreck like me.

…you must make every effort to kill every taste of resentment in your own heart—every wish to humiliate or hurt him or to pay him out. The difference between this situation and the one in such you are asking God’s forgiveness is this. In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people’s we do not accept them easily enough.

As regards my own sin it is a safe bet (though not a certainty) that the excuses are not really so good as I think; as regards other men’s sins against me it is a safe bet (though not a certainty) that the excuses are better than I think. One must therefore begin by attending to everything which may show that the other man was not so much to blame as we thought.
But even if he is absolutely fully to blame we still have to forgive him; and even if ninety-nine percent of his apparent guilt can be explained away by really good excuses, the problem of forgiveness begins with the one percent guilt which is left over. To excuse what can really produce good excuses is not Christian character; it is only fairness. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

This is hard. It is perhaps not so hard to forgive a single great injury. But to forgive the incessant provocations of daily life—to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife, the selfish daughter, the deceitful son—how can we do it? Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say in our prayers each night ‘forgive our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.’ We are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse it is to refuse God’s mercy for ourselves. There is no hint of exceptions and God means what He says.-C.S. Lewis

Living in Grace

Funny, but in 2010 I went through a transformation by going through an intense year of both physical and emotional pain. It shook me up, but it left me realizing I had spent my life not truly living. This was hard for me to realize at first.
I had to learn how to forgive a lot of people. For starters, I had to forgive my employer who downsized the company and took away my job while bringing new employees in. I had to let it go and move on, but I’ll admit, this took me a bit to do.
The same for people who had left my life, some of them my own family. This is too lengthy to get into, but the only thing I can say is it hurt deeply, but again, in order for me to be free from pain, I had to let that go too.
Something began happening the more and more I dropped all the weight I’d been carrying. I felt more alive. Freedom comes the moment you realize that what people do to you doesn’t define you. It may scar you, or it may set you back, but you cannot allow yourself to get stuck. Getting stuck is the worst thing we can ever allow to happen to us in our lives. We are meant to grow.
What God asks us to do is the very things Jesus did for us. Jesus forgave us, so we should forgive each other: grace.
It may seem like it’s too difficult to love everyone, but that’s exactly what Jesus asked us to do. And I don’t think He was trying to set us up for failure. I think what He was doing was trying to show us a better way of living, one where miracles occur. He didn’t ask us to a life of ease, but one of adventure, even when it sometimes sounds difficult, or even maybe impossible, but eventually, if we live in such a way where those who hurt us don’t stop us, the heart can become stronger than once before.
Jesus’ love was so piercing it moved towards death, not from it. And He wants us to love just as fiercely as He does.
And how we can do so is to learn how to live in grace and walk in love.