forgiveness

The Test of the Golden Rule

Do to others as you would have them do to you. Jesus (Luke 6:31)

Yesterday my daughter dropped her wallet in a Target parking lot at midday while trying to load her purchases and two little girls into her car. By the time she had returned home, realized it was missing, retraced her steps, talked to Target security, had them verify from their cameras she placed it in her coat pocket at check out, and finally called her credit card company, whoever found the wallet already had two charges on her card, including pumping $75 worth of gasoline into the behemoth they had to be driving.

People who have no sensitivity to the Golden Rule, i.e. can’t put themselves in the shoes of someone who loses a wallet and have the common courtesy to seek to find its rightful owner, really baffle me. Now I’ll admit my initial reaction to hearing about this person without a conscience really made me mad. Ironically it triggered something in me that caused me to violate a golden teaching of Jesus myself by cursing that person rather than blessing them. (Matthew 5:44) It is true that the anger of man seldom produces the righteousness of God and it always amazes me how quickly one can become a Pharisee. (James 1:20)

I am genuinely puzzled however as to what kind of person would have such a disregard for the Golden Rule. Most commonly defined as “doing to others as you would have them do to you” and epitomized by Jesus’ command to “love your neighbor as yourself” the so called Golden Rule is not just unique to Judeo-Christian teaching. It is a bedrock ethic of human relationship that is found in every other world religion including Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism and Zoroastrianism.
. . . The test of the Golden Rule is in how a person chooses to apply it. The rule was given as a measure of one’s own life rather than to measure the life of another. Whenever we point the finger at Golden Rule breakers there are three fingers pointing back at us. And that means we must seek to treat them the way we would like to be treated if we were them.

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Dealing with the Stain of Sin

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 1 John 1:9 (ESV)

What do you do if you have confessed your sin and received God’s forgiveness but continue to be afflicted with the after effects of your transgression? The after effects are the stain of sin – the residual vexation in your soul over what you have done. The stain of sin often is the shame, embarrassment or feelings of failure that continue to plague you. It can be a self loathing and inability to forgive yourself for the stupid choices that you’ve made. The stain of sin can also be an obsessive preoccupation with reliving your sin, which dangerously can become the tool of the flesh and the devil to subtlety lure you back into sins lair.

The quintessential verse in the Bible promising God’s unmitigated forgiveness process for repentant sin is quoted above from the first epistle of John. As an apostle, John had been privy to Jesus’ many teachings on the forgiveness of sin. He had been a witness at the foot of the cross where Jesus paid its awful price through the shedding of His blood. (see 1 John 1:7) And after the resurrection, he had seen first hand Jesus’ merciful forgiveness completely restore his buddy, the repentant denier, Peter.

It is important to note from John’s verse that forgiveness of sin has two key aspects. They are the forgiveness and the cleansing. In simple terms, the forgiveness part is God forgetting our sin and the cleansing part is God helping us to forget it.

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Making Peace With Your Past

When was the last time you ran into someone you preferred not to see? What thoughts went through your mind and what emotions did you feel? How did you handle it?
We all have people like that in our lives. In fact it happened to me just recently. I was surprised at my reaction. Stuff from the past I had either forgotten or thought I had dealt with surfaced. I found myself swallowing hard, composing myself and mustering up the grace to make friendly conversation. But there was a reserve in my heart and a measure of self protection that was unsettling for me.
Afterward I could not help but sense that God had engineered the encounter to get my attention and that it was not a mere coincidence or happenstance that I was faced with relating to that particular person. In fact having just given a message (Connecting the Dots) about the Jewish patriarch Isaac making peace with his past, I had been sensitized to the necessity of that process in my own life.
Isaac’s story in Genesis 26 of his conflict and rejection at the hands of Abimelech, king of the Philistines, is really not unlike any of our stories when our relationships with people go south. It thrust him into a season of adversity and adjustments that God ultimately used for good in his life. My previous blog posts on “Connecting the Dots in Adversity” and “When Adversity Forces a Defining Decision” chronicle that journey.
What I discovered when I gave my message was that Isaac’s story was not complete without the closure God forced upon him after he had settled and forgotten all about Abimelech. Abimelech shows up unexpectedly, accompanied by both his personal advisor and the commander of his army. Talk about an intimidating encounter and one that Isaac would have preferred to avoid. All of the past hurt and personal offense surface immediately and Isaac reacts with “Why have you come to me, since you were hostile to me and sent me away?” (vs. 27) He wasn’t as adept at hiding his emotions as many of us can be when confronted with the remembrance of past wounds in relationships.

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