Speedy Forgiveness
A Sweet Pursuit!
Forgive others as quickly as you expect God to forgive you.
I love the idea of speed here. Jesus did say to forgive one another as He has forgiven us and we do rightly expect quick forgiveness. As for forgiving others quickly, we know Romans 8:28 teaches that God will bring great good out of all things as we trust Him and follow Him, so maybe we ought to.
Speedy forgiveness might be a great idea because getting over being worked up, worried, and fearful and onto God’s better things for the day with a joyful heart is quite nice! And, often our offender is not such a nice person, so getting angst over them out of our heads and getting the Lord and His beautiful things with others back into our thinking is a wonderfully happy thing to have happen behind the scene in our heads.
Believing that God can take bad things and make them into very good things is a process. When something happens negative and we deal anger and fear a blow by choosing to believe that God will work something good that will overcome the bad, we’re on a good road.
Joseph is one of the Bible’s central examples of this. His thoughts spoken to his brothers over 3800 years ago that are recorded in Genesis 50:20 are quite fascinating, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result….” That’s wildly right on target with God’s ways which were penned by Paul in Romans 8:28 some 2000 years later.
What’s interesting to me is that Joseph had little daily victories in Potiphar’s household and in the prison but then there came the time for God’s whooper when he was put in charge of all of Egypt and then was able to hugely help his own family and many others.
The Lord recently did something astonishing for me as a direct result of something done that wasn’t right. Many good things happened along the way because, I assume, I was choosing to believe the Lord and God can use just having a more buoyant spirit to bring His good plans to pass. But, then God miraculously moved and what happened was so good it shocked me. And it’s ramifications, like Joseph’s, were radically life-changing for the better.
It seems that when God works snidely things for our good, He does it little by little as we walk out our days in trust and seeking to please Him. But it seems too, that God also strikes in huge ways bringing astonishing things to pass in His perfect time that overwhelm us with their beauty and goodness.
Today I heard of something done that wasn’t right. It was done by one person in a powerful corporation and it directly affects me to a decent degree. It’s been hanging in the back of my mind on and off today. I know by experience–a whole lot of it–that God can use it for good, But I still get to spend time with the Lord and come to the happy place of believing it …and then eventually experiencing it.
The idea of speedy forgiveness encourages me greatly to be thankful for all things and in regards to the corporate thing, to realize that God knew this was coming and that He has a plan to overcome it. And His plan to overcome it in my life might even involve me taking steps of action which bring about much better results. God often uses our obedience as part of the process of overcoming the effects of evil.
I can begin now in this new area. And the idea of doing it speedily is greatly freeing.
“Whom the Son shall set free shall be free indeed” speaks to me well in this instance now, this moment. Speedy forgiveness and speedy trust– with trust that God will powerfully work all for good–creates a fantastic freedom of heart.
Jumping on board with it now is un-refusably inviting!
It’d be an honor and a joy if this would somehow help you, too, in issues that have been hanging and hurting your joy.
