placeholder for future post about the obstacles to forgiveness.
a few notes…
Forgiveness is one of the parts of Christianity that people have the most trouble with. It’s one of the main things and i haven’t met anyone who hasn’t struggled with at least one of the aspects of forgiveness.
in each case( forgiveness of self, forgiveness of others, and believing and accepting God’s forgiveness of us) the root cause of failure is usually a failure of faith, not really believing God, or what is said of God. We fail to believe God and His prophets about our own sin. we don’t truly believe our “small” daily sin is as bad and offensive as God says it is so we don’t realize how much we need forgiveness. But it is so bad that it took nothing less than the crucifixion of Christ to atone for them. The reason that is significant is because if we don’t understand our debt, we won’t be the poor in spirit. we won’t see our true need for Christ. consequently, we won’t be as grateful for the erasure of our debt and ready to forgive the comparatively small debts against us by others (see parable of ungrateful servant in matt 18)
Secondly, some don’t believe that it really did. Somehow their sin is different. it is worse and more is needed. It can’t be that Christ’s death was enough to fix what they did. Or the number of times they have messed up now disqualifies them from forgiveness despite all of the scriptures to the contrary. failure to believe the words of the bible about the efficacy of the blood and God’s great mercy. one danger of this one is another idea that sometimes arises along with it to “fix” the despair of this (dis-)belief. the idea that one can add enough (with works) to the sacrifice to make it enough. that is, that you can earn it with enough good works plus the blood. earn the blood? aack!
placeholder…. post to come soon.
