THE FORGIVER RESPONSIBILITY.

IOI CHRISTIAN MORNING MEAL

TOPIC: THE FORGIVER RESPONSIBILITY.

Continue from where we stopped yesterday...
Now, let’s turn the tables. What about when you are the forgiver?

Analyze the problem: when to forbear and when to forgive

(Colossians 3:13).
The first thing to do when you think you should forgive someone who has wronged you is to make sure that it really rises to the level of forgiveness.

Colossians 3:13 says: “Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.”

There is forgiveness, and there is forbearance.

You can think of forbearance as a kind of low-level forgiveness, or more simply as exercising patience and tolerance in the face of the idiosyncrasies of the people in your life.

For example,
if your spouse is chronically late in getting ready to leave the house for an engagement, that doesn’t really rise to the level of mortal sin. It may be irritating, but it just doesn’t say in the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt not wait until the last minute to put thy makeup on.”
And it doesn’t say in the Ten Commandments that table manners are a matter of spiritual life and death.

You may have to forbear someone who talks too much,
someone in your house who chews with his or her mouth open or who leaves towels on the floor, someone who seems incapable of replacing the toilet paper roll.

You may need to smile and tolerate some of the weird opinions of others or if they have no opinions or are opinionated about everything-but that probably is more about forbearance than forgiveness.

If you don’t see the necessity to forbear, then you may be living a narcissistic life, as if your way of living and thinking is superior in every way to that of others.
No, we have to live with the assumption that we live in an imperfect world surrounded by imperfect people, and not every bumping of heads means someone has sinned.

None of this is to say that we should take our sins against each other and minimize them, expecting others to just put up with our major mess-ups just because “none of us is perfect.”

I’ll say it again: Forgiveness is the gutsiest thing a human being can do because real people do real damage to each other all the time-but it can be solved.

And so here are our marching orders: “Forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.”

LET US PRAY
FATHER IN JESUS NAME, GIVE US A FORGIVING SPIRIT AND HELP US TO LOVE EACH OTHER IN JESUS NAME.

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