Bearing grudges,
looking for revenge and harbouring antagonistic feelings are all things that we
so easily do, forgetting that we regularly pray ‘forgive us our trespasses as
we forgive those who trespass against us’. We need to forgive – and we need to
be forgiven.
I like the idea of
the church as a ‘community of the forgiven’. Steven Croft reminds us to take
this seriously in his Jesus’ People: What the Church should do
next. He writes (p. 35) – The Church is, by definition, the community
of the forgiven. As long as we are mindful of how much God has forgiven us, it
will not be difficult to be merciful to one another and, indeed, to those
outside the community. In so far as we forget and choose to ignore God’s grace
and forgiveness in our own lives, our hearts begin to harden towards others
very rapidly.
Quite! How forgiving
are we?
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