God Wants to Forgive You
There are many reasons why Jesus came to the earth, and our word Atonement has come to embody them all, but we think, if we had to be specific, we would say that the essence of His life was centered on forgiveness.
In this great hymn of Restoration, have mercy on me, Lord [Bwana unifadhili] by Benard Mukasa centered on Psalms 86:3, completely captures our spirits.
The Savior is the incarnation, the personification, the grand architect of forgiveness and mercy.
It is inherent in almost every act of His life.
It is the one single most significant quality of the Father that Jesus came to teach us with His words and show us by His example.
Indeed, the most beautiful words He spoke during those last agonizing hours of His life are, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).
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Whenever you feel the difficulty of forgiving in your life, read those words and the feeling of forgiveness will move into your soul.
We believe it is more than critical that we reach a certainty of knowledge of how very easy it is for Him to forgive.
He delights in forgiveness. He is mercy and He is love. We wish this were true of you and us, but in our humanity we can find it daunting.
Perhaps because we struggle with this grace we may wonder about God and our relationship with Him. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord” (Isaiah 55:8).
We must sometimes remind ourselves that God simply does not view things the way we do.
Mankind has far too often created God in their image, justifying even the most terrible of acts. Unfortunately, religion can be very effective in shutting the mind down from thinking and the heart from feeling.
We quote the above words from Isaiah because the verse immediately preceding them and contained in the same paragraph assures us of forgiveness “Let the wicked forsake their ways and the unrighteous their thoughts. Let them turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will freely pardon” (Isaiah 55:7).
His ways and His thoughts are merciful thoughts and forgiving ways, though humanity’s ways may not be.
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How Does God Forgive
Literally hundreds of scriptures come to mind. We think of Paul’s words to the citizens of Athens when he was teaching them from Mars Hill.
He had wandered through the Agora, which was filled with idols and temples to pagan gods who had been worshipped for centuries.
Here was violation of the first two of the Ten Commandments. Yet it was all so easily waved aside with one word in Paul’s address. “And the times of this ignorance ... God winked at” (Acts 17:30; emphasis added).
We love that word! God winked at it all! We can’t tell you how comforting it is to know that we worship a “winking God.”
God with the power to forgive sin (Matt. 9:1–8). It doesn’t matter how big the sin is or how small, it doesn’t matter how long ago it was committed or how recently. It doesn’t matter whether it was spontaneous or malicious. God will always forgive you.
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In the footnote we learn that in the Greek, the word "wink" means to overlook or disregard. Vine, who wrote a dictionary of all New Testament words from the Greek, describes it this way: “God bore with them without interposing by way of punishment” (Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words [Barbour & Company, Inc., 1940], 220).
Paul would know about a God who winked, for this same God had forgiven him while he was in a state of hostility and intolerance while traveling on the road to Damascus.
Paul is described as “breathing out threats and slaughter,” something, unfortunately, that has happened too often within religion.
He had not asked the Lord to intervene in his life. Yet he was called by a voice of gentleness and meekness, which simply and with love asked him a single question: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:1, 4).
Here was winking.
That voice of mildness changed everything. Paul would speak of it for the rest of his life, as it was the defining moment in his mortal journey - a moment of forgiveness.
It made Paul what he was, and it would be Paul, perhaps more than any other man, that spread Christianity and thus assured its continuation.
God forgave Paul, the men who nailed his Son to the cross (Luke 23:34). He will also forgive you for Abortion, Adultery, Abuse, Hate, Hypocrisy, Doubt, Divorce, Drunkenness, Immorality or Murder, if you repent and ask him for forgiveness.
There is nothing you have ever done that he cannot or will not forgive when he is humbly asked.
In his epistle to Timothy, Paul tried to explain why he felt God had shown him mercy: “Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief. Howbeit for this cause I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might shew forth all longsuffering, for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe on him to life everlasting” (1 Timothy 1:15–16).
Paul earlier told Timothy, “The grace of our Lord was exceedingly abundant with . . . love which is in Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 1:14; emphasis added).
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When we read these many accounts, as we have seen so often, they fill us with the spirit of forgiveness, and in the grace of that spirit we too can forgive and believe that we can be forgiven.
We may not be able to hold that forgiveness in the heart continually, but we have felt it for a moment, and that moment can expand in time.
We would point out also that in so many of these examples not only is forgiveness granted, but the individuals rise to positions of trust and usefulness in God’s kingdom.
Though we strongly believe that forgiveness, whether receiving it ourselves or extending it to others, is not an act of the mind, but of the soul, it is reasonable to believe that God can turn the crimson life into the snow life (Isaiah 1:18).
It is so because of the type of a God He is—the winking God, the God of Paul—the God who forgives beyond the breadth, length, depth, and height of our understanding, the God who forgives above all we can ask or think, the broad-as-eternity God.
All you need is to PRAY, REPENT, AND FORGIVE OTHERS as possible as you can.
It is this easy God forgives us.
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