Forgiveness and grace
“You can hold on to your anger, or you can hold on to Jesus, but you can’t hold on to both. Forgiveness is how we let go of anger and hurt to get a firm hold on the ‘yes’ of God offered to us in Jesus Christ.
Forgiveness is releasing the person who hurt you from the expectation that he could ever fix the harm he did to you. He can’t. Once you have been wounded, only Christ can heal you.
He does that by first giving you the grace to forgive those who wronged you. . . .
The good news of the gospel is not that you can get to God but that, in Christ, God has come to you. In the Incarnation, God said, ‘Stay where you are. I’ll come to you.’”
– Mike Glenn
The Gospel of Yes
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Every day in October I’m sharing a short quote on grace from a favorite book.
If you’d like to receive the grace quote every day . . .
- Don’t assume the worst–Extend grace
- Don’t take my word for it
Love this. Too often we think of forgiveness as having to think like the person has never done what they did, but “releasing the person who hurt you from the expectation that he could ever fix the harm he did to you” helps put it into perspective and turns us to Christ, who is the only one who can heal us. Love the last paragraph, too.
I find that very freeing too. We just release the debt (not that it’s not hard!), because really, once someone has hurt us, they can’t ever really fix things back to how they were before the hurt anyway. We have to trust Christ for the true healing.
“Forgiveness is releasing the person who hurt you from the expectation that he could ever fix the harm he did to you. He can’t. Once you have been wounded, only Christ can heal you.” Love this, Lisa. I’ve never thought of it that way before.
I find it a very freeing way to view forgiveness and healing!