Matthew

At the beginning to the musical Les Misérables , the lead character Jean Valjean is arrested by the police, with silver he has stolen from a kindly bishop who had given him shelter. Valjean is plainl...

He who cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself.

The man who is truly forgiven and knows it, is a man who forgives.

In the second century, a priest from Antioch named Sulpicius had steadfastly refused to sacrifice to the gods, even under torture, and was being led away to be beheaded. As he walked, a Christian name...

Gracious God, we are sorry for withholding good things. We have offered judgment and held back mercy. We have kept comfortable and withheld justice. We have ignored cries for help. God we cannot love ...

According to a study performed in 2010 by the Fetzer Institute: Sixty-seven percent of Americans agree that the US population is composed of generally forgiving people, but 58% also agree that ther...

Every day God patiently bears with us, and every day we are tempted to become impatient with our friends, neighbors, and loved ones. And our faults and failures before God are so much more serious tha...

Even in our moments of doubt, our lack of faith, and the blindness which means we fail to see God amongst us, God is still at work. God is still healing. God is still forgiving. Even when you fail to ...

Gracious God, we know that You have forgiven us in Jesus Christ, but we often remain slow to forgive one other. You have sent Your Spirit to reconcile us to each other, but we resist Your work to bind...

Holy Spirit, you have come to reconcile us to each other, but we resist your work to bind us together. We hold onto grudges. Even though we know God has forgiven us in Jesus Christ, we are slow to for...

When we are bitter, we delude ourselves into thinking that those who hurt us are more likely to be punished as long as we are set on revenge. We are afraid to let go of those feelings. After all, if w...

No one heals himself by wounding another.

As a young pastor, I wanted to pray for Jean, who had been sick in bed for about a week. So I took Mike, a fellow leader in the church, with me to her home. Her husband, Jim, greeted us at the door an...

God has given us all a message of reconciliation-that God, in Christ, has reconciled the world to himself (2 Corinthians 5:18-19). The first place we are invited to practice this reconciliation is wit...

Ernest Hemingway grasped some of the difficulty that characterizes relationships between fathers and sons in his short story, The Capital of the World . The story revolves around a father and his t...

Revenge and forgiveness are major themes of Michael Christopher’s play, The Black Angel. In it, Herman Engel is Nazi general responsible for killing over 200 French Jews. Convicted of his crimes by th...

In her book Family Ministry, Diana Garland relates the following account by R.L. Honeycutt on the origin of the Irish expression “Chancing one’s arm”: On display in St. Patrick’s cathedral in Dublin...

After the Civil War, in an incident recounted by Charles Flood in Lee: The Last Years, Robert E. Lee visited a woman who took him to the remains of a grand old tree in front of her home. There she cri...

There’s a story about a traveler making his way with a guide through the jungles of Burma. They came to a shallow but wide river and waded through it to the other side. When the traveler came out of t...

The pastor R.C. Sproul was studying in the Netherlands in the last 1960s and randomly struck up a conversation with a Dutch woman. The conversation was a common, enjoyable interaction, but when it was...

Philip Yancey writes of a friend whose marriage was choked by hostility. One night the friend reached the breaking point: “I hate you!” he screamed at his wife. “I won’t take it any more. I’ve had eno...

Many promising reconciliations have broken down because, while both parties came prepared to forgive, neither party came prepared to be forgiven.

Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.

To forgive oneself”? No, that doesn’t work: we have to be forgiven. But we can only believe this is possible if we ourselves can forgive.

Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is th...

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love.

Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude.

Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans and myself from the community of sinners.

By forgiving another, I am trusting that God is a better justice-maker than I am.

God's mercy to us is the motivation for showing mercy to others. Remember, you will never be asked to forgive someone else more than God has forgiven you.