thought exercise on Forgiveness of Sin

He hurls our sins overboard. What a picture of the way God treats our sins. Corrie ten Boom, a dear saint of the last century, used to say, “And then God put up a sign saying, `No fishing allowed.”‘ W...

According to Dallas Willard, grace is “God doing in us and for us what we could not do ourselves.” We are meant to be forgiven by grace; we are also meant to live by grace. We often believe that only...

There are few Christian authors more respected than C. S. Lewis. After his conversion to Christ at age 33, he would spend the rest of his life writing iconic Christian works. However, his relationship...

The law is harsh and cannot help us to receive forgiveness. In Craddock Stories, a collection of outstanding stories by Fred Craddock, is the following account with one who could understand law, but ...

In a talk about faith and doubt, the Irish Londoner Charlie Mackesy shares a humorous anecdote from a friend. This friend was attending a traditional Anglican worship service with his wife and their y...

It would be impossible to overestimate the impact these meals must have had upon the poor and the sinners. By accepting them as friends and equals Jesus had taken away their shame, humiliation, and gu...

In A Forgiving God in an Unforgiving World , Ron Lee Davis shares a powerful story of forgiveness about a priest from the Philippines. The clergyman had carried the weight of one particular sin that ...

A week beforehand, the high priest was put into seclusion—taken away from his home and into a place where he was completely alone. Why? So he wouldn’t accidentally touch or eat anything unclean. Clean...

We cannot have true justice unless it is motivated by love, just as God’s greatest act of justice, sending Jesus to die for us, was motivated by love. Years ago, before the emancipation of slaves, Fre...

Al Capone, the most notorious gangster in American History, had these three words etched on his tombstone: “My Jesus Mercy”

The Greek word for Easter, pascha, means “passage.” It evokes so many different passages for us: the Israelites’ passage from slavery to freedom, our own passage from sin to forgiveness, Jesus’ passag...

When something has gone wrong, justice needs to be done and seen to be done. Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement examines exactly this same dynamic. The central character, Bryony Tallis, makes a grave mista...

Hobart Mowrer was Research Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois. Mowrer critiqued Freudian psychology and its assertion that guilt was merely a pathology to be dispensed with. In this...

In Isaiah 43:25, God says, “I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more.” Here God uses two absolute terms to assure us of the complete removal...

We read of the temptations of Jesus, but we never hear of a confession of sin on his part. He never asked for forgiveness, though he told his followers to do so. This lack of any sense of moral failur...

Like many popular adages, this one about all sins being equal before God is not entirely wrong. Every sin is a breach of God’s holy law. And whoever fails to keep the law in one point is guilty of bre...

Solitude... keeps us from making judgments about other people’s sins. In this way real forgiveness becomes possible. The following desert story offers a good illustration: A brother . . . committed...

‘Salvation’ is a wonderfully wide-ranging word and it would be a great mistake to think that it refers only to the forgiveness of our sins. God is as much concerned with our present and future as with...

Have you ever put together an "elevator speech" or "pitch" for a job or a project? It's a 30-second (or less) statement of who you are or what you're selling which you coul...

In 1964 Peter Higgs wrote a paper entitled, “Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons,” which proposed the existence of a new fundamental particle of matter based solely upon mathematical dedu...

Every meal—not just Communion, but including Communion—is a reminder that we are dependent on God as creatures. We are not self-sustaining. Much of our food is grown, processed, distributed, and possi...

As sinners, we are apt to assume the worst about people. We are eager to find favorable comparisons that make ourselves look good at the expense of others. We are quick to size people up and think we ...

I just paid a parking ticket the other day. It was easy. I read the charge against me, flipped the ticket over, checked the box that said “I plead guilty to the charge,” filled out a check for $35 to ...

Let’s call her Roberta; she was clearly near the end of a very long journey toward death’s door. Roberta’s cancer was a particularly nasty variety; by now it had eaten its way into most of her vital o...

The practice of confession in the context of a liturgy or in a private ecclesiastical setting has declined drastically over the past fifty years, and in particular since the Protestant Reformation in ...

For several years, Jason and I nurtured a friendship that led us to decide to work together because we knew each other so well. But things soon became complicated between us. I began to notice some tr...

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...

In their excellent book on reconciliation, Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice share the true story of Billy Neal Moore, who would both find Jesus in prison and ultimately find his victim’s parents to b...

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting to-day for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market… Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system…. Chea...

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...