Costly

My Bible study group just finished Tim Keller's "Counterfeit Gods". If you've never read Tim Keller, I would highly recommend it, as any good Presbyterian would.

As with any good book, there were a few parts that resonated with me well past when I closed the pages. Actually, weeks past, which is only slightly annoying, and very telling of how much I needed to hear this passage.

I actually took a picture to send to a friend, because, can't we all relate? Or maybe I'm alone out here on a limb, holding grudges.

At every point in the Bible, the writers are at pains to stress that God's grace and forgiveness, while free to the recipient, are always costly for the giver. From the earliest parts of the Bible, it was understood that God could not forgive without sacrifice. No one who is seriously wronged can "just forgive" the perpetrator. If you have been robbed of money, opportunity, or happiness, you can either make the wrongdoer pay it back or you can forgive. But when you forgive, that means you absorb the loss and the debt. You bear it yourself. All forgiveness, then, is costly.

I think somewhere between the messages of "forgive because we have been forgiven" and "seventy times seven", I have it in the recesses of my mind that I should "just forgive", and it should be easy. I mean, Jesus DIED for our sins, surely I can forgive for fill in the blank. While those statements are true, there was comfort for me in the fact that it's not easy, nor is it supposed to be.

Wrongs require payment, sacrifice- and more often than not, that payment and that sacrifice is made by the one wronged. Sometimes to people who don't ask forgiveness - and a lot of times don't "deserve" it. Ouch.

On the cross we see God doing at the cosmic level what we all have to do when we forgive. There God absorbed the punishment and debt for sin himself. He paid it so we did not have to.

Sound familiar? Keller does a great job of always taking it back to the cross. What Christ did for us on the cross, we are called to emulate, on a smaller scale, in our own lives. It's not fun, or easy, but it's truth.

A nice truth for the thick of  Lent season.