Quotes on Forgiveness

Richard Lovelace’s thoughts on the heart:
“Revival takes place when people stop seeing sin as an isolated act of disobedience and they begin to see it as an organic network of compulsive beliefs, behaviors and thoughts that issue out of their basic alienation from God.”

Author and counselor Gerald May says this to us who are victims:
“We frequently repress our desire for love because love makes us vulnerable to being hurt. The word passion, which is used to express strong loving desire, comes from the Latin root passus, which means “suffered.” All of us know that, along with bringing joy, love can make us suffer. Often we repress our desire for love to minimize this suffering. This happens after someone spurns our love; we stifle our desire, and it may take us a long time before we are ready to love again. It is a normal human response; we repress our longings when they hurt us too much. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that we do the same with our deepest longings for God. God does not always come to us in the pleasant ways we might expect, and so we repress our desire for God. When we repress a desire, we try to keep it out of our awareness. We try to keep our focus on other things–safer things.”

Church Historian Professor at Gordon-Conwell, Richard Lovelace argues in his book, The Dynamics of Spiritual Life:
“Only a fraction of the present body of professing Christians are solidly appropriating the justifying work of Christ in their lives. Many have so light an apprehension of God’s holiness and of the extent and guilt of their sin that consciously they see little need for [ongoing] justification, although below the surface of their lives they are deeply guilt-ridden and insecure. Many others have a theoretical commitment to this doctrine, but in their day –to-day existence they rely on their sanctification for justification, in the Augustinian manner, drawing their assurance of acceptance with God from their sincerity, their past experience of conversion, their recent religious performance or the relative infrequency of their conscious, willful disobedience. Few know enough to start each day with a thoroughgoing stand upon Luther’s platform: you are accepted, looking outward in faith and claiming the wholly alien righteousness of Christ as the only ground for acceptance, relaxing in that quality of trust which will produce increasing sanctification as faith is active in love and gratitude. In order for a pure and lasting work of spiritual renewal to take place within the church, multitudes within it must be led to build their lives on this foundation. This means that they must be conducted into the light of a full conscious awareness of God’s holiness, the depth of their sin and the sufficiency of the atoning work of Christ for their acceptance with God, not just at the outset of their Christians lives but in every succeeding day. It is only the blood of Jesus Christ which is able ‘to purify your conscience from dead works to serve the living God’ (Heb 9:14). A conscience which is not fully enlightened both to the seriousness of its condition before God and to the grandeur of God’s merciful provision of redemption, will inevitably fall prey to anxiety, pride, sensuality and all the other expressions of that unconscious despair which Kierkegaard called ‘the sickness unto death’.” (101)

Kevin was my Cousin by Rob Lamothe
kevin was my cousin… he was 22
my mother’s little brother’s son
killed last night in clarksville
him and three girls
never hurt no one
shot down in cold blood
for two hundred dollars
that’s fifty dollars a life
that’s four young people
from four good families
four thousand more
tears to cry
there are some things
won’t be forgiven
there is some blood
will not wash away
there’s a shadow
on the living
it will not go away
give me a room and the boy that pulled the trigger
four empty hands – mine and his
just me and my anger – him and his ignorance
and we will see just how tough he is
there are some things
won’t be forgiven
there is some blood
will not wash away
there’s a shadow
on the living
it will not go away