The origin of the Power to forgive.

(eight pictures at the bottom of page).

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Power to forgive comes from Prayer Alone.

May 28, 2018 - Georgia

 

“Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.” 

 

When a man prays his own prayers is like digging deep within him and cannot feed himself let alone others. But when a man prays what God has prescribed in the Lord’s Prayer, he helps himself by faith in the wealth of God’s grace. Once he is fed, he is strong enough to administer the forgiveness due to others. Only the strong and the debt free soul finds strength to forgive because he or she has fed in the forgiveness of God where health and strength come from.

 

A forgiving person can’t but forgive because he or she is strong in the Lord and knows first hand the life giving experience of forgiveness.

 

Sin amongst humans is there to be forgiven only and not to be used as a bargaining chip or coercion or blackmail.

 

The easiest thing among humans is to sin and the hardest thing is to be clean and free from sin. Sin is like acquiring a debt by charging to an unlimited credit card that when the time to settle debts arrive the sinner finds out to have lived beyond his means and the debt is larger that he can possible pay in a life time.

 

Since debts among humans in their horizontal relationships are smaller in comparison with the debt in the vertical relationship to God that is too great, Jesus who is preeminent comes into the picture and picks up the tab of our bill and pays it in full all our debts on the cross with his precious blood.

 

Therefore, we the people of God, who have been strengthened by the love and grace of God in Jesus should find in forgiving others of their sins against us an opportunity to display what “Living in Grace” means. He who has eating the daily bread from God is strong enough to ask for forgiveness and dispense forgiveness of Sin to others. 

 

A man is never more like God when in love and grace; he forgives and unilaterally loves and loves first.

 

There might be wounds and scars that serve as reminders of the past offenses, but they should never to be remembered and held against the offending person’s soul and salvation as a unsettled curse tied on earth and therefore tied in Heaven to be dealt in the Court of God.

 

Anyone alive who thinks to owe me anything, know from this day forward by my own words that should be accepted by faith that you owe me nothing. To remember in pain and hurt and speak about unhealed wounds fresh or old is only to remind you of cost of my gift to you. I do not take the price tag of my gifts because I want the other person to know that for me a poor man the cost was high and at the same time is my way of saying “You are worthy”. It is never my intention to charge you the price of your debt to me. 

 

No one can pay the cost of forgiveness. The offended soul has the right to put the price of forgiveness from where only grace and mercy in compassion can set you free. Forgiven people are fed by God’s daily bread and are strong enough to forgive.

 

You may say that God himself has forgiven and does not remember my sins, why do you bring up the past into my face?

 

If you really believe God to be an absent-minded God, you are badly mistaken, because God does not or cannot forget anything.

 

What I believe is that your ever present offenses to a Holy God has been forgotten to the point of never being held against you because Jesus has already paid it all on the cross. But salvation does not make any sense if we forget from where and from what we are being saved and shall completely be saved.

 

So if God does not forget, neither do I forget no matter how I try. In fact, the harder that I try to forget, the more I remember past sin and wounds.

 

This is also from the hand of God who actually is in the business of reminding us from where we have been saved by the strong hand of God’s grace and love.  By nature we are thankless and ungrateful creatures and the memory of sin keeps us humbled.

 

To humility we have been called and humble we shall become, either by repentance that is self-humiliations or God shall humiliate us in the exposure of our well-concealed nakedness in self-righteousness. Make your choice, humble yourself or you shall be humiliated. But if you are in your way to heaven, then you need to be like Jesus and the sovereign God will see to it you will be humble even if it takes all you life and old age (specially) to become one. 

 

Sin is a missionary to make us humble like Jesus. If you feed in God’s grace and love, you will be strong enough to forgive as you have been forgiven in Jesus. The Power to forgive comes from Prayer. I should know it because I love much, only because much has been forgiven in my life.

 

I am a forgiven man and free to witness in the name of Jesus your Lord and mine. Please notice behind my frown there is a TLC smile. 

 

Gerry Gutierrez

 

PS. The following pictures are a chronological testimony of my Ruthie a woman of prayer who had the Power to Forgive my past and love me a Radical Revolutionary truck driver all the way to little Simeon and Josiah and the end of her life. Ruthie loved Jesus and loved me.