In this week’s study of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus calls our attention to God’s forgiveness. Some of us have been walking with the heavy weight of guilt and shame of our sins. Maybe it’s a guilt you’ve carried around for years. Everybody has a past but maybe you feel like your past is chasing you. Maybe you feel like it’s gaining on you. As we pray to God to forgive us our debts, today we also ask, have we forgiven ourselves?
When grace finds us, we’re usually a mess. Grace has a funny way of interrupting us and believe it or not you’re exactly the kind of person Jesus came to help. If it’s hard for you to believe God has forgiven you, maybe it’s because you haven’t forgiven yourself, but we must also remember God’s forgiveness isn’t our license to sin. Do we take God’s forgiveness and go right back into the life we were living? No, because that wouldn’t be peace and that wouldn’t be grace. To paraphrase Ann Voskamp, “Grace finds us where we are, but won’t leave us how we’re found.”