Category: Forgiveness

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Personalised confession prayer

adult affection baby casual

Beautiful God, Maker, Author, Sustainer – Perfect in Love, Lover of Mercy, Sure and perfect in Judgment,

I was born into fallen Adam, the family of slavery, sinner by birth – born again into Jesus, the Family of release – with new, complete and paid-in-advance fullness. Thankyou that Your Spirit in me is in the business of new life; life more abundant; life that is forward facing and growing as your light pushes back the darkness.

Thankyou that Your Spirit can’t rest beside sin and is faithful to not allow me rest there either.

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It is for freedom

I have been thinking a lot about the difference and overlap between the need for redemption and the need for forgiveness.

The transaction at that fateful tree, transferred the birthright of all Eves children from the Kingdom of Light, to the Kingdom of Darkness when she believed and acted on the persuasions of an upstart Prince – over the presence, blessing and promises of the King of All.

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Broken boys

Oh Lord – he’s 10.
He’s 10 with a broken brain.
Can you mend a 10 year old broken brain?
Of course you can. I know that. But will you?
Would you?

Oh Lord he’s 10.
Or 11.
Maybe he was 10 when he did it and 11 now.
But his brain got broken a long time ago.

This doesn’t just ‘happen’
Are you in the business of mending broken brains?
Sometimes I don’t think so.
But what if that’s because we only see the ones that didn’t get mended.
– or haven’t yet.

What if you’ve mended more brains that we could ever know
Because we haven’t seen the effects of the brokenness?

Oh Lord, he’s 10. Or 11.
Does it even matter?

You Who dwells outside of our now – do you see the man he ‘is’ in a simple pivot of the line of time? Is he a monster? Is he fixable?

Oh Lord – a broken boy.
Please God might you mend him?

Might you put your people around him to help him heal?
Would you protect others in the now, and in the future, from the spread of this specific sadness?

Would you?
Oh Lord he’s 10.

So many fearful others, so sure of the ‘should haves’.
And would I be too in their position?

Oh Lord – the other broken boy.
Heal, protect, love, tear down, build up, surround and restore.
How long oh Lord.
How long.
He’s 8.

Oh Lord.

Written after one boy abused another at a local school.

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An unexpected turn of events

I’ve also been thinking about the story of the woman caught in adultery in Matthew 8. It occurred to me to try and imagine what her life would have been had she not been outed. The religious leaders that dragged her, possibly naked, into the public arena of the temple where they knew Jesus would be, had precisely ZERO good intentions. They didn’t care about the law, they were misusing the law – after all, where was the dude? No justice there.

They didn’t care about her reform or status or situation in life (likely a prostitute – with no other means of survival). They were fully intent on trapping Jesus with what they thought would present Him an impossible call, and used force, shame, power and the perversion of justice to bring this to a head.

Very not fair.

Outrageous in fact.

So they brought her, guilty as charged, totally shamed before her community for either a judgement of death on her, or a means to create hatred and dissent toward Jesus.

And they failed.

In the end it seems everyone but Jesus and the woman left that place with a measure of shame. The leaders themselves caught in their own trap and the woman though guilty, was freed from her condemnation and shame.

What an incredible collision of intentions, actions and people.

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Unpacking forgiveness

Forgiveness – The ideas attributed to forgiveness are often pre-packaged with a whole host of assumptions, a tonne of pain, a few shovelfuls of offence, confusion about moving forward etc etc etc and when you’re in the middle of a knot it can be pretty tricky to figure out which is what. It’s also pretty often that the knot itself is what gets in the way of being able to forgive when we assume more is meant by it than is so.

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