If relationships are the purpose of my existence, and the malady
is the depravity and corruption of my heart that wantonly destroys
relationships, then what is the antidote?
What is the core issue of why a relationship does not get
restored after if has broken down?
Last week we talked about how some antidotes or prescriptions
can get pretty weird if the diagnosis is wrong. Well show me a faith, religion,
secular worldview that not only demonstrates forgiveness but the restoration
and transformation by the transgressed for the transgressor.
Can you think of a world view, a faith, a philosophy, a
community, a government or a an individual towards others whereby they being
the benefactor take the judgment, the beneficiary is the wrong doer. And
the relationship results in the transformation of the wrongdoer to their
perfect or restored state?
Analogy:
The father of the raped and murdered child not only proactively
reaches out to murderer to forgive and release him from his guilt and stands on
behalf of him at his trial to pardon his crime, but then carries him, works
with him and invests time and money into restoring the murderer so he becomes a
new man.
Forgiveness: between God and myself and between others I have
transgressed and have transgressed me.
Grace: unmerited favour... "For it is by grace you have
been saved, not by works for this is a gift from God" Ephesians 2:8-9.
Do you and I not see that the problem with mankind is the
depravity of the heart actively or passively destroying the very purpose of our
existence - to functionally relate to one another, with love being the ultimate
expression, and fail to understand that the true medicine is forgiveness.
Suppose one says, I don't need to forgive, I just "let be
what will be". Can love exist or have its proper expression in that worldview?
After all forgiveness is not required if that person just "let's it
go"? Can freewill (and love) exist coherently in that worldview?
Do I not realise that far from my thinking that Jesus came to
save me from the separation between my maker and I, but equally and almost more
relevant today than into the next life, Jesus smashes through my egotistical
ideology and saves me from myself. My wanton depravity to return to my vomit of
un-forgiveness - of him of her or that company, that group, that government,
that family member, that murder that rapist that crook.... To carry and carry
and carry and carry and hold on so tightly like a precious jewel my bitterness,
anger, self righteousness, rage, disgust - my un-forgiveness.
Jesus you ask too much of me, "to err is human, to forgive
is divine". Yet my malady if not dealt with by the medicine of forgiveness
will continue my self-destruction.
Oh that Jesus recognises this more than we give Him credit for,
"here, a helper will come, a comforter, the Holy Spirit, to transform you
and restore you back to your original purpose, because I know you can't forgive
without His spirit inside you". (to paraphrase John 15).
"Father forgive them for they know not what they
do [as they were hammering 7 inch long and 3/8 inch wide nails through his wrists and feet]..."
Parable of the Unforgiving Debtor
21Then Peter came to him
and asked, “Lord, how often should I forgive someone who sins against me? Seven
times?”
22“No, not seven times,”
Jesus replied, “but seventy times seven!
23“Therefore, the Kingdom
of Heaven can be compared to a king who decided to bring his accounts up to
date with servants who had borrowed money from him. 24In the process, one of
his debtors was brought in who owed him millions of dollars. 25He
couldn’t pay, so his master ordered that he be sold—along with his wife, his
children, and everything he owned—to pay the debt.
26“But the man fell down
before his master and begged him, ‘Please, be patient with me, and I will pay
it all.’ 27Then
his master was filled with pity for him, and he released him and forgave his
debt.
28“But when the man left
the king, he went to a fellow servant who owed him a few thousand dollars. He grabbed him by the throat and demanded
instant payment.
29“His fellow servant fell
down before him and begged for a little more time. ‘Be patient with me, and I
will pay it,’ he pleaded. 30But
his creditor wouldn’t wait. He had the man arrested and put in prison until the
debt could be paid in full.
31“When some of the other
servants saw this, they were very upset. They went to the king and told him
everything that had happened. 32Then
the king called in the man he had forgiven and said, ‘You evil servant! I
forgave you that tremendous debt because you pleaded with me. 33Shouldn’t you have mercy
on your fellow servant, just as I had mercy on you?’ 34Then the angry king sent
the man to prison to be tortured until he had paid his entire debt.
35“That’s what my heavenly
Father will do to you if you refuse to forgive your brothers and sisters from
your heart.”
For he has rescued us from the kingdom of darkness and
transferred us into the Kingdom of his dear Son, who purchased our freedom and
forgave our sins. For God in all his fullness was pleased to live in Christ,
and through him God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with
everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ’s blood on the cross.
(Colossians 1:13, 14, 19, 20 NLT)
“If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father
will forgive you. But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not
forgive your sins. (Matthew 6:14, 15 NLT)
I tell you, you can pray for anything, and if you believe that
you’ve received it, it will be yours. But when you are praying, first forgive
anyone you are holding a grudge against, so that your Father in heaven will
forgive your sins, too. ” (Mark 11:24, 25 NLT)
But people are counted as righteous, not because of their work,
but because of their faith in God who forgives sinners. (Romans 4:5 NLT)
By TIMES ONLINE
Added: Thursday, 08 January 2009 at 11:00 AM
Reposted from:
Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that
as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal
includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural
communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells
sealed and clean. I went to see this work.
It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development
charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've
been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid
since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly
refuses to fit my worldview, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there
is no God.
Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous
contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from
the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts.
These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa
Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The
rebirth is real. The change is good.
I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the
practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that
salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in
Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the
severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the
world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to
motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not
the faith.
But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the
missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that
matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.
First, then, the observation. We had friends, who were
missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone
with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we
had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The
Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its
converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a
liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their
dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life.
They stood tall.
At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this
impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African
Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four
student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.
We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the
more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find
somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.
Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had
to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and
spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct,
man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential
towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more open.
This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You
do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing
development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I
noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid
team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. Privately
because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so
much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the
Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a
devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for
a two-hour service.
It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism
in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but
surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a
conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.
There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists
for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded
in our own culture: theirs and therefore best for them; authentic and of
intrinsically equal worth to ours.
I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more
peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think
collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This
rural-traditional mindset feeds into the big man and gangster politics of the
African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the
(literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.
Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the
wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the
whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it
fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting
curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own
hands or on their own shoulders.
How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When
the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at
the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to
describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given
by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? Because it's
there, he said.
To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one
would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere?
Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that
nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.
Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its
teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God,
unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being,
smashes straight through the philosophical/spiritual framework I've just
described. It offers something to hold on to, to those anxious to cast off a
crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.
Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global
competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even
the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A
whole belief system must first be supplanted.
And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing
Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the
mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the
machete.
