Learning More About Forgiveness

Alcoholics Anonymous lived in the background in my life, like the four walls of a bedroom.

No one notices or dismisses the walls, because there would be no room without the walls.

Then again, we were never supposed to live in our bedrooms for the rest of our lives, anyway.

I had never once questioned the juxtaposition of Twelve Steps and the Bible, for that's what my mother had taught me.

She was so wrong, and the consequences could have been deadly, but praise God for the Gospel Revolution/Restoration taking place in the world. Thank you, Jesus Christ, for Andrew Wommack and Joseph Prince (and of course Kenneth Price and even Kenneth Hagin), the simplicity of the Gospel, based on rightly dividing the Word of God, which magnifies Jesus Christ and makes nothing of man's efforts or thoughts.

It's all of Christ, none of us.

Grace is not just what saves us, and more than what keeps us (yet is very important). Grace is what "lives" us, too!

The Gospel is all about grace:

"I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel:" (Galatians 1: 6)

Notice that this grace does not come from man, or from tradition, or experience, and definitely not from the law, but from Jesus, who brought grace and truth (John 1: 17)

Grace is all unmerited, undeserved favor, and God wants us to receive and keep receiving His abundance of grace with the gift of righteousness (Romans 5: 17)

Why most people do not understand grace, ultimately rests on the fact that man does not understand that He is dead in his trespasses. Man does not need help to be good, but he needs life to overcome the death into which every man is born because of Adam:

"Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come." (Romans 5: 14)

We cannot receive His grace if we still think that we can or must do something more to earn it.

Righteousness is a gift, which means that we do or give nothing in order to receive it.

This includes working man-made programs like Alcoholics Anonymous and other Twelve Step spin-offs like Celebrate Recovery.

I never forgave others because I never believed that I was fully forgiven, and I never felt fully forgiven because I kept thinking that I had to take an inventory, or take stock of my thoughts, feelings, and actions in order to maintain or remain forgiven.

Never once did I understand that Jesus lives in me through His Holy Spirit, and  many people never knew how deep I was in the Twelve Step cult when I was growing up.

The Gospel means that we are fully justified in Christ. Yet as long as I was still working Twelve Steps, I was not resting in His Finished Work.

If we do not believe that He has taken us from death to life, from orphan to sonship, from poverty to prosperity through the blood of Jesus Christ, then we will not be able to forgive others.

Consider this wonderful verse in Ephesians:

"31Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: 32And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you." (Ephesians 4: 31-32)

We forgive or rather extend grace, as God has been gracious to us!

I never understood this grace, because I was so busy working Twelve Steps to maintain a standing of some sort before God.

"For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse: for it is written, Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them." (Galatians 3:10)

and

"Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace." (Galatians 5: 4)

"Justified by the law" can include working Twelve Steps, as if what Jesus did at the Cross was not good enough for putting away our sins once, for all, and forever!

I have also learned that I do not "have to" forgive, but because I have been forgiven all of sins, I get to forgive others. The only reason I walked around frustrated and bitter was that I did not rest in the finality of all that Jesus did at the Cross.

When I realized that those false demands, those false walls should never have stood there in the first place, it was easy to step out and let go!