Necessarily Incomplete:Thoughts on Repentance, Love, and Forgiveness

As Thou dost forgive us our trespasses, so may we forgive others who trespass against us.*

When Adam and Eve hid from God in the Garden, they sinned. I had never considered their hiding as a sinful act until God opened my eyes to my own tendency to hide from Him after my own sinful rebellions and thoughtless acts of omission and commission.

I think part of the difficulty in living a life that experiences the "easy yoke and light burden" that Jesus promised His followers is our hesitance to repent at the moment we know we have sinned. Instead, our tendency, the human, fallen tendency, is to mimic Adam and Eve: we run away from God, hoping He didn't notice. But, we know in our hearts, we can run but not really hide.

So how do we change this habit of behavior? How do we change any destructive behavior, be it the sin or the response to the sin which compounds the original offense? The answer is simple but not easy: submit in humility; admit that, try as you might, you cannot successfully change the heart behind behavior without the Holy Spirit's work; and you cannot change the behavior permanently without a change of heart.

So, do we just sit and wait and do nothing ourselves. No, we are creatures of free will; we have choices, the most important of which is to submit in humility, but while God is changing our attitudes and healing our wounds that lead to destructive thoughts and behaviors, we can choose to act differently, not as a rebellious attempt to circumvent the need for a spiritually derived change of heart, but as a statement of faith that we trust God to carry our "heart-change" to completion.

C. S. Lewis said: "When you are behaving as if you love someone, you will presently come to love him." If we direct our actions to love someone, even if in our hearts we despise them, we are humbling ourselves to God. We are saying, in essence: "You, Father, love this person who is part of Your creation, so I will be obedient and act as though I love them, too." Our obedience opens the door for God to change our hearts using the emotions that He placed within us.

We cannot of our own volition change our hearts, but we can use our hands and feet, our words and actions to do the opposite of what our selfish hearts will us to do, submitting those evil desires to God even as we act in love, even as our actions speak the forgiveness of God that we have not yet experienced in our heart.

Some say that unless we forgive we cannot be forgiven; unless we love our neighbor as ourselves we are not true believers. There is an element of truth in these propositions, but they leave another aspect of God's grace unspoken: As we develop faith in Him, we love ourselves as He loves us; we forgive ourselves as He forgives us; only then are we prepared by Him to forgive others and to love others in the way we should love ourselves.

The concept of being loved to love and being forgiven to forgive necessarily implies that we have to first accept God's love and forgiveness before we can love and forgive as He demands. They are not actions that are the initiators of our salvation, but the fruit of it, and the fruit may take years of nurturing and pruning before it is produced, meaning that between our salvation and our perfection will be many trials in which we may fail to love or forgive as we should.

Packer points out in his book, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, the occurrence in nature of antinomies, a situation in which two necessary laws appear to be contradictory. He uses the analogy of light being both particle and wave, two contradictory theories but both needed to adequately explain the action of light.

The need to forgive to be forgiven, to love others as we love ourselves, can be viewed as antinomies as well--we cannot forgive without divine grace first being given to us, without divine love first being offered to us; at the same time we are to forgive and love as a condition of that forgiveness and eternal love. A cause (being forgiven, being loved) is necessary for the effect (forgiving others, loving others), yet the effect is required in order for the cause to be in place--two necessary laws that seem to contradict each other.

Only God has the depth of intellect to understand such an antinomy. We only have to "trust and obey"---someone ought to write a hymn about that :).

When we walk with the Lord in the light of His Word,
What a glory He sheds on our way!
While we do His good will, He abides with us still,
And with all who will trust and obey.**

Peace and grace be yours. Amen

*(translation from Aramaic to Old English by G.J.R. Ouseley from The Gospel of the Holy Twelve)

** Trust and Obey, John Sammis (1887)