Forgiveness

• Have you ever been hurt by a friend? Has someone ever really ‘kicked you when you’re down’, betrayed or gossiped about you to others?
  
  
• It’s a hard thing to forgive those who hurt us. It’s hard when they were supposed to be your friend and when you’d shared many good times, secrets, even future plans together.
  
  
• So what do you do when you’re in a situation like this? What’s a revolutionary’s response supposed to be? What is going to change your friend’s take on the world? Simple: you need to forgive them! Simple, yet often hard to do.
  
  
• Jesus spoke about forgiveness to His disciples. Peter asked Jesus how many times He was supposed to forgive somebody when they’d wronged him. Peter, plucking some kind of random religious number out of the air suggested that seven times might be enough. Matt. 18:22 details the Lord’s response: ‘“No, not seven times,” Jesus replied, “but seventy times seven!”’
  
  
• You see, the most revolutionary thing we can do when someone wrongs, offends or hurts us, is to make the choice to forgive and keep on forgiving; until the pain has gone and we remember it no more. This may take a short while, it might take our whole life, but it will speak to others, and maybe even the person who has wronged us. It will show them that our way of doing things is not the way of this world, but a revolutionary response which has its origins in another Kingdom...the Kingdom of God.