Forgiveness doesn't mean that what was done to you was OK. Forgiveness allows the wound to become glorified scar. Forgiveness keeps bitterness and resentment making a home in your head and heart. Forgiveness keeps the evil someone has done to you from shaping your life for the rest of your life. Forgiveness remembers that we have been forgiven for far more by Jesus Christ than has ever been done to us. Forgiveness gives us the freedom to no longer be controlled by the failings of others. Forgiveness brings us to the place where we can honestly say to the one who has harmed us, "You owe me nothing. You no longer control how I move forward in life. I have put you in the gracious Hands of Jesus."
THE FOLLY OF IDOLATRY Martin Luther said that the human heart is an idol factory. The truth is that we were created to know and live by the gracious rule of and in the Presence of God who created us. Our peace, our understanding of meaning and purpose can only be truly grounded in God who created us for that meaning and purpose. The rebellion of Adam and Eve, their decision to do the opposite of what God said would make for life, resulted in spiritual and ultimately physical death. They chose to believe they needed something more than what God had provided. Their doomed attempt to try and live life without reference to God as the ground of meaning and purpose did not make life fuller, but emptied it. They wanted to decide what was good and what was evil without God and the disintegration of human life was the consequence. Rather than living in the Presence of God and by the gracious rule of God all around them, they turned from wholeness to brokenness, from fulfilment to scarc...

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