Posts Tagged: God's unconditional love and forgiveness
“Believing We’re Forgiven, Provided . . .”
I believe that God can forgive anybody, even me. However, I also believe that there is a proviso. A proviso is a condition that must take place for an agreement to be kept.
Many people think that God’s love and forgiveness are unconditional. In a deep sense, that is true. There are no provisos in God’s love.
However, in order for us to actually experience God’s loving forgiveness, one of my recent twelve-step readings pointed out that there is a proviso. Here is part of that reading:
“Meditation for the Day
‘One thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things that are before, I press onward toward the goal.’ We should forget those things, which are behind us and press onward toward something better. We can believe that God has forgiven us for all our past sins, provided we are honestly trying to live today the way we believe He wants us to live. We can wipe clean the slate of the past. We can start today with a clean slate and go forward with confidence toward the goal that has been set before us.
Prayer for the Day
I pray that I may drop off the load of the past. I pray that I may start today with a light heart and a new confidence.”
(From Twenty-Four Hours a Day © 1975 by Hazelden Foundation.)
I was struck by the sentence, “We can believe that God has forgiven us for all our past sins, provided we are honestly trying to live today the way we believe He wants us to live. We can wipe clean the slate of the past.”
How we live our lives—which is mostly made up of the choices we make—matters in many ways. One way that making good choices matters is in the realm of assurance of God’s love and forgiveness. Sure, we are forgiven! Good news indeed! Our past does not have to determine our present or our future! More good news!
But all of this good news won’t mean much unless we are honestly striving to live the best lives we can. So, how about if we get busy fulfilling this proviso today? It isn’t about God fulfilling God’s part of deliverance. That part, we can take to the bank. It’s about the proviso.
Living out the proviso is hard work, but it is also good work. And doing good work gives us all kinds of assurance—including the fact that our past does not define us.
DOWN TO EARTH BELIEVER
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