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Forgiving Others

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Our forgiving others is absolutely crucial to our physical and spiritual health. We cannot have a healthy relationship with God if we are holding a grudge against another person. It doesn’t matter if we are right and feel that we are justified to be mad at someone.

Forgiving others is not always easy. Sometimes it is impossible without God’s help. It may not be easy, but it is vital to our relationship with Christ. 

The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant

“Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?”

Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.

  “Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand bags of gold was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.

  “At this the servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’ The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.

  “But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred silver coins.  He grabbed him and began to choke him. ‘Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded.

  “His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it back.’

  “But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were outraged and went and told their master everything that had happened.

  “Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ In anger, his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.

“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart” (Matthew 18:21-35).

This is an excellent example of someone receiving grace and forgiveness from God, but not willing to offer grace to others. 

God is more than willing to forgive us and extend His grace to us, even though we don’t deserve it. But, He expects us to, in turn, extend forgiveness to others.

Jesus plainly links our forgiveness by the Father with our forgiveness of our fellow man. At the center of the Lord’s prayer, Jesus taught us to pray, “Forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” 

Jesus is clearly saying that if you do not forgive men their sins, the Father will not forgive your sins. The scriptures make it clear that our forgiveness depends on our forgiving others. Grace begins and ends with forgiveness.

“For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins” (Matthew 6:14-15).

“And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins” (Luke 6:25).

There is another aspect of forgiveness that we need to consider. God tells us that vengeance is His, not ours.

“Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord” (John 12:19).

Why does God say vengeance is for Him?  Surely sin always has its consequences, but do you think God wants or enjoys dishing out our revenge?  This statement is not about the one receiving revenge. It is about the one who is angry and wants revenge. God knows the one who is angry towards another, the one who feels they have been hurt or taken advantage of is being hurt by their anger much more than the one they are angry at. A person who is holding anger or resentment towards another is being robbed of their joy and closeness with God. God loves us and knows what is best for us. He is taking the burden of revenge from us.

Anger is not only damaging to our physical health, it is devastating to our spiritual well-being. It may require the love of Christ to be able to forgive, but when we do it will heal and cleanse our very soul. Joy will replace our anger.

It has been said that if you forgive someone, then someone is set free, and that someone is YOU!

Forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting. Sometimes we think they are the same. We believe that if we can’t forget then we haven’t forgiven. Forgiving doesn’t depend on forgetting. They are not the same.

We usually can’t forget and sometimes it may be best if we don’t. We may still need to be cautious around someone we have forgiven. Nor do we have to accept or approve of their behavior.

The key to forgiving others is to quit focusing on what they did to you and start focusing on what God did for you. You will never be called upon to give anyone more grace than God has already given you.

Forgiving means that we no longer hold anything against someone. But more importantly, it means we are trusting God with the situation and our life and we are no longer a slave to our anger. It means our relationship with God is healed and we can now enjoy a much closer walk with him. 

Are We a Reflection of Jesus

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Just as the Father is in Christ, Jesus lives in us when we accept Him into our lives.

“On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.” (John 14:20)

In verse 9, Jesus tells His disciples that if you have seen me you have seen the Father. Jesus is a reflection of the Father. If Jesus lives in us, should we not be a reflection of Him? Shouldn’t the world see a reflection of Jesus in our lives?

David Jeremiah told the story of four businessmen trying to go from one flight to the next. They only had a few minutes to catch the next flight, as they were running through the airport, they accidentally knocked over a display where a young lady was selling bags of apples. 

Three of the four made it just in time to board their flight home. The fourth man stopped and told his coworkers to go ahead, he would catch the next flight. He then returned to help the girl pick up her apples. Only then, when he saw the girl on her hands and knees searching for the apples did he realize she was blind. He helped her pick up the bags and apples. Some bags were torn and some of the apples were bruised and not good to sell. 

He then opened his wallet and gave her more than enough money to cover her loss He apologized again for the incident and turned to leave. As he was leaving, she called after him and he turned to her, “Sir, are you, Jesus? She had figured since he had helped her as no one else ever had, that he must be Jesus. 

Do people see Jesus in you? Is your life a reflection of Christ? I am not asking this to make you feel guilty or unworthy. I have to ask myself these questions from time to time. We all should be a reflection of Christ if we are serious about our Christian walk. We may be the only Jesus some people ever see.

How do people see Christ in us? It is not by attending church, it is not by talking to them about God, it is not by doing a lot of good works, and it is not by what we do or say, although these things are all good; it is not how they see Jesus in us. Jesus said we should love our neighbor as ourselves. It is only when people see we care about them and love them, that we are a reflection of Christ.

Without love our lives are meaningless. “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing” 1 Corinthians 13:1.

“Jesus said to those who followed Him: “By this, all will know that you are My disciples if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).

Let the love of Jesus shine through you, it will make you beautiful to those around you.

When We Pray We are Never Alone

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Dear Praying Friend,
Do you know that Jesus gave us the Holy Spirit to help us when we pray? 

“In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And He who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.” — Romans 8:26-27, New International Version

Even when we don’t know what to pray, the Holy Spirit prays for us. And He always prays in line with God’s will. This is a powerful truth. To top it off, Jesus sits at God’s right hand presenting our requests to His Father. 

“Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.” —

Even when you are praying by yourself, you are never praying alone. The Holy Spirit and Jesus are with you, hearing every prayer and aligning them with God’s will before presenting them to our heavenly Father.

thanks to Lucinda Mason for this post, Jesus Film Project® Prayer Mobilization, Team LeaderCru® Global Prayer Council

Books by Jerry, many of which you may read for free on Prime: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Jerry-Blount/author/B06XK4GJT1

  1. Things You Probably Didn’t Learn in Chruch
  2. Basic Christianity: Living a Joy-Filled Life and Making a Difference
  3. The End Times: Signs and Prophecy
  4. Noah and the Great Flood: Proof and Effects
  5. Following Jesus and Fishing Along the Way: Stories of God’s Great Outdoors
  6. The Rapture: Coming Soon 

Jesus

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The life of Jesus is a part of documented history. No historian of any credibility would deny that Jesus lived. His life is a part of recorded history, not just in the Bible and by religious writers, but by secular historians of His day.

The fulfillment of Bible prophecy by Jesus should have left no doubt about the deity of Christ. The Old Testament was written over a period of 1000 years. During that time God gave his prophets over 300 prophecies concerning the messiah’s coming. In the Old Testament, there are 60 major messianic prophecies and 270 minor prophecies or conditions that were fulfilled by one person. That person was Jesus Christ.

   Professor Peter Stoner and his mathematical class spent several months doing a mathematical analysis overseen by the American Scientific Affrication and by the Executive Council of the same group, using the modern science of probability in reference to eight major prophecies found that the chance that any man might have lived to the present time and fulfilled all eight prophecies is 1 in 10 to the seventeenth power. That’s 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000. Or to put it in perspective that would be like covering the state of Texas 2 ft. deep in quarters, marking one quarter, burying it somewhere in Texas, blindfolding a person, and telling him to go find it on the 1st try. They determined that the odds for someone to fulfill 8 of the prophecies was 1 in 13 trillion. 

Amazing isn’t it that Jesus not only fulfilled those 8 prophecies but he also fulfilled all 330 prophecies. God did not intend that there be any mistake about who the Messiah was.

    We can track the lineage of Jesus in Genesis from Adam to his birth. Genesis and Jeremiah both specified his ancestry; he would be a descendant of Shem, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, from the tribe of Judah, the house of David. 

In Isaiah 7:14 we were told that the Messiah would be born of a virgin. Micah 5:2 said that he would be born in Bethlehem. Isaiah 53 pictures a messiah who would suffer and die for the sins of Israel and the World. This was 700 years before Jesus lived.

Isaiah predicted the Jews would reject him and the Gentiles would believe in him. Psalms 22 foretold the crucifixion of Jesus 800 years before the crucifixion was invented by the Romans. 

   Psalms tell us the Messiah would be betrayed by a friend for 30 pieces of silver and that it would be cast on the floor of the temple and used to buy a potter’s field, and that’s exactly what happened.

   Malachi 3:1 & 4 other Old Testament verses require the Messiah to come while the Temple of Jerusalem is still standing. This is significant when we realize that the temple was destroyed about 37 years after Jesus ascended to heaven to sit at the right hand of God and it has never been rebuilt since.

   Isaiah 40:3 and Malachi 3:1 states that there will be a forerunner for the Messiah, a voice crying in the wilderness, one preparing the way before the Lord. John the Baptist fulfilled that prediction.

   God through the Old Testament predicted the precise lineage of Jesus, the time of his coming, the manner of his birth, the place of his birth, his betrayal by Judas, and the betrayal price. The manner of his death, the people’s reaction, the mocking and spitting, the casting of dice for his clothes, the non-tearing of his garments, his resurrection, and hundreds of other prophecies and details.

The New Testament documents the life of Jesus from His birth to His ascension to heaven. But there are many other references to Jesus besides the Bible. 

There is so much more proof that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God the Father. To see more evidence of Jesus’s deity, check out my book “Things You Didn’t Learn in Church.”

Books by Jerry, many of which you may read for free on Prime: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Jerry-Blount/author/B06XK4GJT1

  1. Things You Probably Didn’t Learn in Chruch
  2. Basic Christianity: Living a Joy-Filled Life and Making a Difference
  3. The End Times: Signs and Prophecy
  4. Noah and the Great Flood: Proof and Effects
  5. Following Jesus and Fishing Along the Way: Stories of God’s Great Outdoors
  6. The Rapture: Coming Soon 

God – Creator of the Universe

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The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. (Isaiah 40: 26)

It is impossible for us with our feeble minds to truly understand and comprehend the greatness of God. But, if we look around us at His creation, we can see some of God’s greatness, such as the natural wonders, lakes, streams, and mountains. God created this earth and everything in it, not only the natural wonders but all the complex living creatures He created. As if this world isn’t marvelous enough, God didn’t stop there. Genesis tells us thousands of years ago that God hung the sun, moon, and stars in place. God created the universe. How big is the universe? Well, how big is our God?

The sun is 865,000 miles in diameter. That’s 109 times bigger than the earth’s diameter. The Earth seems big to us, but 1321.3 of our planet would fit inside Jupiter. Jupiter is huge, but God made even larger planets. The planet dubbed HAT-P-1, is 450 light-years from Earth. It’s twice the size of Jupiter. Our earth would fit into HAT-P-1 over 2500 times. How awesome is God, that he could create all this and still care about you and me? Care enough to send his son to die for us. 

The universe is so large that it can not be measured in miles so we measure it in light years. A light year is how far the light will travel in a year. Light travels at 186,000 miles a second. That’s over 670 million miles per hour. Multiply 186,000 miles a second, times 60 seconds a minute, times 60 minutes an hour, times 24 hours a day, times 7 days a week, and times 52 weeks in a year and you get 5,878,499,817,000 miles. A light year is nearly 6 trillion miles. 

The sun is 93,000,000 miles from Earth but it only takes sunshine eight minutes to travel to Earth. The Milky Way is 25,000 light-years away. But yet it is so large that we can see it from the earth. The God that made the Milky Way cares about you and me. He cares about even the little daily things in our lives.

The observable universe is estimated to be 93 billion light-years across. How much further than that does it go? Astronomers may guess, but only God knows! God created the universe, therefore it cannot contain Him. He is larger than it.

Some time back, I was looking at pictures from the Hubble telescope. They had trained the telescope on one of the blankest, barest, emptiest, spots in the universe and let it draw in the images for ten days. The photos that resulted were full of planets and universes. It was at this point, that it dawned on me that at least in my little human mind the universe is limitless. That’s how big God is! He is limitless. His power, mercy, goodness, grace, and love are unlimited. Think about that. There is no limit to His love for us! 

The Goodness of God

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There is no limit to God and there is no limit to His goodness.

There is no limit to God’s love. He loves each of us the same, without limit. There is no limit to His mercy. God is as merciful to one person as He is to another. Likewise, there is no limit to His grace. It is just as available to one person as another. Each of us can experience God in His fullness, if we are not experiencing God’s love, grace, and mercy, it is not God’s fault. God has made Himself available to each and every one of us.

There is no limit to the goodness of God. God is as good to one person as He is to another. Experiencing that goodness on a human level is our challenge. We can experience as much of God’s goodness as we are willing to experience. God does not set a limit on how much of His goodness or His grace or His mercy or His love we can experience.

God wants us to experience His love, mercy, grace, and goodness to the fullest. Our problem is not that God is withholding anything from us, it’s that we limit ourselves by how much we seek and trust Him. It is simple, the more we seek Him and strive to be in His presence; the more we will experience His goodness, and the more our capacity to experience Him grows.

Each of us has as much of God in our lives as we want. Sadly, for many Christians that is not very much. They have no idea of the joy and peace that they are missing out on. We are so concerned about satisfying our own wants and desires we are afraid to fully trust God with our lives. We somehow have the opinion that we know what’s best for our lives, rather than putting our lives into the hands of the Almighty God who knows the future and wants what is best for us. How foolish we are to think we know what is better for us than the omnipotent God who created us.

The more we trust God and seek to do His will, the more His goodness is displayed in our lives. The more we partake of His goodness, mercy, and love. On the other hand, the less we seek Him the less He is a part of our lives.

Our Perception of God

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How we live our lives as Christians is usually on the same level as our perception of God. The greater our perception of God, the greater our trust in Him. Therefore, the closer and more intimate our relationship with Him is.

Theology is the human attempt to understand God. It is absolutely impossible for us as humans to understand God. God is far greater than we can ever comprehend in our wildest dreams. 

God tells us in Isaiah 55: 8-9: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

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Do you Have Peace in your life?

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We live in a world that knows no peace. It is a complex world, that can be very stressful at times. It is a far cry from the world God had created for us. We can only dream of the peaceful life that Adam and Eve knew in the Garden of Eden. 

Philippians 4:7 tells us when you belong to Christ Jesus, God will bless you with peace that no one can completely understand. And it will keep guard over our hearts and minds.

“And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

Jesus said, “Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled; do not be afraid.” (John 14:27)

Jesus knew that if there was one thing we needed here on earth it was to have peace in our lives. He knows the trials, heartache, troubles, and uncertainty each of us faces. The peace He gives us allows us to face each day no matter what it brings.

In 2022 I suffered a very severe heart attack. My wife rushed me twenty miles to a small local hospital, where I was given clot blockers and blood thinners to stop the effects of the attack. From there I was rushed by ambulance to a larger regional hospital, where I was stabilized until surgery. The emergency nurse at the local hospital told me later that people normally don’t survive a heart attack like mine. The heart surgeon at the regional hospital told me at least three times that I was lucky to be alive. He said I would never have made it to Marquette, that I owed my life to the staff at the Munising Hospital. I thought at the time that luck had little to do with it. It was God.

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Jesus – God or Man

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As Christians, the foundation of our faith is Jesus Christ. Paul said that we should always be prepared to explain to others why our hope and faith are in Jesus. So, who is Jesus? What do we tell the unbeliever or those who may have doubts? We can say with confidence that Jesus is Alive! His resurrection was real. The textual, documentary, and archaeological proof of Jesus’s life abounds!

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What Are the Beatitudes?

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Jesus begins His Sermon on the Mount with a series of sayings that have come to be known as the Beatitudes.

The fifth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel begins very simply: “Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them” (Matthew 5:1–2).

And with that, Matthew details the most important sermon ever preached. We would be hard-pressed to overemphasize the significance of the Sermon on the Mount. Even people who know nothing about Christianity regularly use terms that spring directly from this one sermon:

  • Salt of the earth
  • Go the extra mile
  • Turn the other cheek
  • Judge not lest ye be judged
  • Do unto others

There’s little question that Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is one of the most well-known messages from any religious leader in any era. And it all starts with the Beatitudes.

Discovering the Beatitudes

The Beatitudes are eight (or nine) statements that introduce the Sermon on the Mount:

  1. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
  2. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
  3. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
  4. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
  5. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
  6. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
  7. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
  8. Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
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