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Attitude:
Ability to love and forgive yourself or rather Ability to accept love and forgiveness
I pray for this attitude since love, forgiveness and peace are from God. Remembering God’s providence, love, and forgiveness, we can freely extend this attitude to our children as we have freely received it (Matthew 10). Indeed, our confidence and competence, our sufficiency, is through Christ from God, and not from ourselves (2 Corinthians 3). If I am burdened by self-hatred, regret, and guilt, I am likely to be as critical of those in my life as I am of myself. If I accept God’s forgiveness and go forward in repentance, I am likely (and required) to be forgiving of others. Grace is free because Jesus Christ paid my penalty and this the opposite of what I deserve. What I deserve is the death He died on the cross in my place, and the separation He experienced from God, the Father. Can I accept His love and forgiveness as my only hope for salvation in Jesus Christ alone? What are my triggers keeping me from developing the attitudes that God requires? Self-sufficiency? Self-reliance?
Balance:
“For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote unto you with many tears; not that ye should be grieved, but that ye might know the love which I have more abundantly unto you.” – 2 Corinthians 2:4, KJV (See 2 Corinthians 7 where love and forgiveness are accompanied by a Godly sorrow.)
Check:
How can we seek and accept God’s forgiveness specifically and particularly and give our children the understanding that it is all God (monergism) who regenerates us and justifies us, while at the same time we participate (synergism) in our sanctification? How does understanding this help those in Christ know you are loved and forgiven and free you up to love and forgive your children?
“Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” – Philippians 2:12-13, KJV
”Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.” – Hebrews 12:1-2, KJV
”Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little.” – Luke 7:47, KJV
For further research and reflection:
Peter (John 21); Joseph’s brothers (Genesis 45); God’s great mercy (Psalm 103); God repays the years the locusts have eaten (Joel 2); Forgetting what is behind (Philippians 3); A new thing (Isaiah 42, 43); Accuser is cast down (Revelation 12).
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