March 16th 2012

So once you ask God for forgiveness I’m good, right?

Read Matthew 5:23-24 and journal your thoughts

Chances are whenever we sin against God; we have probably sinned against someone else also. This is a crazy hard thing to do, isn’t it? It is one thing to humble ourselves before God, but humbling ourselves before someone else, ouch.

Sometimes we have a hard time understanding why asking others for forgiveness is so important, after all our relationship with God is the one that really matters right? This is a pretty common way of thinking about forgiveness in our culture. You see, our culture is a product of several different movements in the past; one of which is the Enlightenment which is centralizes the importance of knowledge; secondly our culture is birthed from Existentialism, which is a very individualized way of thinking. It is especially because of the influence of Existentialism that our culture focuses on the individual’s relationship with God as primary, and not the person to person.

We have to remember that all throughout the Scriptures there is this heavy emphasis places on community. It’s not about “me”, but “we”. In the Old Testament it was about the community of the Israelites and in the New Testament it was about the followers of Jesus and the expansion of God’s Kingdom. Over and over through the teaching of Jesus the Kingdom of God seems to be not just about our relationship with God, but with others (See Matthew 25:31-46).

All this to say, when we sin against someone it doesn’t just effect our relationship with God, but their relationship with God and the communities’ relationship with each other. Have you ever been in an awkward situation when 2 people were in a really heated argument? It’s easy to take sides, it’s easy to view one of the people as being at fault, but when we forgive each other, we not only heal that relationship, but the relationship within the whole community.

Take some time and think about the people you’ve sinned against, and pray that God would give you the strength to ask them for forgiveness.