To forgive or not to forgive that is the question?

Luke6:27,28 says But I say to you who are listening now to Me: (in order to heed, make it a practice to) love your enemies, treat well (do good to, act nobly toward) those who detest you and pursue you with hatred.  Invoke blessings upon and pray for the happiness of those who curse you, implore God's blessing (favor) upon those who abuse you (who revile, reproach, disparage, and highhandedly misuse you).

These two verses teaches us how to deal with our enemies.  If we say we forgive those who have hurt or offended us and go no further something is missing.  Not only does God tell us in His Word to forgive others, He also instructs us to bless them.

How easy is it for us to say I forgive you, but do you really?  Do you do what God instructs us to do?  Well after reading this I had to hang my head in shame because I realized that God was speaking directly to me.  I have forgiven people and asked God to forgive me.  But more than often I know I have not asked God to bless these people.  Some days I could pray for someone thinking well I have done my bit, but I think God instructs us to do it on a daily basis.

Hard isn't it?  Well I'll be honest and say it certainly is not easy for me.  You see forgiveness works like this.  I can say I forgive you, but if I say I will never forget what you did, am I really truly forgiving you?  Think about it?  To me the answer is a red hot NO!

How can you forgive unless you forget.  God forgives us and forgets our sins, so why do think that we can do it differently?  To work through the process of forgiveness and enjoy the peace we seek, we must do what God tells us to do, which is not only to forgive but also to bless.

You see what we need to realize is that when we ask God to bless them we are not asking Him to bless them financially or to have more possessions; we are praying for them to be blessed spiritually.  We are asking God to bring truth and revelation to them about their attitude and behavior so they will be willing to repent and be freed from their sins.

We don't see these things and we don't understand the power we have in God's Word because we are so self-centered.  We are so concerned with how we have been hurt that we don't see the big picture.  Harsh words but it is true.

We are like Jabba (the fictional character in star wars) we sit around and moan "what about me"?  We pour so much energy into crying and moaning about how we have been hurt or offended.  Well it's not all about you or me.  God's Word says it's all about other's!

When we can actually take the focus off of ourselves and our "little" lives and start doing good unto other's we find that we are much happier people than when we sat around like Jabba, saying "What about ME"?  ME, ME, ME!


Lord please help me to do something DYNAMIC for You today!