All posts in " Forgiveness "
Share

Your Esau = your brother

By Dave Henning / December 5, 2023

“You no longer swagger in false strength; you limp in God’s power.  You need fear Esau no more.  God has gone ahead of you.  He has prepared the way and paved the path.  Your Esau, your past, is now your brother.  Embrace him.  And weep for joy.”- Max Lucado “If we confess our sins, he […]

Share

Lip service – “Amazing Grace”?

By Dave Henning / August 22, 2023

“Many people sing ‘Amazing Grace’ and give lip service to the idea, but that grace has not profoundly changed them.”- Timothy Keller “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.  They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.”- Matthew 15:8-9 (NIV) Timothy Keller concludes Chapter 6 […]

Share

A soft reset – forgiveness

By Dave Henning / July 24, 2023

“Salvation is a hard reset; our sin is forgiven and forgotten.  We are justified, just as if we had never sinned.  But forgiveness is a soft reset.  It’s something you need to do over and over again.”- Mark Batterson “However, as it is written: ‘What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and […]

Share

Take offense = zero-sum game

By Dave Henning / July 20, 2023

“When you take offense, you stop playing offense.  Your defense mechanisms kick in, and you start protecting your ego at all costs.  It becomes a zero-sum game, and no one really wins.  If you want to experience the miraculous, you have to offer forgiveness.”- Mark Batterson “The true saint burns grace like a 747 burns […]

Share

Complete withdrawal – all about you

By Dave Henning / April 8, 2023

“Vengeance is all about you — not about the honor of God or the good of the victims or the offender.  But, on the other hand, complete withdrawal is about you as well. . . .  when someone wrongs you, if you resent them on the inside but stay courteously mute on the outside, you […]

Share

Fig leaves – desperate efforts

By Dave Henning / March 27, 2023

“We spend all our lives finding ways to cover up that deep, radical sense of inadequacy. . . .  Why all these things?  They are fig leaves. . . .  These are desperate efforts to deal with the sense of unacceptability — of unlovability — we all have.  But fig leaves don’t work. . . […]

Share

Lifelong struggle – forgiveness

By Dave Henning / March 19, 2023

“By not forgiving, I chain myself to a desire to get even, thereby losing my freedom.  A forgiven person forgives.  This is what we proclaim when we pray ‘and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us.’  This lifelong struggle lies at the heart of the Christian life.”- Henri Nouwen, […]

Share

Frameworks of thought – forgiveness

By Dave Henning / March 8, 2023

“There are frameworks of thought within which forgiveness can find no home.  Forgiveness entered the world along with the recognition of divine and human worth . . . of rights. of duty, of guilt.  It cannot occur when those are not recognized.”- Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice in Love “[God] has made everything beautiful in its time.  […]

Share

Strictly secular sense of forgiveness

By Dave Henning / March 6, 2023

“The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth.  The fact that he made this discovery in a religious context and articulated it in religious language is no reason to take it less seriously in a strictly secular sense.”- Hannah Arendt, philosopher (1906-1975) In Chapter 3 (“The […]

Share

Modern western culture – forgiveness

By Dave Henning / March 5, 2023

“[We have such] impoverished contemporary understandings and practices of forgiveness in modern western culture. . . .  If all that matters is individual autonomy, then forgiveness and reconciliation — which are designed to foster and maintain communion — are of little importance.”- L. Gregory Jones, Embodying Forgiveness (1995) Timothy Keller concludes Chapter 2 of Forgive […]

Share

Complaints around forgiveness

By Dave Henning / March 4, 2023

“What lies behind this conflict over forgiveness?  All the complaints around forgiveness assume definitions and models of it that indeed can be problematic.  It is not enough, then, to simply call people to be more forgiving.”- Timothy Keller In Chapter 2 (“The Fading of Forgiveness’) of Forgive, Timothy Keller critiques the three current models of […]

Share

A profound need – forgiveness

By Dave Henning / February 28, 2023

“The human need for forgiveness appears indelible.  It won’t go away by denouncing it or trying to deconstruct it.  The need I’m referring to is both a profound need to grant forgiveness and to receive forgiveness. . . .  Forgiveness gets down to the bottom of things — to the alienation we feel from God […]

1 2 3 14
Page 1 of 14
Call Now Button