The Suburbs of HeavenIt doesn’t take much in the way of discernment to see that something is drastically wrong with the world in which we live. The mere fact that people would even think of walking into an elementary school and casually and violently extinguishing the lives of the most precious and, yet,…
One of my most vivid memories from childhood is being passed over for the class reading award in first grade. I thought for sure that I was going to win it. I think I even stood up from my desk when the award was being presented only to hear someone…
On at least two occasions, in the context of speaking about forgiveness, Jesus instructs us to confront every brother or sister who sins against us and fails to repent or apologize. In Matthew 18:15, He says that we are to “go and tell” the one who has hurt us “his…
What do we do if we confront fellow believers who sin against us and, yet, they still don’t apologize and seek our forgiveness? What do we do if we confront them and things actually get worse? Is it ever appropriate for us to just give up and to go about…
In my last post, I argued that Jesus’s whole point in telling the “Parable of the Unforgiving Servant” was to say to Peter (and to you and me by extension) that we shouldn’t have to ask how many times we should forgive someone when they sin against us. Knowing that…
The reason many of us struggle so profoundly with forgiving other people is either that we have never experienced God’s forgiveness for ourselves or that we have lost sight of it in our everyday lives and it no longer influences the ways that we think, speak, and act. In either case,…
