Our freedom to forgive comes from being forgiven!  We cannot give what we do not have!  God said … FREELY GIVE what you have FREELY RECEIVED!

We cannot move first when it comes to God!  HE IS THE INITIATOR and grace is His first move to save us!

Always remember that HE loved us FIRST! “We love because He first loved us.” (1 John 4:19 NIV)

He forgave us FIRST!  “But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While WE WERE STILL SINNERS, Christ died for us!”  (Romans 5:8 NIV).  And I so love the part that He NOT only forgives us but He forgets what we’ve done wrong!  Oh yes, He does!  “For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their lawless deeds I WILL REMEMBER NO MORE.” (Hebrews 8:12 NKJV)

Not just that, He will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea!  “And compassion is on its way to us.  YOU’LL STAMP OUT our wrongdoing.  You’ll SINK our sins to the bottom of the ocean.” (Micah 7:19 MSG)

When we truly believe that we are created according to His image and likeness, then, we are called to do to others what He is doing to us.  Just as He forgives and forgets, we are commanded to do so.  The beauty of His commands to us is that … WHAT HE COMMANDS, HE EMPOWERS US!  We are NEVER left on our own to do it because you and I know that it’s way beyond our capacity to accomplish.  To forgive is already hard, how much more forget???  We always have the propensity to scuba dive and find again the sins with our names or the names of the people who have wronged us and  brought them back to the surface even if they were done half a century ago.  Oh yes, it’s funny to think about this but it’s very true!  BUT as we put our trust in Him and lean NOT on our own understanding, yielding into exceeding greatness of His power at work in us, it is He who will direct, move, make straight and plain our paths.

Bottom line is unless we experience HIM, we cannot convey Him!  Unless we are loved by Him, we cannot effectively love others!  Unless we have been forgiven by Him, we cannot fully forgive others!  Unless we come to a realization that He has forgotten the wrongs that we’ve done, we will never forget what has been done to us.  It is in our divine encounters with HIM, in the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, that empowers us, graces us, moves us, compels us to love and forgive!