The Worthiness of Jesus

Mark 1:22 NIV

The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law.

What Do You Think of Jesus?

I make it a regular practice of weighing myself on our bathroom scale.  Recently it started indicating that I weighed 120 pounds, 17 pounds and 3.8 pounds.  Now I am more than glad to lose weight but that was a bit extreme and so I changed the batteries but it continued to give me similar readings.  Why it was so important to me to know precisely how much I weighed as if where my belt notched did not give me all the information I needed, I can’t say.  Maybe it is a mild form of masochism; perhaps I needed a fresh dose of bad news each day.  I was determined to get an accurate measure of my weight though, so much so that I bought a new scale.  I was very happy to read that with the new scale, I apparently had lost 75 pounds.  Unfortunately, my belt told me that could not be the case.  Off I went back to the store to return my new scale so that I could have an accurate measure of one important area that I judged myself.

One of the characteristics of being human is that we regularly measure not only ourselves but more often others on a wide range of scales.  Is he smart?  Is she unsophisticated?  Is he creative?  Is she strong willed?  What is she really?  Talented?  Funny?  Depressed?  A good conversationalist?  Honest?  Caring?  Egotistical?  Full of love?  When it comes to Jesus, there is perhaps no one in history who has been categorized as often.  Yet, what do we really know about Him?  If you were hanging out with Jesus at Starbucks, what sort of impression would He leave you?  He was a carpenter and perhaps poor.  Would that be what struck you?  Would you have considered Him charismatic or witty or quiet and thoughtful?  Today we will consider just one aspect of Jesus and that will be His mind.

Early in Jesus’ life He famously camped out in the Temple of Jerusalem for perhaps an entire week and met with the Jewish teachers there.  Luke described Jesus’ conversations with the teachers as being eye-opening for all who were a part of the discussions.  Every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover.  When he was twelve years old, they went up to the Feast, according to the custom.  After the Feast was over, while his parents were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but they were unaware of it.  Thinking he was in their company, they traveled on for a day. Then they began looking for him among their relatives and friends.  When they did not find him, they went back to Jerusalem to look for him.  After three days they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.  Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers. (Luke 2:41-47 NIV)  Clearly, Jesus was a mentally sharp young man who gave great thought to the Scriptures and had a well-organized mind.  The best teachers in all of Israel were at the Temple and they were impressed by Jesus’ thinking.

Nearly two decades later Jesus taught on a hillside and a large crowd came to hear what He had to say.  This extended teaching session became later known as the “Sermon on the Mount”.  At the time, Jesus’ fame was growing but not many yet had heard Him speak.  When He got finished, the crowd was in awe of what they heard.  When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law. (Matthew 7:28-29 NIV)  No one, as far as we can tell from ancient writings, came close to Jesus’ insight into ethics and moral decision-making.  His teaching that day was pure genius.  Like the crowds, we too are amazed by how He interpreted Scripture and the way He presented a complete approach to life.

The Gospel of John gives a similar assessment of Jesus’ effect on others.  Temple guards who had been sent by the priests to arrest Jesus were not psychologically prepared for the task.  Their “mistake” was they took the time to listen to Him preach.  When Jesus finished, rather than arrest Him, they returned to the priests with genuine awe at what they heard and reverence for the one who delivered the message.  When asked why they had not seized Him, their response was not what the priests expected.  "No one ever spoke the way this man does," the guards declared. (John 7:46 NIV)  The Pharisees who had sent them were not impressed by the guards’ assessment of Jesus’ sermon.  Certainly we can guess that the guards themselves were not expecting to come away as captivated by Jesus’ words as they were.  The guards were not “spiritual groupies”.  They were full-blown skeptics who found Jesus’ mind captivating.

There is a fascinating response of Jesus in Matthew 22 to those who did not believe in a resurrection from the dead. The ones who argued against a resurrection were influential and no one had been able to refute them because they refused to turn to anything other than the first five books in the Bible as authoritative on the matter.  Bible scholars at the time who believed in the resurrection could not find a scintilla of evidence for it in Genesis to Deuteronomy.  Jesus however quoted from Exodus God’s arresting call to Moses at the burning bush as proof of life after death.  But about the resurrection of the dead — have you not read what God said to you, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'? He is not the God of the dead but of the living."  When the crowds heard this, they were astonished at his teaching. (Matthew 22:31-33 NIV)  And why not?  Who would have ever considered such an argument as that?  Jesus did though.

Let us look at one final example of Jesus’ mind at work.  John 8 is the explosive account of Jesus being brought the woman caught in adultery.  The background of this is fascinating.  The text in the Greek indicates that the woman had been caught in the very act of adultery; as she and her “lover” were in bed.  To catch them so, especially given the very delicate circumstance of committing adultery and not wanting to be caught indicates that somehow the Jewish leaders who brought her to Jesus knew in advance what the pair were about to do and where.  At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them.  The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery.  In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.  But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger.  When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her."  (John 8:2-7 NIV)

If we strip away all the maneuvering of the teachers of the Law to get Jesus to say something that could land Him in trouble with Roman authorities for promoting an execution or cause Him to lose face with the Jewish crowds who would rebel against Jesus allowing for sexual immorality, we come to these two primary aspects of this report.  First, are we not impressed with Jesus’ shrewdness to give permission to whoever was without sin to begin the stoning of the woman!  Not a man in the crowd dared say he was sinless.  What sort of great mind is able to turn the tables on a crowd out for blood?  It is simply spectacular how quickly Jesus thought of a solution to the dilemma He faced.

Let us though turn to the second revelation we have in this passage of Jesus’ mind.  At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there.  Jesus straightened up and asked her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?"  "No one, sir," she said.  "Then neither do I condemn you," Jesus declared. "Go now and leave your life of sin." (John 8:9-11 NIV)  What is most illuminating in Jesus’ response to the woman is how Jesus’ mind worked.  Mercy saturated His thinking and His decision-making.  If He was going to have to choose between condemning someone and being merciful, He decided upon mercy.  He made this clear in the Sermon on the Mount.  Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. (Matthew 5:7 NIV)  That is how Jesus thinks.  I will be merciful.  I could criticize.  I could judge.  I could condemn and be justified in blowing up a person’s life for what she has done.  That though is not how I think.  I will be merciful.  What about us?  How do we think?  Will our first choice be mercy?    Will we think like Jesus?  Will we give up our right to judge and criticize and condemn and like our Savior, be happy to show mercy?  What kind of world might we have if just Christian people (we won’t concern ourselves with any other sorts of people) would live by this one approach to life, “If I will err, I will err on the side of mercy.”

Disoriented to be Reoriented

There is a moment when God breaks through into our cluttered minds and it generally is at those times of tremendous tumult.  We have realized just have far blown our sin is and it is crashing upon our heads.  Repentance is one of the great themes of the Bible and something Jesus talked about repeatedly.  We may feel badly about what we have done or more often embarrassed by our public disgraces but that is not the same thing as repentance.  When the Holy Spirit reveals our badness in a matter; it is never to make us throw up our hands in despair, it is always to bring us to radical change.  There are countless numbers of hand wringers in the world; those who wish they had acted differently and it doesn't take the least bit of God for that.  But to prefer holiness over the life of the world requires the supernatural work of the atonement of Christ.  When our Savior gathers Himself in us through His Cross, He begins to live at the edges of our lives.  We forgive, show mercy, are kind, reject all forms of sexual immorality, love sacrificially, walk humbly.  This is impossible if Christ is not blending His life with ours so that we act upon the impulses of God rather than our previous lusts and sin marred concerns.  One look at the Sermon on the Mount and we despair of ever really living the truly Christian lifestyle but with Christ in us, we can do it.  We can accept the insults of those who turn on us and not reply in kind.  We can look away when our eye is intrigued by a forbidden attraction.  We can hold our tongue when we want so badly to defend ourselves.  We can befriend the enemies of God and give sacrificially to those who don't deserve our worst, let alone our best.  Nothing is quite so discombobulating as the realization that God really does live in you and He wants to work His way out of you in your common behaviors.  It is then as you give Him free access that you discover that you actually are supernaturally remade by Christ into a new Creation, one built for holiness in everyday thoughts and activities.

You are to be holy to me because I, the Lord, am holy, and I have set you apart from the nations to be my own.   Leviticus 20:26 NIV

Refuge

2 Samuel 22:31 NIV

"As for God, his way is perfect; the word of the Lord is flawless.  He is a shield for all who take refuge in him.

Do You Have A Hiding Place?

 

More than a decade ago when our oldest son was only nine or ten, we went camping in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  Somehow we stumbled upon a beautiful swimming hole on the Kings River at the western end of the park.  The river cascaded down giant granite boulders into a large pool that was formed in a giant basin of granite.  The pool was quite deep in places, more than twenty feet or so.  The river had carved a natural water slide that dropped into the pool and I held Noah, who was pretty young and together we slid down the rocks and splashed into the pool a number of times.  Jacob though was intrigued by a father and son who stood high above the pool looking down.  The son was not much older than Jacob and it seemed like they both were going to jump down into the water.  The spot where they were going to jump was more than twenty feet above the pool.  The cliff jutted out over the water and was directly above the deepest part of the pool.  When both father and son jumped, screaming as they fell into the water, Jacob thought he would like to do the same thing.  After the father and son climbed out of the water, Jacob asked me if I thought it was dangerous to jump there.  The father and son insisted it was perfectly safe so Jacob and I went over to the spot where he would land and studied it carefully.  The water was crystal clear; we could see the bottom perfectly and it looked plenty deep to land.  The only problem was that you had to jump out from the rock to land in the deepest part of the pool.  Jacob pondered the risks, stared up at the cliff, looked down into the water and after much encouragement from the father and son that had jumped before, began to make his climb up to the ledge where the others had leaped into the pool below.

There is for each of us, a time when you need to know if there is a safe place to land.  You will, and maybe already have, find yourself falling without a net to catch you.  It is easy to pretend like Job’s friends that only really bad people face tragic and traumatic circumstances but you know that is not the case.  Because you live in a sin corrupted universe, real troubles spring up without warning and you must face them.  Hardship and pain are here with you and sometimes it is a calamitous illness, other times a sudden loss of income, a relationship that falls apart, depression that can’t be shaken, failure crushes your sense of worth, a habit that you know you should break but you just can’t or an accident that brings irreparable damage.  When you look down from the cliff where you stand, what do you see?

Perhaps like me, you have been intrigued by the story of Ruth found in the Bible.  Newly married to a young man she clearly chose to love, Ruth was suddenly a widow.  The more we read of her story, we find ourselves captivated by her kindness, generosity and loyalty.  Why a tragedy like this would happen to someone with such a warm and loving heart is difficult to comprehend.  We can of course just wave off this calamity as a slight roadblock in her life because she later remarried and gave birth to the great-grandfather of a mighty king but that would do a tremendous disservice to the actuality of her heartbreak.  Tragedy by definition is tragic and just because some good is awaiting us down the road from it does not mean we can shake it off as inconsequential unless we have been damaged psychologically and do not respond to disasters in a healthy way.  Ruth did not “just shake off” the calamity of her husband’s death and nor should she have.  She was without the love of her life and that pain was significant.

Ruth made a dramatic decision that clearly changed the course of her life.  She decided to make the God of her mother-in-law, the God of Israel her God.  This was a conscious choice on her part based upon what she had seen in her husband, her father-in-law and her mother-in-law Naomi and how belief in God had shaped their lives.  When Naomi decided to leave Moab and go back to her hometown in Israel after the tragic loss of her own husband and two sons, Ruth was determined to leave with her.   Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. (Ruth 1:16b NIV)

Ruth was not merely changing her religion; she was completely rearranging her life with God.  Life is tragic and there is a tremendous amount of heartbreak in our world.  We cannot explain it all and like we discover about Job, there are supernatural forces working that are unseen to us bringing tremendous amounts of pain and sorrow to good people.  Ruth realized though like the Psalmists and her own great-great-grandson would later proclaim, God is a refuge for those who turn to Him.  Ruth’s future husband Boaz could see clearly that Ruth had turned to the Lord in her sorrow and found Him a great comfort.  He tenderly prayed for God to be her strength and help, “May the Lord repay you for what you have done.  May you be richly rewarded by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge."  (Ruth 2:12 NIV)

Ruth may have been the inspiration of David who also found God to be a refuge where we can go in our troubles and hardship.  O Lord my God, I take refuge in you; save and deliver me from all who pursue me, (Psalm 7:1 NIV)  The Lord is a refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble. (Psalm 9:9 NIV)  Keep me safe, O God for in you I take refuge. (Psalm 16:1 NIV)  There is a supernatural work that God does for us and within us when we turn to Him in our times of trouble.  This work cannot be explained by logic or by psychological theories.  Those who have experienced this work of God have a terrible time trying to explain exactly what happens when they turn to God for refuge but that doesn’t alter the facts of His help and comfort.  You cannot explain what happens when you turn to God for refuge but like the Psalmist, you simply know what you have experienced.  God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. (Psalm 46:1 NIV) 

Before he became physically king of Israel, David as a young man became the actual enemy of Israel’s king.  David hadn’t done anything wrong but Saul had become paranoid and saw David as a threat to his throne.  Saul led an army into the desert regions of Judea to hunt down David and kill him.  But David and his small band of men avoided capture.  With Saul’s soldiers camped just below where David was hiding, Saul entered the cave where David was to go to the bathroom.  There in the dark of the cave, with Saul oblivious to David and his men hidden from view, David’s men urged David to kill the king.  David crept up to Saul and cut off a part of Saul’s robe without Saul knowing.  David was conscience stricken though by how close he came to killing Saul the Lord’s anointed.  He said to his men, "The Lord forbid that I should do such a thing to my master, the Lord's anointed, or lift my hand against him; for he is the anointed of the Lord." (1 Samuel 24:6 NIV)

This is a perfect example of what it means to dive into God and make Him your refuge.  Rather than take matters into his own hands and kill Saul, he gave Saul back to God to do with as the Lord wished.  He could have violently grabbed the kingdom of Israel by assassinating Saul in the cave but he trusted God to take care of him and make him king in God’s time.  Many were dependent on David to save them from Saul and his own soldiers were pushing for him to kill Saul then and there but David refused.  David took his stand in the cave that regardless of how bad it all seemed, he would make God his refuge.  This determination to dive into God and let Him protect and comfort you is found in the Psalms.  Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge. (Psalm 62:8 NIV)

I heard recently of a Muslim girl who decided to become Christian despite the opposition of her family.  She risked the hatred of her parents and perhaps even physical harm to take refuge in Jesus.  This high school student did what Ruth did and what David did and what we can do too.  She has hidden her life in Christ and is trusting Him to take care of her.  What about you?  Will you trust God with your finances?  Will you tithe?  Will you trust God with your friendships?  Will you talk openly about your faith in Christ?  Will you trust God with your family?  Will you pray for them and encourage them?   Will you trust God with your work and school?  Will you let Christ guide you and direct your steps rather than just do whatever methods the world uses to get ahead?  How serious are you about being Christian?  What great things might God do through us if we put our trust in Christ and dove into Him…made Him our refuge, our source of safety and peace?

It's Not Random...But It's Not Coherent Either

There are plenty of events that cannot be explained logically.  We can go through the Bible and try to give some sort of rationale to all too many of them and we will find ourselves dumbfounded.  Paul suffered and we might say it was for his development spiritually but was he really that far bent out of shape to require all the hardships and painful trials he endured?  There is a great battle going on unseen within the universe and it is unfathomable to us its reach.  We can talk about the Civil War or World War II in general ways and feel like everything was quite reasonable but when you track the events of a single life going through it, the wars are irrational and incoherent.  Strategies are all well and good and the leaders directing armies make sense of what they are doing but for the poor soul on the battlefield, there is nothing sensible in it.  We are in the midst of a great and terrible conflict and although we are not aware of the forces operating all about us, we don't have to look far to see the collateral damage.  Anger, bitterness, frustration, broken hearts, lost dreams, shattered hopes are not far from any of us and it all seems like nonsense if we don't factor into the life equation the unseen battleground.   The devil and his forces are waging war against humanity and it is terribly brutal what is coming of this war.  Yet our Savior has promised to bind up the brokenhearted and release from darkness all those prisoners who have experienced the fury of the battlefield.  If it was all God in this, we might be able to draw a straight line of cause and effect but the devil is out there too and he is not reasonable in his workings.  Good people get blasted and terrible ones seem to have "all the luck".  Smart plans get beaten into the ground by circumstances we can't factor into our organizing.  Blessings seem to come in haphazard ways and the prayer of Jabez is a great model for good Christian people until the tent stakes are ripped out of the ground by a hurricane and what is left from the storm is rubble.  We have a Savior though who took the worst the devil could throw at Him and on the third day rose from the dead and one day the devil will be thrown into the lake of fire and the battlefield will become a paradise.  Until then, we trust in a good God who loves us and suffers with us in the "aches" of life.    Faith in our Lord's love for us is not a platitude; it is the way we have it and His love for us will triumph in the end.

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.  Therefore put on the full armor of God...      Ephesians 6:12-13a NIV

Sponge

Philippians 2:12-13 NIV

Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed — not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence — continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.

What Is Inside You?

When I was teen, I began to make rapid progress as a Christian.  I read my Bible daily, prayed, attended church services faithfully and was an active part of the youth program.  I didn’t smoke or drink or use drugs.  I was made a children’s Sunday school teacher and served as narrator for our church Christmas Cantata.  (They wouldn’t let me sing)  I had become intrigued with contemporary Christian music and was starting to read books about the faith.  During one of my daily Bible readings, I came across a verse that sent me reeling.  There was nothing profound in it; the simplicity of its message was like a hammer though.  Up to this point and even much longer I played lots of basketball and I was on the court no different than any of the other players.  I talked trash and I used lots of foul language.  Now I justified my cursing by saying that I was just expressing myself; that just like adjectives and adverbs make language more colorful and expand on communication capabilities, so too curse words were an effective way o making my points stronger and more demonstrative.  But then I came face to face with Colossians 3: 8.  But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. (NIV)  I was now up against it because I realized that God was not pleased at all the cussing coming out of me.  Profanity was clearly prohibited by the Lord.  But that profanity was within me…it did not spring out of a vacuum.  I had to decide not only how I was to deal with the swear words coming out of me but also the cursing that was within me.

If you were a sponge and were squeezed, what would come out of you?  Would it be love and mercy and kindness or anger and frustration and worry?  How do you look on the inside?  Where no one else can see, what do you find there?  This is not a matter of what have you hidden from others.  It is a question of what actually you are right now.  Much is made in the field of psychology of how we mustn’t bottle up our feelings and that may or may not be important.  Our concern today is much more profound.  What shall we do about who we really are?  What will you do about who you really are?

The Bible makes much of what you really are rather than what you or others think of who you are.  Paul the Apostle took seriously this matter of what is inside you and said, Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed — not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence — continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose. (Philippians 2:12-13 NIV)  There is something that happens to us when we put our trust in Jesus Christ to make us new people.  Through Jesus’ death on the cross, a profound change occurs in us.  The Bible calls it “salvation” and that is a good term for what God does in us through Christ.  Jesus referred to it as being “born again”.  In reply Jesus declared, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.” (John 3:3 NIV)  A miracle occurred when Jesus gave up His life on the cross.  It opened the way for God to come into us and become a part of us, His personality merged into ours.  To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. (Colossians 1:27 NIV)

Now it is strange to think of Christ being a part of us and we have to adjust our thinking to accommodate this.  If Christ is in you, then that impacts every bit of your life.  You think with Christ being a part of your thinking, you have emotional responses to situations and Christ is a part of that too.  Even your actions are done with Christ as a part of them.  Through the work of Jesus Christ dying on the cross, this is actual and not symbolic.  The life of Jesus Christ is joined to yours and the two lives become one new life.  Paul put it this way.  For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. (Colossians 3:3 NIV)

We are like a sponge filled with Christ.  The way He comes out of us though is if we obey what He tells us in Scripture or by direct revelation at a personal level.  That is what Paul means by “as you have always obeyed.”  Our salvation is worked out of us when we do what God tells us to do.  For example, when the Lord told the Apostles to wait in Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit came upon them, they could have decided to go other places…to Bethel, to Capernaum, to Nazareth.  It would have been logical to leave Jerusalem because the opposition to Christ was strongest there and it was potentially deadly.  They stayed though and the Holy Spirit did come upon them and Christ came out of them through speaking in foreign languages and preaching that changed the lives of those who heard it.

Another example would be when Peter was told to go meet with a group of non-Jews and answer their questions about Christian faith.  This would have been absurd to Peter before Christ became a part of him.  Peter had thought that God didn’t want Jews to have anything to do with non-Jews but with Christ joined to him, it became clear that God loved non-Jewish people and they too were to gain salvation.  A Roman soldier was told by an angel that he needed to hear the Christian message from someone he did not know, Peter.  Cornelius stared at him (the angel) in fear. "What is it, Lord?" he asked.  The angel answered, "Your prayers and gifts to the poor have come up as a memorial offering before God.  Now send men to Joppa to bring back a man named Simon who is called Peter. (Acts 10:4-5 NIV)  When the servants of the Roman soldier came to the house where Peter was staying, the Lord spoke to Peter about going with the servants to meet with Cornelius the Roman.  Peter obeyed and like a sponge, the Lord was squeezed out of Peter and Cornelius and his family and friends became Christians.  This would not have happened though if Peter had disobeyed God.

Another example is found in the book of Acts.  Paul and Silas were traveling through what is now western Turkey when the Lord spoke to Paul in a dream to go across the Aegean Sea to Macedonia.  There they began preaching and even saw a few people become Christian but soon Paul and Silas were arrested and beaten and thrown in prison.  It was a terrible situation for them yet because Christ was living in both and had changed their personalities, like a sponge, Christ was squeezed out of them.  They joyfully sang praise songs and worshipped God in their cell.  This sort of happiness and contentment would not have been possible if the Lord was not a part of them, joined into their personalities.  When the pressure of being beaten and imprisoned squeezed them, out came the joy of the Lord.

Obedience to God brings out the best of us.  Take any command the Lord has given us:  do not judge or criticize, love your enemies, be sexually pure, pray and don’t worry, tithe.  Whenever we obey one of the least of God’s commands, Christ is squeezed out of us and our salvation is put into effect.  Your salvation is meaningless in the world about you if you don’t do what God tells you to do.  Every common act of obedience to Christ on our part is a miracle in the world.  Just think what our Lord will do through you if you do what He says!  Who knows what lives will be changed by the power of Christ working through you!  Consider just this one act of obedience.  Our Lord tells us to forgive what someone did to hurt us deeply.  We do forgive that offence.  As a result, that sin is no longer attached to the person.  You would stop talking about that sin and wrecking the person’s reputation.  People who would reject and maybe even despise that person would be open to loving and encouraging her.  She no longer has to live with the pain of what she has done…doesn’t have to hang her head in shame when she thinks about you.  Salvation has come to her and to all who could be hurt and angered by what she did.  It is not overstating this to say that generations could be impacted by our simple obedience to the command to forgive those who hurt us.  Salvation slips into lives through forgiveness.  It is a basic axiom of Christianity.