people mess up. they make choices they deeply regret, & say & do things they wish to God they could take back. there’s loss, there’s pain, there’s bitterness – for everyone involved, even the innocent. and worst of all, there seems to be no way to go back. life seems permanently stuck.

then God comes in and takes his own blood & starts erasing things.

1 corinthians 13.5 Love keeps no record of wrongs.
john 20.22-23 He breathed on them, and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
luke 23.34 Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.”

sin will always equal death, that’s why God can’t stand it. he can’t stand how it always injures other people, takes advantage of them, steals their happiness & peace, & holds them in an addicted cycle. yet rather than reach his hand out & force people against their will to stop it – he came personally & walked in the middle of us, never once joining in with sin. then he allowed jealous & vindictive men to pound steel into his body & hang him up to suffocate slowly. & because there was no sin in him, death couldn’t hold him. he died, they buried him, & then he resurrected. that crushed sin forever. it has no real ultimate power now.

romans 6.14 For sin shall not have dominion over you.
micah 7.19 He will again have compassion on us, and will subdue our iniquities. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.
acts 3.19 Repent therefore and be changed, that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord.
2 corinthians 5.18-19 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them.

people live stuck in sin, & so for them it does have power. yet right now Jesus wants you to experience his forgiveness so deeply that 2 things happen. first you live totally broken free of the power of sin: you’re not crushed by temptation & guilt & bitterness & judgment & addiction & regret. second you live cancelling sin. when people wrong you, you set them free immediately. you burn your black-list. you don’t demand to be treated a certain way. you don’t always have to be right. every morning you wake up with a new dose of mercy, so you deal that out to everyone you bump into, for better or for worse. you get more passionate about having real sincere love coming out of you than you’ve been about changing other people (friends, enemies, family, employees, boss, government, etc.) to meet your needs.

there’s lots of people out there angry enough for change that they’re ready to break stuff, burn stuff, overthrow stuff, blow stuff up. what about blowing up the death-grip of sin & bitterness?

ephesians 4.32 Forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you.
matthew 6.12 And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
matt 18.32-33 I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, just as I had pity on you?
acts 7.59-60 And they stoned Stephen as he was calling on God and saying, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Then he knelt down and cried out with a loud voice, “Lord, do not charge them with this sin.”