A Seal and Guarantee

“In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.” – Ephesians 1:13-14

The Holy Spirit is a seal and a guarantee. In classical times, a seal had four functions. It provided security: a sealed letter meant it had not been tampered with. It provided authentication: a seal was like a signature, carrying the full authority of its owner. It certified genuineness: it meant a document was the real thing, not a duplicate. It served as identification: the design of a seal was unique to its owner. The Holy Spirit signifies that we belong to God and are under his authority. He reassures us of our identity and of the genuine reality of our spiritual state. He both teaches us these truths, and displays them to others.

The Holy Spirit is also a guarantee. This word was a Semitic loan word that indicated a down payment that would be forfeited if the purchase was not completed or service not rendered. I think about how it feels to put down a nonrefundable deposit: that’s when I really know whether I want something or not, isn’t it? God has put the Holy Spirit like a nonrefundable deposit into us, a first installment and a sure promise of the inheritance to come. The word for “guarantee” in modern Greek also means “engagement ring”: something beautiful and of high value which proclaims one’s love and future intentions towards someone. 

The down-payment is not the purchase; the diamond is not the marriage. They foreshadow an experience that will be much greater in scope. The Holy Spirit works in us, and in the church as a body, the way God will one day work in the new heavens and earth: to secure it for his own, to stamp it with his authority, to bring about true eternal reality, to identify it in every way with his own radiant glory. The Holy Spirit, writes N. T. Wright, comes and takes “residence in the actual physicality of Christian believers as the advance statement of God saying, ‘I am doing this now because one day that’s what I am going to do to the world. This is how it is going to work.’”

Why We Labor

“Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.” – 1 Corinthians 15:58

Paul has just gone to considerable detail discussing the resurrection of Jesus—and this is his concluding statement. Not, “sit back and relax because God’s got a great future in store for you,” but “labor on, knowing that now your labor has even more meaning than it did before.”

In his book Surprised by Hope, N. T. Wright expounds on this connection. He writes, “You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that's about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that's shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting roses in a garden that's about to be dug up for a building site. You are… accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God's new world… what we do in Christ and by the Spirit in the present is not wasted. It will last all the way into God’s news world. In fact, it will be enhanced there… The work we do in the present, then, gains its full significance from the eventual design in which it is meant to belong.”

How will this translation happen? Will the trees we plant, the injustices we right, the art we create be present in the new world in a way they would not have if we hadn’t begun it all here? I don’t know. But I do think most of us tend to think of heaven as far less embodied than it actually will be: the point of resurrection is not that we will shed ourselves and this world, but that we and our world will rise, remade. Sown in dishonor; raised in glory; sown in weakness, raised in power (15:43). That is why Jesus’ resurrection is everything. It goes both ways: on one hand, we work looking forward, knowing that what we do is not lost and will in fact be brought into greater fullness in eternity. On the other hand, we work as new-creation people called to bring our vision of eternity into the present, to bring the restoration, redemption, and beauty of God’s kingdom into our world now as much as we can.

This time has changed the nature of our labors: we’re wrangling with more digital platforms; we’re doing more cooking and cleaning around the house. It has changed the value of our work, separating out what is deemed “essential” or not. But the resurrection changes how we see and do all our labors. It tells us why “inessential” things like beauty and creativity are necessary. It changes how and why we wipe a counter or try to get our kids to understand a math problem. None of it is pointless; none of it is lost. Abound in your work, Paul says. Persevere. Don’t give up. Your labor is not in vain.

Waiting For The Dawn

“… as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will sustain you to the end… God is faithful.” – 1 Corinthians 1:7-9

Many have remarked that living in this pandemic has made lent particularly meaningful as we’ve been forced to give so much up, but I think this year Holy Saturday encapsulates how I feel. There is great mystery in the fact that God did not raise Christ directly from the cross. There was a day in between. The day Jesus stayed dead. As the Westminster Larger Catechism states in its answer to question 50, “Christ’s humiliation after his death consisted in his being buried, and continuing in the state of the dead, and under the power of death till the third day.” As a reading for Holy Saturday inThe Liturgy of the Hours goes, “Something strange is happening on earth today—a great silence, and stillness.”

Holy Saturday was a Sabbath: a day Jesus’ followers grappled with confusion and grief while pinioned into inaction, unable to do anything but sit in inconsolable despair. Holy Saturday is a day of epic disappointment, of the bursting of grand hopes. We are held there in that despair, all our illusions and indulgences emptied. That is how the harder moments of this time have felt: held in place, unable to do anything to retrieve what is lost, unable to speed anything up, contending with monotony and grief and the strange still silence of the world. 

What happens when you are there in that place? We learn to hear words like the ones Paul writes here in 1 Corinthians: God is faithful. And so, we can wait, and even be present to the wait. In a way, Holy Saturday is symbolic of this pandemic which is symbolic of the entirety of my life: living in brokenness while waiting for the resurrection that will surely come. I am waiting for something. God sustains me in the waiting. And I have hope in what I wait for.

This is the first Easter I’ve had since reading N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope, which I highly recommend. “What are we waiting for?” Wright asks in the preface. “And what are we going to do about it in the meantime? Most Christians don’t know what the ultimate Christian hope really is… the classic Christian answer to the question of death and beyond is not so much disbelieved as simply not known.” He describes in chapter 12 how salvation is not about the death of the body and the escape of the soul, not about “going to heaven when we die”—salvation is “being raised to life in God’s new heaven and new earth.” The present bodily life is not valueless because God will raise it to new life. What we do in the present will last into God’s future.

As Simone Weil wrote, “Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.” Our Holy Saturday is different from that first terrible one, because we know so much more about what we’re waiting for. All the same, part of the work that Jesus did somehow was in staying dead for this day in between, and as his followers there is meaning to us being in that space as well. There is value that will last. May God sustain us to the end.

Mystery Unveiled

“Not to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but has now been disclosed…” – Romans 16:25-26

I was out this morning in the fog that so often blankets this part of the world that time of day, out in a mountain forest. There was a moment when the fog lifted, and crystal-clear I could see the redwoods looming around me. “The redwoods,” wrote Steinbeck, “once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It’s not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time.”

The fog lifted to show me what had been there all along: what I had sensed but not been able to trace in detail, and it was something entirely beyond myself and my time. When Paul talks about mystery and revelation, it reminds me of N.T. Wright’s description of what the temple meant to a first-century Jew: “The Temple in Jerusalem was not just a big church building at one corner of the city; in Jewish cosmology it was the place where heaven and earth actually overlapped and interlocked… This is not about something ‘up in the sky’ – it is like a curtain being pulled back in the room where you sit.”

For some reason, we do tend to think of God as up in the sky somewhere, but Paul speaks to a first-century Jew who would have been looking for Him here on earth. The concept of God showing up like the unveiling of a secret right here in our space is a bit radical and unsettling. He is not unobtainable or ethereal; he is not an invention. He existed before my ability to see him, he is right here next to me and now within me, and he is as solid as the trees rising slow and strong around me, whose trunks I can touch, even if I can’t quite put the feeling they give me into words. “I do not want you to be unaware of this mystery, brothers,” writes Paul (Romans 11:25). Let us open our eyes to it, to this God who is “very near you… in your mouth and in your heart” (Deuteronomy 30:14).

From Thirst To Rivers

“On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, ‘If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’ Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.” – John 7:37-39

During the Festival of Booths (Deuteronomy 16:13, Numbers 29:12), there was a ceremony of water-pouring that, though never recorded in the Bible, is well-documented historically: at dawn on the first seven days of the festival, a priest would lead a procession down to the pool of Siloam, where a golden pitcher was filled with water. The procession returned to the temple as the morning sacrifice was being offered, and the water was poured out at the altar as the temple choir began to sing the Great Hallel (Psalms 113-118). The ceremony was not enacted on the eighth day. It is among a crowded throng of thirsty pilgrims, after enactment of God’s past provision and their continued need, that Jesus makes this proclamation, the same one he made to a solitary Gentile woman by a well (4:14).

Jesus gives us the living water of eternal life. But he doesn’t go on to say, “into” our hearts will flow living water. That would be the logical conclusion. The movement is in the opposite direction: “out of” our hearts flow rivers. No one knows for sure what Jesus is quoting here, but one possible reference is Ezekiel 47, where we see water flowing from the temple, first ankle-deep, then knee-deep, then waist-deep, then becoming a river that one cannot pass through. A river deep enough to swim in, that gives life wherever it goes, on whose banks are trees with leaves that do not wither and fruit for healing. We see similar imagery in Revelation 22, where the “river of the water of life, bright as crystal” flows from the throne of God through the city with the tree of life on its banks. 

And so, this is not just water-talk, but temple-talk. Jesus is God tabernacling on earth; the Spirit flows like the river, received after Jesus was “glorified.” “Throughout John’s gospel,” writes N.T. Wright, “there is a build-up towards the ‘glorification,’ the ‘lifting up,’ of Jesus—which turns out to be, with heavy paradox, the crucifixion of Jesus seen as the moment when his glory is fully and finally revealed, when the love of God which was always at work in him shines out most fully.” We are filled with the Spirit not for our own sake, but for the sake of spreading God’s glory and life into the wider world. This is a feast not only of celebration, but of vocation. After all, that was the ceremony: the filling in, the pouring out. We drink not to become lakes, but rivers, until “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14).

Offering

“‘There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are they for so many?’ Jesus said, ‘Have the people sit down.’… Jesus then took the loaves.”- John 6:9-11

For fun, we estimated that we packed 532 school lunches one year. Lately, I’ve been transitioning the kids into packing their own lunches, but it’s still quite a daily production. I like to think that the boy in this story brought a lunch packed by his mother, though of course we don’t know. But it probably was the result of some kind of ordinary, everyday labor. What’s remarkable is that the boy bothers offering it at all, given the size of the crowd. The disproportion is enormous. There’s no logic to it. One can’t blame Andrew for his question, the same question asked by Elijah’s servant when Elijah accepts an offering of twenty barley loaves in 2 Kings 4:42-44: “How can I set this before a hundred men?”

That’s the question I have sometimes, if I really examine myself. How can I set this before everyone? How can what I offer be enough? How can what I say, bring, or do meet the need that I see around me? But Jesus does not ask me to concern myself with that. He takes me just as I am: without criticism or appraisal. He does not say to Andrew, this is all you could scrounge up? He does not disregard the boy’s contribution. He takes it, receives it into his own hands, and gives thanks for it.

In the 2 Kings passage, the bread that is brought is “bread of the firstfruits, twenty loaves of barley.” The firstfruits were that first offering from the harvest once the Israelites came into the promised land (Leviticus 23): it was both a reminder of God’s provision and a product of their own labors. It was an act both of thanksgiving and of trust. N. T. Wright wrote when speaking of how Jesus’ resurrection is a sign of our own one day: “The point of the firstfruits is that there will be many, many more.” That is what Jesus does here in John. He takes the proffered loaves and makes many, many more. Imagine the boy’s wonder, seeing the loaves he had carried with him and given up, now being passed from hand to hand by the thousands.

Spurgeon preached of this passage: “I do not say that every man of common ability can rise to high ability by being associated with Christ through faith, but I do say this—that his ordinary ability, in association with Christ, will become sufficient for the occasion to which God in providence has called him.”

Jesus And Jubilee

“… to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’ And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’” – Luke 4:20-21

In the perfect rhythm of God’s rest and restoration, every seventh day was a sabbath day. Every seventh year was a sabbath year. After every seven sabbath years was a Jubilee year, the sabbath of sabbaths. Leviticus 25 tells us they were to count “seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the time of the seven weeks of years shall give you forty-nine years.” And then, in Daniel 9, we are told that the anointed one, the prince, will come in “seventy weeks” of years, seventy times seven years. The Jubilee of Jubilees. “This predicted 490 years,” writes N. T. Wright, “haunted the minds of devout Jews in the centuries immediately before and after the time of Jesus. There is plenty of evidence to indicate that people were calculating, as best they could, when that time would be up.”

It is in this context that Jesus announces his public ministry, a moment most clearly defined here in Luke 4. Jesus reads from Isaiah 61, and when he gets to the part where Isaiah refers to Leviticus 25, when he gets to the Jubilee year, he stops. He sits down and says, today this is fulfilled. The Jubilee of Jubilees, the prince of Jubilee, is here. 

There is some shadow of the Sabbath in our culture, but we don’t really have a good grasp of Jubilee. None of us have experienced it, and it is unclear whether or not the Israelites ever did; they certainly weren’t by the time of the monarchy. The Jubilee was only experienced once in a lifetime, every fifty years. It taught the Israelites that the land on which they lived belonged to God; that life was to be lived in community; that each person had equality and personal dignity in their shared identity as God’s people; that life had a rhythm of worship, work and rest. The Jubilee countered tendencies towards inequality and poverty through socioeconomic restoration of people and land. But it was also rooted in spiritual restoration; its beginning was marked by the Day of Atonement.

Jesus arrives at this time, reading this passage, to show us that he is all that the Jubilee points to. Rest, redemption, forgiveness, justice. This is what his public ministry will be about. What does the Jubilee mean to you? How is Jesus this for you?

Firstfruits

“When you come into the land that I give you and reap its harvest, you shall bring the sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest to the priest, and he shall wave the sheaf before the Lord.” – Leviticus 23:10-11

Have you ever experienced the start of something that filled you with great anticipation and hope for what was to come? I think of the first time I saw Ellie on a sonogram. The opening prelude to an orchestral piece in a concert hall. Appetizers in a multi-course meal at a good restaurant. The first time I held Dave’s hand. I think the moment when the Israelites held a handful of the first of their barley harvest was a moment like that. They were holding the answer to God’s promises: they had arrived in the promised land after years of wandering and battle. They had planted their own crops. But this first of the harvest was also a promise that more was to come. 

We talk about Jesus as the lamb that died on the Passover, or how the Holy Spirit came on Pentecost, but we don’t as often discuss what it means that Jesus rose on the day of Firstfruits. This was the day when they took that first handful of the harvest and gave it to God in an act of thanksgiving and trust. The point of the firstfruits is that there will be many more. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15, “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep… For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ.” Jesus rose, and because he did, we will too. His resurrection was a firstfruits of what is to come: this is the great hope that we have.

N. T. Wright expounds on this in his book Surprised By Hope. “Many Christians,” he writes, “don’t know what the ultimate Christian hope really is… The classic Christian answer to the question of death and beyond is not so much disbelieved as simply not known.” What are we waiting for? What are we going to do about it in the meantime? The answers to those questions lie in the realization that salvation is not about “going to heaven when we die”; it is not the death of the body and the escape of the soul. Salvation is being raised to life in God’s new heaven and new earth. “Heaven, in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hidden, dimension of our ordinary life—God’s dimension,” Wright explains. “God made heaven and earth; and at the last he will remake both and join them together forever.” 

Jesus’ bodily resurrection is a promise of not only our own resurrection, our own new bodies, but the recreation of the world. The things we do in our life now are not just to make it more bearable until we leave it—they are a part of building for God’s kingdom. They are not valueless because God will raise it to new life. Jesus’ resurrection is my hope for everything: for myself, for my work, for the world I live in. It is the reason I believe that nothing I do is in vain. That day, when the Israelites reaped their first harvest, when they felt hope and anticipation grip their hearts and fill their hands: that was the day Jesus rose.

Satisfaction Through Substitution

“And he came down from offering the sin offering and the burnt offering and the peace offerings… And fire came out from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offering and the pieces of fat on the altar, and when all the people saw it, they shouted and fell on their faces.” – Leviticus 9:22, 24

“Apart from what the Bible tells us, we really don’t know anything of the awful nature of sin and the awful holiness of God. If we forget that we really don’t know anything, we are kidding ourselves.” – J.L. Packer

Admittedly, the book of Leviticus is a bit weird. Reading it is like trying to decode a language utterly foreign to the modern mindset. Makes me recall something N.T. Wright wrote: “We need to come to the text, trying to give 21st-century answers to 1st-century questions, rather than 19th-century answers to 16th-century questions, as much of the church still tries to do.” The burning question for an Israelite at that time would have been: how does one enter God’s presence? The Israelites had a tangible understanding of “the awful holiness of God” and “the awful nature of sin.” They had gone to great lengths to build a tabernacle but no one was able to enter it. How was this to be resolved? 

God introduces a radical new answer: substitutionary sacrifice. If you’ve been in church for a while, it’s easy to get inoculated to this concept, but consider what it would have meant to hear that instead of dying, another could die in your place. Instead of your child or wife or friend dying, another could die in their place. For every kind of sin, there was a kind of sacrifice. There was a way. Understanding this is the key to understanding the cross. As John Stott writes in The Cross of Christ:

“The righteous, loving Father humbled himself to become in and through his only Son flesh, sin and a curse for us, in order to redeem us without compromising his own character… The biblical gospel of atonement is of God satisfying himself by substituting himself for us… The concept of substitution may be said, then, to lie at the heart of both sin and salvation.  For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man.  Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be; God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be.  Man claims prerogatives that belong to God alone; God accepts penalties that belong to man alone.” 

What does this mean for our 21st-century questions? Often our response to inadequacy is to try harder, to strain ever onwards in self-actualization, to achieve or acquire something more. This is what our world tells us to do. It’s not natural to admit our efforts will never be enough. It’s scary to trust something outside of ourselves, just as it would have been scary for Aaron to offer the animals and trust the fire would consume them and not the people. But over and over, in every mention of fat and entrails and organs, God is saying, there must be a substitute. And you must completely trust that the substitute is enough. That is the only way.

On some level, if I really absorbed this truth, my life would be driven less by anxiety, fear, guilt, and more by rest, thankfulness, awe, and love. Much of my life is a growth in grasping and living into something inherently foreign to my own tendencies and culture. But better a feeble trust in the right thing, perhaps, than a strong trust in the wrong thing. Even if all I can whisper is, “I believe; help my unbelief,” that is something. What would it mean for you to believe this truth, and how would you live even just a little bit differently?

Fasting For The Bridegroom

“And Jesus said to them, ‘Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.’” – Matthew 9:15

Jesus says in Matthew 6:16, “And when you fast,” not “if you fast.” While fasting is not explicitly commanded in the Bible, it is assumed to be a normal part of the spiritual life. People in the Bible fasted to express mourning or repentance, to seek answers in prayer or at times of great need, to worship God. Richard Foster describes secondary purposes such as revealing things that control us, reminding us that we are sustained by God, or helping keep balance in our lives.

It’s interesting that the only other place Jesus talks about fasting, here in Matthew 9, he describes a different kind of purpose. While there is some dispute in interpreting the latter part of the verse, I tend to feel that Jesus is referring to the time between his ascension and second coming. While we have the Holy Spirit—who is so valuable it was worth Jesus going away to have him!— there is also a sense in which we are not with Jesus as we will be. There is tension between having the kingdom of God now, yet wanting more. Fasting is a way of expressing our sadness at Jesus’ absence and our longing for his return.

Have you thought much about this, the fasting of the lover who is waiting for the return of the bridegroom? The first time I did, I realized my fasting had been so self-centered—not that one can’t fast for petitionary reasons, of course—but at the heart of it, I wanted things, not Jesus. My eyes were turned towards myself, not him.

But fasting this way, it feels like I’m saying, Jesus, the reality of my soul and being is that I want you more than I want food or anything else on this earth. I feel your absence; I’m sad about that, sad about the ways this world is broken. I’m sad about how my sense of your presence so often comes and goes with my mood and circumstances. I hunger for you to come back, to be with me forever and make everything new. My hope is in that more than it is in my next meal.

This kind of fasting reminds us what we are really waiting for. N.T. Wright writes in his book Surprised By Hope: “The presence we know at the moment—the presence of Jesus with his people in word and sacrament, by the Spirit, through prayer, in the faces of the poor—is of course related to that future presence, but the distinction between them is important and striking. Jesus’ appearance will be, for those of us who have known and loved him here, like meeting face-to-face someone we have only known by letter, telephone, or email.” We are waiting for that, longing for that moment and all it will mean for us and the world and the feast that is to come. As John writes at the end of Revelation: "He who testifies to these things says, 'Surely I am coming soon.' Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!"

Forgiveness

“For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” – Matthew 6:14-15

“But does it teach that I am forgiven only because I have forgiven? No, the teaching is, and we have to take this teaching seriously, that if I do not forgive, I am not forgiven. I explain it like this: a man who has seen himself as a guilty, vile sinner before God knows his only hope of heaven is that God has forgiven him freely. The man who truly sees and knows and believes that, is one who cannot refuse to forgive another. So the man who does not forgive another does not know forgiveness himself.” – Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, p12

This verse has always bothered me, because it makes God’s forgiveness sound conditional. But, like Lloyd-Jones likes to say, “If you find yourself arguing with the Sermon on the Mount at any point, it means either that there is something wrong with you or else that your interpretation of the Sermon is wrong. I find that very valuable.” There’s something to that. The parts that grate on me the most are probably the parts worth pressing in to.

This verse bothered me because it seems like Jesus is saying, “if you do it for others, then I’ll do it for you,” like a bargain. But I think he’s actually saying, “if you do it for others, then you’ll know that you understand what I did for you,” like a fact, a statement of truth. 

I think too often, I don’t really receive God’s forgiveness as much as I bestow forgiveness on myself. It’s a kind of self-absolution, to avoid feeling guilty, so I can make myself feel better rather than truly change. I don’t see the depth or true nature of my sin, and I don’t see the cost of the forgiveness I receive. 

Reminds me of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in The Cost of Discipleship about costly grace: “Instead of following Christ, let the Christian enjoy the consolations of his grace! That is what we mean by cheap grace, the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs. Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves… Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has… It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble; it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him… Such grace... is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life… Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of His Son… and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us.”

Somehow, I think forgiving others should come easily to me, but in fact it should not. It cost Jesus his life. It should cost me something. It should cost me my life; it is the way of life as I follow Jesus. Just like receiving forgiveness from God can be a process—as I see and understand more about my own sin, as I learn and practice confession, as I open myself to receiving grace and forgiveness—forgiving others is a process. This is a good place to start, a kind of litmus test: if I cannot forgive someone else, how have I failed to receive God’s forgiveness for myself?

N.T. Wright writes that forgiveness is not a moral rule with attached sanctions: it is a way of life, God’s way of life, God’s way to life—“and if you close your heart to forgiveness, why, then you close your heart to forgiveness.. If you lock up the piano because you don’t want to play to somebody else, how can God play to you?... Not to forgive is to shut down a faculty in the innermost person, which happens to be the same faculty that can receive God’s forgiveness.”