Understanding Yourself And God’s Plan For You Is Power

Loving God and your neighbor is freedom.
Forgiving others is peace.
Being yourself is bliss.

Joshua 3:7-11,13-17
Matthew 18:21-19:1

God keeps His promises for He is faithful forever. Faithfulness requires keeping to one’s promise despite all odds. There are a lot of difficulties that can come to us when we are following the path that God has laid down for us. One of them is the act of forgiveness. To be a Christian is to live a forgiven and forgiving life. In other words, it is to extend to others the liberating mercy that our faithful God always extends to us.

In today’s Gospel, Peter asked Jesus the limits on forgiveness and the Lord tells him the famous parable of the unforgiving official. It is the story of the man who had been rescued by mercy but who brazenly refused to show a servant the same mercy the king had extended to him. In the end, he was stripped of the mercy he had received, tortured, and tossed into prison, and with Jesus’ ominous warning that the same fate awaits us if we withhold forgiveness from anyone.

It is pertinent to note therefore that we do not have the power to forgive others. Only God can forgive. Forgiveness makes us faithful to calls for us. Forgiveness is a gateway to becoming what God is desire of us. We cannot quantify the mercy of God. We must be ready to forgive at all times so that the grace of God’s forgiveness can permeate our lives.

God’s mercy is the foundation of our lives and each of us has a mission of mercy to carry out. Each of us is to be a living sacrament of God’s merciful love in the world. It is a vocation every Christian shares, a calling to which no follower of Jesus is ever exempt. That is because God has been endlessly and patiently compassionate and merciful to us. God’s extravagant mercy is the gift that makes all of us equal and all of us one. If we refuse to extend mercy then we are ungrateful to God and that could lead us to a horrible situation.

Fr Joseph Osho