God’s Love and Forgiveness

I am reading Bold Love with a dear friend of mine as a follow-up to our experience at Sonship Week 2007.  Many speakers and mentors that week had talked about the book by Dan Allender and Tremper Longman; a book rooted soundly in the gospel narrative.

I find the book refreshing, challenging and life-changing.  It is not a psychobabble book on how to love better, or get it right, it does not dispense with ideas for how to be a better person.  Anyway, I came across a few pages this morning in my reading and needed to pass it along to my enormous reader base (!).  Allender begins with this passage from Nehemiah:

Nehemiah 9:15-21

In their hunger you gave them bread from heaven and in their thirst you brought them water from the rock; you told them to go in and take possession of the land you had sworn with uplifted hand to give them.

But they, our forefathers, became arrogant and stiff-necked, and did not obey your commands. They refused to listen and failed to remember the miracles you performed among them. They became stiff-necked and in their rebellion appointed a leader in order to return to their slavery. But you are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love. Therefore you did not desert them, even when they cast for themselves an image of a calf and said, ‘This is your god, who brought you up out of Egypt,’ or when they committed awful blasphemies.

Because of your great compassion you did not abandon them in the desert. By day the pillar of cloud did not cease to guide them on their path, nor the pillar of fire by night to shine on the way they were to take. You gave your good Spirit to instruct them. You did not withhold your manna from their mouths, and you gave them water for their thirst. For forty years you sustained them in the desert; they lacked nothing, their clothes did not wear out nor did their feet become swollen.

Allender writes:

His long-suffering patience and forgiveness, however, are not offered without great cost to Himself.  the cost is ultimately the sacrifice of His own beloved Son for the payment of sin.  His forgiveness also involves a high price for the recipient.  The cost is sacrifice as well, but of a wholly different order from His Son’s shameful death on behalf of His brothers and sisters.

The cost for the recipient of God’s grace is NOTHING–and no price could be higher for arrogant people to pay.  Something within me (that feels noble) longs for a religion that requires payment…I cannot bear the loss of pride and swagger…grace is free, and that is disturbing.

Good stuff.

~ by Nate on November 28, 2007.