Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

He drew a circle that shut me out-- heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win: we drew a circle that took him in.

It's easier to get forgiveness for being wrong than forgiveness for being right.

Any married man should forget his mistakes. There's no use in two people remembering the same thing.

Consider what two petitions Christ couples together in His prayer: when my body, which every day is hungry, can live without God's giving it daily bread, then and no sooner shall I believe that my soul, which daily sinneth, can spiritually live without God's forgiving it its trespasses.

"Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act. It means, rather, that the evil act no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship."

The Grahams' Unexpected Hospitality Former televangelist Jim Bakker speaks of events that occurred immediately after his release from prison: When I was transferred to my last prison, Franklin [Graham] said he wanted to help me out when I got out-with a job, a house to live in, and a car. It was my fifth Christmas in prison. I thought it over and said, "Franklin, you can't do this. It will hurt you. The Grahams don't need my baggage." He looked at me and he said, "Jim, you were my friend in the past and you are my friend now. If anyone doesn't like it, I'm looking for a fight." So when I got out of prison the Grahams sponsored me and paid for a house for me to live in and gave me a car to drive. The first Sunday out, Ruth Graham called the halfway house I was living in at the Salvation Army and asked permission for me to go to the Montreat Presbyterian Church with her that Sunday morning. When I got there, the pastor welcomed me and sat me with the Graham family. There were like two whole rows of them-I think every Graham aunt and uncle and cousin was there. The organ began playing and the place was full except for a seat next to me. Then the doors opened and in walked Ruth Graham. She walked down that aisle and sat next to inmate 07407-058. I had only been out of prison 48 hours, but she told the world that morning that Jim Bakker was her friend. Afterwards, she had me up to their cabin for dinner. When she asked me for my addresses, I pulled this envelope out of my pocket to look for them. In prison you're not allowed to have a wallet, so you just carry an envelope. She asked, "Don't you have a wallet?" And I said, "Well, yeah, this is my wallet." After five years of brainwashing in prison you think an envelope is a wallet. She walked into the other room and came back and said, "Here's one of Billy's wallets. He doesn't need it. You can have it."

In the long run, the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell is... a question: "What are you asking God to do?" To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that that is what He does.

Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.

One day, while I was grieving over some past failures, I received a letter from a friend who told me how she and her granddaughter had been watching a plane skywrite. The little girl was puzzled when the words began disappearing, but suddenly piped up, "Maybe Jesus has an eraser!" In her innocent wisdom I realized that just as skywriting disappears, Jesus wipes away all things I so bitterly regret. No matter how much we mature as Christians, and try desperately to compensate, memories of our own failures can rise up and haunt us. But, with God's forgiveness, they will fade away--Jesus does have an eraser.

Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea until they have something to forgive, as we did during the war. And then, to mention the subject at all is to be greeted with howls of anger. It is not that people think this too high and difficult a virtue: it is that they think it hateful and contemptible. ‘That sort of talk makes me sick,’ they say. And half of them already want to ask me, ‘I wonder how you’d feel about forgiving the Gestapo if you were a Pole or a Jew?’ So do I. I wonder very much. -

FORGIVENESS Colossians 3:13 says, "You must make allowance for each other's faults and forgive the person who offends you. Remember, the Lord forgave you, so you must forgive others." When you're part of a family, you're going to need to forgive. Families give all kinds of opportunity to be hurt. "Forgiveness is a sort of divine absurdity," Walter Wangerin Jr. writes in an excellent book called As for Me and My House: Forgiveness is a willing relinquishment of certain rights. The one sinned against chooses not to demand her rights of redress for the hurt she has suffered. She does not hold her spouse accountable for his sin, nor enforce a punishment from him...She does not make his life miserable in order to balance accounts for her own misery, even though she might feel perfectly justified in doing so, tit for tat: "He deserves to be hurt as he hurt me." The pattern for forgiveness, again, is Jesus. He forgave us, and because of that, we're required to forgive others. This is hardest, sometimes, within our own families. Hurts accumulate, patterns are repeated. But we're required to forgive. Do we have to wait until the person asks for forgiveness before we forgive them? Some people argue that that's the way God treats us. Actually, it isn't. Romans 5:8 says, "But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners." Before we ever thought of asking God for forgiveness, he was already taking action to forgive us. In any case, when we don't forgive, sometimes when we're waiting for the other person to apologize or to ask forgiveness, we're doing damage to ourselves. Ann Lamott's said that "Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die." We think we're hurting the other person by not forgiving, when really it's killing our own souls. Lamott writes: They say we are not punished for the sin but by the sin, and I began to feel punished by my unwillingness to forgive. By the time I decided to become one of the ones who is heavily into forgiveness, it was like trying to become a marathon runner in middle age; everything inside me either recoiled, as from a hot flame, or laughed a little too hysterically...As C.S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity, "If we really want to learn how to forgive, perhaps we had better start off with something easier than the Gestapo." If you have something you need to forgive, Wangerin's book As for Me and My House has a really good section on how to do this. He gives some steps - not like a recipe or a formula that make things automatic, but some useful steps nonetheless: 1. Be realistic 2. Remember your own forgiveness 3. Sacrifice your rights in prayer 4. Tell your spouse [or whoever else in you need to forgive] the sin 5. Follow words with action

For major hurts, Dr. Fred Luskin from Stanford has discovered three preconditions to true forgiveness, which he discusses in his book Forgive For Good: 1) Know what your feelings are about what happened 2) Be clear about the action that wronged you 3) Share your experience with at least one or two trusted friends

If you are suffering from a bad man's injustice, forgive him lest there be two bad people.

Why is forgiving a man's sins a greater miracle than healing his body? There's a lot to it, but almost everything can be seen through this lens: modern medicine can duplicate the physical miracle but not the spiritual one.

St. Patrick was a deacon's son (and a pagan as it turns out). At the age of 16 he was captured by Irish slavers and served as a slave in Ireland for 6 years. It was during this time that he was converted and first began to dream of converting his captors. He escaped at the age of 22, walked 200 miles to freedom, and trained as a missionary before returning to Ireland and founding hundreds of churches and leading thousands to Christ.

Love means to love that which is unlovable, or it is no virtue at all; forgiving means to pardon that which is unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all.

He who cannot forgive another breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself.

A Spanish father decides to reconcile with his son who has run away to Madr. Now remorseful, the father takes out this ad in the El Liberal newspaper: "PACO MEET ME AT HOTEL MONTANA NOON TUESDAY. ALL IS FORGIVEN." Pace is a common name in Spain, and when the father goes to the square he finds eight hundred young men named Paco waiting for their fathers.

In Nikos Kazantzakis's novel Christ Recrucified, there is a scene in which four village men confess their sins to one another in the presence of the Pope. One of the men, Michelis, cries out, "How can God let us live on the earth? Why doesn't he kill us to purify creation?" "Because, Michelis," the Pope answered, "God is a potter; he works in mud."

People ask me what advice I have for a married couple struggling in their relationship. I always answer: pray and forgive. And to young people from violent homes, I say: pray and forgive. And again, even to the single mother with no family support: pray and forgive.

Many promising reconciliations have broken down because, while both parties came prepared to forgive, neither party came prepared to be forgiven.

It is important to realize that the fundamental approach of the moralists is not that we ought to <i>suppress</i> anger but rather <i>dissipate</i> is by employing the various cognitive, affective, and behavioral strategies that we have described. Forgiveness, compassion, the recognition of human frailty, the cultivation of emotions incompatible with anger such as love or humility, and avoidance of provocation are all meant to preserve us from becoming angry or enable us to substitute some neutral, benevolent emotion.

So we see that objectively the Blood deals with our sins. The Lord Jesus has borne them on the Cross for us as our Substitute and has thereby obtained for us forgiveness, justification and reconciliation. But we must now go a step further in the plan of God to understand how He deals with the sin principle in us. The Blood can wash away my sins, but it cannot wash away my `old man'. It needs the Cross to crucify me. The Blood deals with the sins, but the Cross must deal with the sinner.

"The revelation was one thing, the repetition quite another."

Consider the man who suffered from a debilitating disease of the brain. At times it would cause him to act irrationally and unpredictably. Under the influence of one such attack, he unwittingly struck out and killed another man. At trial, he was sentenced to death. But when his relatives appealed for mercy and explained the medical reasons for his temporary insanity, the governor granted clemency and pardoned him. But before his friends and relatives reached the prison to share this good news, the man had died as a result of his illness. So he gained nothing from the governor's pardon. Quite apart from the pardon, he needed treatment for his disease. Only then might he have lived to enjoy his release. It is treatment we need, not just forgiveness.