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Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.
Colossians 3:12-14 (ESV)N.T. Wright: -- *Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters*
"The virtues Paul lists are not arbitrary moral goals. They are the clothing of the new humanity. You do not grit your teeth and generate compassion from a void. You put it on because it has already been given to you in Christ. The wardrobe is open. The question is whether you will reach for what hangs there, or keep wearing the rags of the old self -- irritation, score-keeping, the slow burn of unforgiveness. Paul's point is startlingly practical: you can actually choose kindness. It is not a feeling you wait for; it is a garment you reach for."
Henri Nouwen: -- *Bread for the Journey*
"Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human race. To forgive another person from the heart is an act of liberation. We set that person free from the negative bonds that exist between us. But we also set ourselves free from the burden of being the offended one."
Cyprian of Carthage: -- *On the Lord's Prayer* (§23)
"God orders us to be peacemakers, and to be of one heart and of one mind in His house. And such as we are made by the second birth, such He wishes us when new-born to continue, that we who have begun to be sons of God may abide in the peace of God, and that we who have one spirit may have one heart and one mind. Thus God does not receive the sacrifice of a person who is in disagreement, but commands him to go back from the altar and first be reconciled to his brother, so that God may be appeased by the prayers of a peacemaker."
George MacDonald: -- *Unspoken Sermons*
"It is not the forgiving spirit alone that constitutes the divine forgiveness, but the love that gives itself in the effort to lift the fallen. The forgiveness of God is not merely the remission of a penalty; it is the slaying of the evil thing in the man. The man must be delivered from the thing that made forgiveness necessary. Until the sinner and the sin are parted, there is no forgiveness. So the divine forgiveness is a labor -- a labor of love that will not rest until the man is clean."
What resentment are you still wearing that Christ has already taken off and left in the tomb?
Seneca: -- *On Anger*, Book III.26
"How much better it is to heal a wrong than to avenge one. Vengeance takes a great deal of time, and it exposes a man to many injuries while only one makes him smart. We all keep our anger longer than we keep the hurt. How much better to go the other way, and not to pile fault on fault. A man who fights back when he is goaded by wrongs gives his tormentor a kind of justification -- as if to say, 'There, I knew it; he needed to be treated so.'"
St. Clair, Michigan: -- Light Rain, 57°F | Humidity: 77% | Wind: ←17mph