We all know that forgiveness is essential for us as Christians. We are people who are forgiven as we come to the Lord in faith and repentance. Forgiveness is a blessing of the gospel. We need to extend the same kind of unconditional forgiveness also to others. Jesus made that abundantly clear in the parable that He told about the unforgiving servant. That servant had been forgiven a huge debt by his master. However this same servant was unwilling to forgive a fellow servant a trifling sum in comparison.

Forgiving others is essential... but forgiving others is not always easy. Over the years I have met church members who continue to hold resentments against other church members – or more commonly, against other family members. Forgiveness is necessary but it is difficult.

At a recent visit my brother reminded me of another good reason why we need to forgive and that is that our unwillingness or inability to forgive someone gives that other person control over our lives.

That needs some explaining. My brother was telling me about a man whom he had worked with and who had been guilty of embezzling his company.

BLESSED BEYOND REASON Peter Smit, 09-11-4

Sermon 1 of a series on Ephesians (Series title – “Ephesians: Portraits of the living church”

Text – Ephesians 1:1-14

Reading – Acts 19

Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is a portrait of the living church.

It captures the church in all its differing aspects of beauty and power. More importantly it helps us see the head of the church, God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

It seems to me that there are some things in our society that are ‘forgivable’ and others that are ‘unforgivable’, at least on face value.   A person can murder someone in cold blood, be caught, sentenced to do his time in prison and afterward, allowed to lead a reasonably normal life.  And that’s true for some of the worst crimes, rape, robbery, even terrorism and treason.  But there are some crimes, when even the prison term has been served, that our society finds very difficult to forgive or forget.

Television is very low on my list of priorities.  I can go for days without so much as turning the television set on.  But last Thursday night I finally decided to tackle that backlog of shirts that needed ironing.  To help reduce the Yuck-factor of ironing it helps to be distracted by the television...!  So I ended up watching an SBS program on blended families.