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Put
on then..... compassion, 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 (English Standard Version)
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"Forgiveness does
not change the past, but
it does enlarge the future."
Paul
Boese
"The
gospel
comes to the sinner at once with nothing short of complete forgiveness
as the starting-point of all
his efforts to be holy. It does not say, 'Go and sin no more, and I
will not condemn thee.' It says at once, 'Neither do I condemn thee: go
and sin no more.'"
Horatius Bonar
"Perhaps
forgiveness is the last thing mentioned in the creed because it is the
last thing learned in life. Perhaps none of us can understand the
forgiveness of God until we ourselves have learned to forgive."
Joan
Chittister in 'In Search of Belief'
"The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong."
Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi
"Of
him that hopes to
be forgiven it is indispensably required that he forgive. It is
therefore
superfluous to urge any other motive. On this great duty eternity is
suspended,
and to him that refuses to practise it the throne of mercy is
inaccessible,
and the Saviour of the world has been born in vain."
Samuel Johnson: Rambler
#185
"Scarcely any law of
our Redeemer is more openly transgressed, or more industriously evaded,
than that by which he commands his followers to forgive injuries."
Samuel Johnson, Rambler
#185
"The practice of
forgiveness is not only, or even primarily, a way of dealing with
guilt. Instead, its central goal is to reconcile, to restore communion
- with God, with one another, and with the whole creation."
L. Gregory
Jones, in 'Practicing Our Faith'
"Not to forgive is
to be imprisoned by the past, by old grievances
that do not permit life to proceed with new business. Not to forgive is
to yield oneself to another's control...
to be locked
into a sequence of act and response, of outrage and
revenge, tit for tat, escalating always. The present is
endlessly overwhelmed and devoured by the past. Forgiveness frees
the forgiver. It extracts the
forgiver from someone else's nightmare."
Lance Morrow,
(1939- ) Essayist,
professor
"Memorial Day is a
day
we remember and honor those who fought and often died for their
country.
It is fitting that we do so. It is not, however, a day that we are
called
on to forgive those who have brought on us the horrors of war. As
a nation we are not called on to do that; as individuals, as the years
pass by and memories fade some of us will. But some can never."
Lyn Nofziger
"We pardon as long as we love."
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
"A man
can be a Christian or a patriot, but he can't
legally be a Christian
and a patriot--except in the usual way: one of the two with the mouth,
the other with the heart. The spirit of Christianity proclaims the
brotherhood of the race and the meaning of that strong word has not
been left to guesswork, but made tremendously definite- the Christian
must forgive his brother man all crimes he can imagine and commit, and
all insults he can conceive and utter- forgive these injuries how many
times?--seventy times seven--another way of saying there shall be no
limit to this forgiveness. That is the spirit and the law of
Christianity. Well--Patriotism has its laws. And it also is a perfectly
definite one, there are not vaguenesses about it. It commands that the
brother over the border shall be sharply watched and brought to book
every time he does us a hurt or offends us with an insult. Word it as
softly as you please, the spirit of patriotism is the spirit of the dog
and wolf. The moment there is a misunderstanding about a boundary line
or a hamper of fish or some other squalid matter, see patriotism rise,
and hear him split the universe with is war-whoop. The spirit of
patriotism being in its nature jealous and selfish, is just in man's
line, it comes natural to him- he can live up to all its requirements
to the letter; but the spirit of Christianity is not in its entirety
possible to him.
The prayers
concealed in what I have been saying is, not that patriotism should
cease and not that the talk about universal brotherhood should cease,
but that the incongruous firm be dissolved and each limb of it be
required to transact business by itself, for the future."
Mark Twain,
from Mark
Twain's
Notebook
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