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Suppose there are people in your life whom you cannot forgive for what they have done. You feel your anger rising whenever their memory comes up, and you recollect the immensity of the hurt and damage they have caused you. You may be still suffering from the consequences of their acts. You think it will be totally unfair to let them go free, and you are hoping that they will get the punishment they deserve. Your sense of justice has been violated, and you feel right about feeling this way about them.

But then suppose God were to look at you like that, with His sense of justice towards every sin you have committed. As the holy, righteous and just Judge of heaven, His righteous anger will rise up against every sin on your record. He will be totally justified if He were to throw you into hell. You will have no excuse to make.

But what has happened is that God's love for you has overcome His sense of justice (Ja.2:13). His love for you wanted to find a way to show you mercy and forgive you even though your sins deserved judgment (Ro.6:23). He met the requirements of justice by punishing your sins, but instead of you meeting that punishment, His Son took it on Himself (Jn.3:16). God could not have overlooked the demands of justice and just forgiven you. His love took the cost on Himself. He suffered in order to forgive you. You receive that forgiveness freely when you admit to Him that you deserved the punishment and accept that it was Jesus dying in your place that earned you this free forgiveness.

When you receive this forgiveness as an unmerited favour from God, you lose your right to judge others. You can no longer say they deserve punishment, because the moment you take that position towards others, your own forgiveness comes into danger (Mt.6:14,15). You cannot ask for forgiveness as an unmerited favour from God if you are not willing to show that same favour to others.

If you are truly a child of God, you will be aware of your status as one whom God has forgiven only because Jesus has died in your place. Without taking that humble position before God, God cannot forgive you. If you have taken that position, you will also know that it was an act of sheer grace from God, something you don't deserve. Then you will no longer be able to imagine that you can deal with others in the way you think they deserve. If you cannot forgive someone because they do not deserve it, it must be clear to you that with that same way of thinking you cannot ask God for your forgiveness.

If, in spite of all this understanding you still decide that you cannot forgive someone, your own status as a child of God becomes questionable. You do not seem to have actually gone through an experience of seeing how your sins appear to God, repenting from your sins and gladly receiving the offer of salvation from Jesus. Unfortunately, there are many like that who just imagine that they are Christians but who have never been born again.

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