Dear Friends,

This will be the last message until October 10,  the week of the eighteenth anniversary of the Word of Grace messages. Everything is fine with me, but I need to take a short hiatus to tend to something else.

Thank you for subscribing or reading when someone else passes it on to you. I send these messages out each week with a prayer that the message of God’s grace will find its way to where it is needed most. I will continue to pray for this to happen during this hiatus. Please join me in this prayer. — Kent

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Do you react to the frictions of living — insults, offenses, abuse, thoughtlessness, rudeness, disobedience — like God does? Me neither!

My first instinct when someone has wronged me is to want to make them pay! But that seems inadequate. I let the memory of the offense cling to my soul until it gains power when a new and difficult encounter with the person exacerbates my resentment of them.

I grew up beside the sea where rough little creatures called barnacles would attach themselves to the hulls and propellers of fishing trawlers and sailboats and rapidly multiply. After a while the weight of the barnacles and their rough edges would slow the churning of the prop and the glide of the hull through the water. Periodically, the sailors and fishermen would haul their boats out of the water and scrape off the barnacles and repaint the hulls to restore efficiency and speed in the water. Sometimes the barnacles cling so tenaciously they have to be pried off with a crow bar.

Resentments are like barnacles. They slow us down as they accumulate. The flow of our thinking is disrupted by the memory of the past wrong. We expend energy on avoidance of the ones we resent instead of making forward progress towards God’s calling for our lives. The unresolved issues weigh down our spirits and hold us back from what is new and fresh. Instead of the wonder and beauty of discovery, we have to strain and labor to go anywhere.

A corporate colleague made a mistake. An account that should have been funded wasn’t. She had uncharacteristically relied on the report of a subordinate instead of checking the numbers for herself. The error was large and devastating since it was now time to draw from the account? “What were you thinking?” I demanded. I instantly realized anything I said was to her was just piling on shame since no one could be tougher on her than she was.

That night I gave the problem much thought and prayer. I called her on her way to work and said, “Can we talk?”

“Not if you are just going to blast me?” was her reply.  Memories of my punishing correction made her afraid of what came next.

But prayer had connected me to our Lord who “is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in love” (Ps 103:8). When he is in control, my attitude and reactions are his, not mine.

“I’m not going to blast you,” I said. “We can work this out.” We went on to have a productive conversation and a resolution was achieved. It marked a turning point in our friendship which deepened and strengthened with trust because of the incident and its aftermath.

God’s interest in us is eternal. He has no interest in letting us bog down in the sins and mistakes that slow us down and distract us from following him into eternity. He forgives us and does not hold our sins against us.

His graciousness allows us the choice to accept forgiveness and cleansing and proceed. But if we refuse to give up our own resentments, we negate his forgiveness of us by insisting on the vindication of our self-righteousness. We will wait forever and miss eternity with that insistence because “only God is good” (Luke 18:19). None of us is righteous or has any claim on righteousness (Rom 3:10-11). If we accept this truth and turn our lives over to Christ to be made new we will be righteous as he is righteous. (1 Cor 1:28-31; Romans 6).

We religious types can be so proud in our virtue and so determined to be right and do right, that we can miss out on receiving Christ’s free gift of grace. Our minds and hearts are so full of the things we want to set right and the vindication we are demanding for ourselves, we leave no room for Christ to move in and take over.

Jesus told the chief priests and the elders, “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes will go into the kingdom before you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him. And even when you saw it, you did not afterward change your mind and believe him” (Matt 21:31-32).

The tax collectors and prostitutes had no illusions. They knew they knew they were sinners and had no righteousness of their own. They repented at John’s proclamation of the coming Messiah. They were willing to accept Jesus as their Savior.

The chief priests and the elders believed they were righteous and had no immediate need of a Messiah. They resented tax collectors and prostitutes and wanted them punished rather than saved. When Jesus pointed out to them the error of their ways they resented him and ended up killing him rather than facing his truth.

Would we rather be right or be forgiven? This is the great question that divides the religious from the faithful. The problem with being right is that someone else has to be wrong. The benchmark of self-righteousness is the sin and error of others. That means both the judged and the judgmental are driven by the same sins.

Because someone always is going to do better and someone is going to be worse, a religion of comparison means a graceless, hopeless existence in which one is only as good as her last performance. Such circumstances breed resentment, guilt and suspicion. That’s why so often when you find two or three adherents of a religion of performance gathered together they are miserable. They have all the trust of a western gunslinger at high noon.

Forward progress cannot be made in that kind of environment which brings us right back to the barnacle problem and the need to turn over our resentments and hurts to our compassionate and loving God. His forgiveness frees us up to move into eternity and our forgiveness of others frees us up from the past to move forward with him.

That’s why Jesus frequently tied effective prayer to our forgiveness of others. Prayer seeks God’s power in God’s timing. Unforgiveness chains one to the past with a lack of trust in God’s grace and justice.

Hard as it may be to accept in our pride, all of us have sinned and fall short of God’s glory. All of us need God’s forgiveness and he has extended it to all of us.  How can we possibly think that withholding our forgiveness from others is acceptable? To do so puts our injuries beyond God’s reach and places our judgments higher on the shelf than his. That can’t possibly be true if you think about it.

Think about this too — our judgments and resentments keep us in close proximity to sin and leave us unhappy. The Lord wants to take those sins away from us as far as possible and there are no limits to what is possible for him! Nothing slows him down and he wants to carry us with him. Are we willing to set down and let go of the loads we are carrying and go with him as far as heaven is from earth? Because that’s where he wants to take the forgiven and the forgiving.

“O taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are those who take refuge in him” (Ps 34:8).

Under the mercy of Christ,

Kent

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Please note that the content and viewpoints of Mr. Hansen are his own and are not necessarily those of the C.S. Lewis Foundation. We have not edited his writing in any substantial way and have permission from him to post his content.

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Kent Hansen is a Christian attorney, author and speaker. He practices corporate law and is the managing attorney of the firm of Clayson, Mann, Yaeger & Hansen in Corona, California. Kent also serves as the general counsel of Loma Linda University and Medical Center in Loma Linda, California.

Finding God’s grace revealed in the ordinary experiences of life, spiritual renewal in Christ and prayer are Kent’s passions. He has written two books, Grace at 30,000 Feet and Other Unexpected Places published by Review & Herald in 2002 and Cleansing Fire, Healing Streams: Experiencing God’s Love Through Prayer, published by Pacific Press in spring 2007. Many of his stories and essays about God’s encompassing love have been published in magazines and journals. Kent is often found on the hiking trails of the southern California mountains, following major league baseball, playing the piano or writing his weekly email devotional, “A Word of Grace for Your Monday” that is read by men and women from Alaska to Zimbabwe.