Forgiveness, Unloading Pain, and Living the Full-Blown Twinkie Life

So the core of the Christian story is grace and forgiveness flowing toward us from God. And then Jesus and the rest of the New Testament is adamant that we pay that same grace and forgiveness forward to people who hurt us or sin against us.

Of course, if you're really ticked at someone for good reason, that really stinks.

In Christian circles, we often talk about forgiving others out of gratitude for what Christ has done for us. This is true to a point, but feelings of gratitude don't really cut it for the hardest cases. I need a completely new power at work in me, not just feelings of gratitude.

And so enters the central importance of Jesus actually taking up residence in our hearts and minds. To be a Christian is to be "in Christ." And to be in Christ is to have him dwell inside of you. You are the Twinkie, incomplete without the filling. To be filled up with Christ is to be fully what you were created to be.

We have a limited capacity to forgive. But Christ in us has an infinite capacity to forgive. In fact, no matter what's happened to you, Jesus has already paid for that sin and forgiven it: "Behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world," his cousin John declared.

And so our job in the work of forgiveness is not to generate forgiveness but to demonstrate forgiveness. Read that again, nice and slow.

It is not on us to dig deep and gut it out and drum up forgiveness. Christ in us has already forgiven, already absorbed that sin against you on the cross. We are therefore instruments of his grace and forgiveness, never initiators of grace and forgiveness on our own.

To be sure we have an important choice to make. We must decide to participate in Christ's forgiveness, we have to allow him in us to do the work in us of actual forgiveness and then allowing him through us to extend forgiveness.

But the hard parts have already been done: the sin has been paid for, the absorption of the sin has already taken place, and Christ already dwells in us.

This, by the way, is not only true in the case of forgiving someone else.

It's true for you when you catch yourself with that really disturbing/broken/angry/si

nful thought or motivation. Jesus already paid for that. No need to go around feeling guilty. Rush to him, he dwells inside of you, invite him to absorb that thought, that motive, and to replace it with his life and love.

And it's true for any pain you experience--be that caused by a specific person or just general pain in life. Jesus in you has the infinite capacity to absorb all your pain--what else would you want to do with it? Allow it to hijack your life/marriage/family/career/soul? Why not allow Jesus to absorb it all and give you life in exchange?

Jesus in us has already taken on all the pain and all the sin of the whole world--the stuff we do and the stuff done to us. The core question in the formation of all our souls is "what will you do with all your pain?"

Jesus has already taken it on himself. To be a Christian is to be the full-blown Twinkie. If you're not a Christian, the offer of living the full-blown Twinkie life is on the table.

Why continue to carry all of this anger, unforgiveness (both of others and yourself) and pain around?