Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

“I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten—
    the great locust and the young locust,
    the other locusts and the locust swarm—
my great army that I sent among you.

• Joel 2:25

For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.

• Matthew 6:14-15

“The greatest problems of conscience are not the wrong things we have done, but wrong relationships. We may have become born again, but what about those we have wronged? It is of no use to sit down and say, ‘It is irreparable now, I cannot alter it.’ Thank God He can alter it! We may try to repair the damage in our own way, by apologizing, by writing letters; but it is not a simple easy matter of something to apologize for. Behind the veil of human lives God begins to reveal the tragedies of hell. Or we may say, ‘I have been atoned for, therefore I do not need to think about the past.’ If we are conscientious the Holy Spirit will make us think about the past, and it is just here that the tyranny of nerves and the bondage of Satan comes in. The shores of life are strewn with ruined friendships, irreparable severances through our own blame or others, and when the Holy Spirit begins to reveal the tremendous twist, then comes the strange distress, ‘How can we repair it?’ Many a sensitive soul has been driven into insanity through anguish of mind because he has never realized what Jesus Christ came to do, and all the asylums in the world will never touch them in the way of healing; the only thing that will is the realization of what the death of Jesus means, viz., that the damage we have done may be repaired through the efficiency of His Cross. Jesus Christ has atoned for all, and He can make it good in us, not only as a gift but by a participation on our part. The miracle of the grace of God is that He can make the past as though it had never been; He can ‘restore the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar, and the palmerworm’.”

• Oswald Chambers, The Philosophy of Sin (Daily thoughts for Disciples, May 27)

I must confess that I have made comments like Oswald Chambers has mentioned here.  There are some relationships that are irreparable.  True, God can work miracles, but when one side is on the side of God and what the Bible says and the other side wants to destroy all that, then how can there be common ground.  Yet, if repentance and coming back to Biblical truth occurs, you must be praying for that in the meantime and you must be willing to forgive.

In other situations, the other party may see no need to repent of anything when they have caused severe grievous harm.  Again, pray.

The world is broken and many of the people in the world have no intentions and no conscience telling them to forgive or accept forgiveness when someone else is trying to make things right.

But when God is at work to repair a relationship, we should never stand in His way.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.