“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.” – C. S. Lewis
Ray David quoted those words in his sermon on Sunday. It’s a great line and there were a few other gems like it heard on Sunday. Seriously, if you weren’t there, check it out here. It’s a fantastic, hard-hitting bit of Gospel gold.
But to get back to Lewis, his larger point is that when we look at our own faults, we accept excuses for our behaviour rather easily, and when we look at the faults of others, we are much, much more conservative. However, he continues, forgiveness isn’t about being stricter with our own excuses or more lenient towards those of others. Forgiveness instead involves a generosity towards others where there simply is no excuse. That’s real generosity in relationships: forgiving someone, who can’t even offer so much as a half-baked excuse in return.
It goes even deeper when it comes to God’s forgiveness, because when we look at how God forgives us, it doesn’t look like cross-outs on a tally sheet of various inexcusable actions here and there in our lives. Our “inexcusability” in God’s eyes runs right through us from head to toe, or maybe more accurately from feet to wallet to mouth.
Paul went so far as to describe God’s act of forgiving us as forgiving the ungodly.
“And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness…” (Rom 4:5 ESV)
We are un-godly. How so? Well, the God we meet in Scripture is pervasively generous. However, the person I see in the mirror is the exact opposite: stripped of all my excuses, I am pervasively selfish – selfish with my money, my time, my gifts, my concern, and, yes, my forgiveness, too. In short, I need God’s radical generosity to forgive my radical ungenerosity.
But the more I know – the more I really, really get – the Gospel truth of a thoroughly selfish me forgiven by a thoroughly generous God, the more I can only just be grateful. It’s a good deal: you trade in all your excuses, you get to have gratitude in return. In the current sermon series, we are thinking about radical generosity, radical in the sense of radiating outward from the centre. Well, it’s from there, from that Gospel-changed heart, a heart turned from worn excuses to deep gratitude, that some of God’s generosity to us can begin to radiate outward in you and me.
