So what about conversing with God? Do we speak with him in the same way we talk to a good friend or to a beloved spouse? Or do we speak to him reluctantly—without much trust or care?

I ask this because I have the impression that too few Christians think of God as a close and congenial conversation partner. Instead he’s more of a potential resource for special needs, or an iconic figure at church meetings and ceremonies.

We need to acknowledge at least one obvious difference in talking to God. He isn’t physically present in the room so we can’t have the sort of back-and-forth exchange we’re used to when we think of conversations. And most comparisons between normal sharing and speaking to God won’t apply. We even have a separate term for talking to God—“prayer”—that recognizes the one-sided nature of coming to God. Prayers and conversations are not the same thing.

Or so it might seem to us.

The Bible actually portrays God as fully invested in us as potential conversation partners. His presence in all believers is immediate—a Spirit-to-spirit bond as in 1 Corinthians 2 and Romans 8—and is potentially more lively than any human bond. Psalm 139:4 portrays him as intimately aware of everything we ever mean to say, even before we voice our thoughts. God, then, is the greatest of communicators. He wants us to hear his heart and vice versa.

But if that’s the case how do we take advantage of such access? Imagine the benefits of a clear and strong connection with God! And with that vision in view let’s move ahead.

A starting point is to seek him. The term “seek” is Bible jargon for our ambition to start a conversation. Listen to Psalm 28:8—a Psalm attributed to David—“You have said, ‘Seek my face.’ My heart says to you, ‘Your face, LORD, do I seek.’ Hide not your face from me.” And hear Christ’s call: “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things [i.e. all our life concerns] will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33).

Next comes a willingness to listen. God, once again, is not a poor speaker. Instead we’re poor listeners. We don’t really want to hear what he has to say.

This conundrum of moral deafness calls for humility and openness. Making the connection work is something only God’s Spirit can accomplish. He alone knows our heart’s true motives. So the starting point for a clear connection with God is an invitation to him to check the connection. Let’s return to Psalm 139 here, to verse 23: “Search me, O God, and know my heart!” David recognized God as the solution to our deafness.

So the heart is crucial as the center of our values and motives. Before our new life of faith we had deadened hearts—wanting to “be like God” as usurpers and users rather than followers—but even in coming to faith our old interests still haunt us. God said as much in Jeremiah 17:9-10—“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? I the LORD search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.”

And now we come to the main insight of conversing with God: he invites us to speak about important matters and not about the themes of our former rebellion. The near deafness of most Christians remains a problem as long as we make self the focus of our approaches to him. Such efforts represent our past spilling into the present—recalling how we once lived as lovers of self rather than as lovers of God and neighbor.

God’s Trinitarian existence is the ultimate measure here. God the Father wants us to take up our new identity: we are now his children by way of union with Christ. We are now his Son’s eternal bride: as much beloved by him as his Son is. So any efforts on our part to continue with the old values of spiritual autonomy and self-interest need to be crucified just as Jesus was crucified for our former life.

A clear connection with the Father is only made in our devotion to his Son. As we abide—living boldly and overtly—in Christ and in his love for us our values shift dramatically. We now discover the Bible to be speaking about this bond from beginning to end. This lesson that Jesus taught his still-dull disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24 is crucial: everything in the Old Testament was a story about the Father sending his Son, the Servant, to give us life.

Once we get the Spirit’s focus on the Son offered throughout the Scriptures we start to pick up on what’s really important. The story of fall and redemption stands behind God’s answers to all our questions. We then hear the Spirit whispering to our hearts as we read, “Yes, yes, you’re getting it at last!”

The tension of the past came when we tried to force God to treat our own stories as central to life. Now we know better. And we can join the Father in his delight in his Son, which is where the conversation reaches its peak.

The post A Clear Connection first appeared on Cor Deo.

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I don’t know many people who have gotten very far into adult life without having experienced deep pain at the hands of another person. The betrayal of a spouse or close friend. Unfair treatment on a job or in an educational setting. The loss of a loved one in a drunken driving accident. Having had something of value stolen. We can all fill in the blank. We are keenly aware of our own pain. Happily, as Christians, we just forgive and move on, right? Well, um…

Forgiveness. It’s something we’re happy to be given, but at times find it challenging to offer. Yes, we know that Jesus told us to forgive—over and over again if necessary. He even said that if we do not forgive others, our Heavenly Father will not forgive us. Paul tells us more than once that we ought to forgive others, as we ourselves have been forgiven by the Lord. We know that Jesus himself suffered and died a death he didn’t deserve so that we can be forgiven.

Why is it, then, that when we say, even believe, we’ve forgiven another person that the mention of their name, or running into them in a social setting, causes a knot in our gut? Why is it that we are so quick to recount the wrongs that were done to us and take every opportunity to make sure others know about it too? If we’re honest, for most of us, forgiveness is hard.

One of the reasons I think we struggle with it is because we take it too lightly. Forgiveness is a word that’s tossed around in Christian settings as though it’s a foregone conclusion, without really considering that forgiveness costs. It cost Christ his life, so why would we think that it should cost us nothing? Forgiveness means that what was lost will never be restored. It means taking another person’s debt to us and writing “paid in full” across the bill. It may well mean never hearing the “I’m sorry” our hearts long for.

Another reason we struggle with forgiveness is that we don’t fully understand the depth of what we have been forgiven. This hits home for me personally because I came to Christ as a young child, and I don’t think I ever fully grasped the ugliness of my own heart until I had to wrestle through forgiving someone who had deeply hurt me. As I was reading through Luke 7, I came to the story of the woman who was washing Jesus’ feet with her tears and wiping them with her hair. Jesus says that her many sins were forgiven, for she loved much, and then he says, “But he who has been forgiven little, loves little.”  In that moment, perhaps for the first time, I felt the weight of my own sin. I also recognized that my lack of love for Christ was rooted in the fact that deep in my heart, I had seen myself as someone who had been “forgiven little.” Today, it pains my heart that I would even think that!

Still, in real life, when the actions of someone else have left our hearts wounded and bleeding, how do we forgive? Though I certainly wouldn’t claim to have all the answers or to be above the struggle, here are some thoughts to consider:

1. Pray that the Lord will reveal your own heart. Psalm 130:3 says, “Lord, if you should count our iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?” The beginning of forgiving others is a deep knowing of what we’ve been forgiven. Experiencing the love of God poured into our own hearts, and responding to him in love, will overflow in love to the one who has hurt us.
2. Pray that the Lord will show you his heart for the other person. Jesus said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” and what follows is, “so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5: 44-45). When we see the person who hurt us through the Lord’s eyes, we see someone who is as needy of forgiveness as we are.
3. Read through the Psalms, such as Psalm 73. The point of this is not to console yourself with the thought that God will punish the person who wronged you. The point is to remind your heart that God knows the wrong that has been done, and he will deal with it. You can rest in that.
4. Remember that the wrong that was done is first and foremost against God, not you. In Psalm 51, after David had sinned with Bathsheba and had Uriah killed, he said, “Against you [God] and you only have I sinned.”
5. Lastly, perhaps the advice I was given will be of help. A wise person said to me, “Gretchen, every time the pain hits, every time the anger comes, get down on your knees and ask God to give you a heart of forgiveness—and keep doing it until the sting is gone.” The last part was very important: until the sting is gone.

When we have truly forgiven, no longer does the mere mention of that person’s name make us feel like we’ve been kicked in the gut. No longer do we feel the need to recount the wrongs that were done. No longer do we wait for the “I’m sorry” that isn’t going to come. Instead, we can be a reflection of the Lord to that person by casting their wrongs against us as far away as the east is from the west. We can be those who love much because we’ve been forgiven much.

The post Until the Sting is Gone first appeared on Cor Deo.