Jason Locke's Blog

How we view forgiveness shapes our understanding of everything in the Christian faith. To be more specific, our view of God's forgiveness impacts the way we forgive. For a long time, many folks believed that God only forgave sin if he could punish before offering his act of forgiveness. This is a punitive or transactional view of forgiveness. The standard storyline went something like this: God can't stand sin. Even though God loves you, God can't stand to be with you if you sin. God wants to forgive you but has to take out his disgust with sin by punishing you somehow until you get it right. Since we're all sinners & repeat offenders, this creates quite a problem. According to the traditional story, Jesus came along and lived without ever sinning. Finally, here was someone God didn't have to punish. But in order to forgive you of your sins, God punished Jesus instead of you. This standard version of the story of forgiveness is mostly rubbish ...

Do you practice transactional forgiveness or just plain forgiveness ? Here's the difference: Transactional forgiveness says, "I forgive you, but you have to grovel and be in the doghouse for a long time." Plain forgiveness says, "I forgive you." Transactional forgiveness says, "I forgive you, but I'm going to hold this over your head as long as I like." Forgiveness says, "I forgive you." Transactional forgiveness says, "I forgive you, but from now on you'll never be equal to me." Forgiveness says, "I forgive you." Transactional forgiveness says, "I'll forgive you if you somehow do enough to prove to me that you've earned it." Plain forgiveness says, "I forgive you." Transactional forgiveness flows out of fury & rage. Forgiveness flows out of love. Transactional forgiveness comes from a heart filled with the fear of deprivation. Forgive...