Your prayer for forgiveness should not be taken lightly. If it’s ‘done on the surface’ with no deeper meaning and understanding… this unpleasant and even painful shadow will keep following you around. Therefore, it is important to understand all aspects of human forgiveness as they all contribute to your prayer for true depth and completeness.
Of all the world’s Great Faiths, Christianity gives the most central role to love and forgiveness. Jesus of Nazareth, in His Sermon on the Mount, enjoined his early followers to refrain from judging others, because by the very same criteria that they used for others, they themselves would be judged. He went on to urge them to forgive, not only their family, friends and neighbors, but also their most bitter enemies, even to the point where they “spitefully use you.” He repeatedly emphasized throughout the Gospel accounts that to be forgiven, simply forgive others.
Jesus went on in that sermon to refer to God as your Father, who, like the sun, unconditionally shines on you whether you are good or bad. All people benefit from the light of the sun irrespective of their station in life. In the Gospel according to Saint John, Light, Life and Love are all correlated. The Apostle John went on to write in his First Epistle: God is Love, perhaps the most stunning statement ever made.
The God of the Abrahamic Faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) is held to be infinite, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. This means that He has no end, always was, always will be, has all power, all knowledge and is present everywhere. A further study of the Gospels reveals that they are methods for realizing our divinity, that we are sons and daughters of God.
How To Pray for Forgiveness
Since we are inherently divine, created in the image of God, we are to treat one another as divine, as virtually gods and goddess. We are to love one another with that same Love with which God loves us. It is most significant that the most famous greeting of the Hindus is “Namaste!” which means, “I salute the deity within you.” Jesus brings His disciples up to the highest standards imaginable. He makes it clear later in the Gospel accounts that love for one another is a sign to all people that you are one of His followers.
Yet Jesus was also a realist. In the singular example He left us in the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Everyone we meet is our mirror. When we forgive others, they, and God, forgive us. He referred to people who judge others as having a beam in their eye, who try to pull out a spec from other people’s eyes.
There is no need to try to impress God, or anyone else. “I’m sorry that I hurt you.” “Forgive me. I will never do this again.” At one point, the Apostle Peter asked Jesus if someone offended him seven times in a single day, could he go ahead and swat him the eighth time. Jesus quipped, “Not seventy times seven.”
If Jesus asked His early followers, and by extension, all humanity, to forgive everyone unconditionally, how can we possibly suppose God won’t forgive us? While the Qur’an has many fearsome sayings around divine justice, in every single Surah, or chapter, except one, God is affirmed as gracious and merciful.
More to the heart of the question of forgiveness is Jesus’ voluntary death on the cross, the worst form of capital punishment in His day. Christian theology maintains that His death was the price of forgiving sin, that He took on the sins of the whole world, the karma of all humanity past, present and future. In the words of Saint Paul, “He who knew no sin became sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God.”
In essence, Jesus voluntary swapped His innocence for our sinfulness. A fine point in the account is the recognition that while on the cross, He forgave the hypocritical Pharisees who had accused Him of sedition and set Him up with the Romans.
It is one thing to forgive an ordinary person, but it is quite another thing to forgive a hypocrite. Earlier in the Gospel accounts, Jesus in no uncertain words slammed the Pharisees for being “the blind leading the blind.” We feel that Jesus, Himself, progressed throughout His life to the point where He could forgive even the hypocrites for the worst offense imaginable. At that very moment, He became the World Savior, the Greatest Lover the world has ever known.
Below, you can watch Bayless Conley share a similar message about the importance of forgiveness:
A mystical perspective throws this all into a daring new light.
We can forgive others also, because we, ourselves, are totally forgiven. From eternity past to eternity future, our sins are forgiven. In other words, there is nothing we can possibly do to alienate God from us. We are loved absolutely, and we grow to discover that this Love is absolute. It is infinite and eternal, the most powerful force in the Universe.
When we open up to this possibility that God Himself (Herself / Itself) IS Love, then finding direct access to God means direct access to Love. We can love others with the very same Love with which we are loved.
Visit this post if you would like to learn more about spiritual healing prayers.
Healing Forgiveness Begins
This divine love is the answer to forgiveness, as well as healing. Saint John reminded the early church that love casts out all fear, “For fear has torment.” The hidden truth of creation is that we ourselves, like God, ARE love. How is this possible?
You might say that we have three selves, a social self, a shadow self and a divine self.
Our social self is our mask that we put on to be respectable, to impress people, to divert attention from our shadow self, which most of are convinced we really are.
The shadow self is what we typically face in the mirror every morning after we have had a bad night, a person with mean, petty, selfish, even vindictive thoughts. This self is everything we pretend we are not in society. It is the worst possible self-image.
Underneath the social self and the shadow self lies our True Self, our divine self.
Our divine self is pure love, an adorable little child descended from Heaven who just wants to awaken, create, play and celebrate.
You might ask, “What happened?” How could we so totally forget Who we really are? It will help to realize that we live in a dream, God’s dream, and that we live out a story, a divine love story. This is the only way to make sense out of the crazy world we so often find. The story is all about God’s love, and we need a full cast of characters to pull this off, light and shadow, suspense and thrill, all the things for which you go to the movies. Consider that we often go to monster movies just for the fun of it.
What if, just what if, all there is, IS GOD? What if God is our only true and ultimate identity? Our reflection… in a way. What if, to take the Christian story, God actually became one of us, and went to the cross, not because we were miserable, filthy worms, but because we were infinitely precious in His sight? Then, Jesus died for our sins in order to wake us up to the Light, the Truth.
The central image of “sin” in the original Greek new testament if of missing the mark in archery, of blowing it. It is not so much that we were bad, but that we failed. Have you noticed how readily people blame themselves, as well as judge others?
What if it was necessary to pluck the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden (duality) in order to enter the greatest show the host of sentient beings throughout creation have ever seen?
How could you reveal absolute love without apparent evil, pain and suffering? What if we all, as individuals, play an essential role in the grand tapestry? What if the entire mosaic or composition is gorgeous?
Your Forgiveness Prayer Up Close
To make the most of this discussion, we recommend that you start with a practice of thanking the Creator for anything and everything, preferable in writing. Then close your eyes every morning and systematically bless people. You can bless entire nations; only make sure you include people at the very bottom of your list.
Single out your greatest enemy and bless him every single day of this coming year. That person may or may not change, but you most certainly will. You will have the actual experience that you are divine. That love we identify as Christ will begin to spontaneously radiate through you.
You may find that it miraculously heals people around you, including yourself. Then you will fulfill Jesus’ vision for the world: “I have come that you might have life, and that more abundantly.”
When you pray for forgiveness your goal is (usually) to heal yourself… or someone very dear to you. This is the deepest and most transformational healing you’ll ever experience!
How Our Prayer For Forgiveness Transformed Us appeared first on http://consciousowl.com.
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