It snowed last night: a soft, deep snow.  In the morning light, the fields around our home glistened in the beauty and newness of its smooth, white covering as fresh, cold, clean air assaulted my senses.   Snow can change a landscape overnight like nothing else can.

David writes: ‘Cleanse me with hyssop and I will be clean; wash me and I will be whiter than snow’ (Psalm 51:7).  In its simplest form, that is the Gospel: that through the sacrifice of His Son, God has changed the landscape, and that we now glisten in the newness of our identity in Christ.

Yet, as I shared last week, that newness, that fresh clean covering, has been assaulted; frequently by those closest to us.  As we have sought their love and their acceptance, it is subsequently their rejections that have hurt us the most.  And so Jesus teaches us that we are to forgive just as we have been forgiven.

We tend to misinterpret His meaning here, wrongly assuming that our forgiveness by Him is conditional on our efforts.  That teaching, however, flies in the face of so much of the rest of the Gospel teaching.  So what are we to understand about forgiving others?

I believe part of the answer lies in the snow. There is this moment, when you first walk out your front door, that the beauty of a new snow just overwhelms you.  But then you start walking in it and driving in it and it becomes slick and cold and dirty.  The calmness gives way to chaos.  That, I believe, is what happens with our own unforgiveness.  It makes His forgiveness, and the life that we have in Him, very difficult to walk in.  It dirties the snow, melts it, and causes us to question what we ever loved of it in the first place. 

God doesn’t command us to forgive as a condition, he invites us into the beauty and the majesty of forgiveness as an opportunity to once again taste of the cool, clean, fresh air of a winter snow. 

To the King,

David