“Therefore I say to you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven for she loved much. But to whom little is forgiven, the same loves little” (Luke 7:47 ).
Every soul on this earth needs the forgiveness of other people who live around him, and in return, he needs to forgive others’ mistakes, as we all are not perfect. Being human we often make mistakes, as the saying goes “to err is human but to forgive is divine.”
Many of us make wrong thoughts with Mistakes and Sin, we must know that we humans can only forgive the mistakes of others, but not their sin, for God is the only One who has the authority to forgive sin.
As being a Christian we need the forgiveness of God, for we are trapped in a lifestyle of sin. These two words “slavery” and “death” are used to characterize this bondage in the scripture.
Sin is more than our willful defiance against God’s law; sin is a power that holds us in slavery. It is a form of separation from God. It is like a disease that has taken over our bodies, and the onset of its horrible symptoms is unavoidable.
Sin is any failure to conform to the moral law of God in act, attitude, or nature. Sin is defined in relation to God and His moral law. Sin includes not only individual acts such as stealing or lying or committing murder, but also attitudes that are contrary to the attitudes God requires of us.
Here we must know that there are two types of sin; original and daily sin. Original sin is the sin that we inherit from Adam the first human, which God created (Romans 5:12 ), and daily sin is the sin that we commit in our daily walk of life.
Our original sin is forgiven when we are baptized in the name of Jesus Christ in obedience to the word of God as Jesus commanded us, and our daily sin as we pray for His forgiveness with a repentant heart.
When we forgive someone’s mistakes we have to forgive them from our heart not only through our mouth verbally (Matthew 18:35).
Forgive others to be forgiven. As we know from (Luke 7:47), we need to love more to be forgiven of our many sins. Here to love is not to anyone but to love God truly, with all our heart, mind, and soul. To forgive others for their mistakes we need to have love in us, without the spirit of love we cannot forgive others.
Forgiving others is forgiving oneself. The more we love our fellow beings it is easy for us to forgive them, and the more we hate them the more we find it hard to forgive. We have to learn how to grow in the love of God so that we can know more about the love of God.
It is only because of Love that God came to this earth for us, shedding His precious blood and redeeming us from our sin. If not for Love, Christ would not have come and died on the cross.
We need to be forgiven to live a holy life and Christ-like and in the long run eternal life. The scripture also states in (Hebrews 12:14) “Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord”
If our sin is still with us then we still defile or unholy, that’s the reason why we are forgiven. With sin still in us, we cannot be righteous and we are slaves to sin. Our conscience, our attitude are all controlled by sin, which hinders us to do the will of God.
In our nature, we totally lack spiritual good before God. When our sins are not forgiven we are not pure, our whole affected by sin, intellects, emotion, and desire, our hearts, our goals and motive and also even our physical part Spiritually and physically we are under the control or realm of sin and cannot do anything according to the will of God. Regeneration of our heart is a must to sanctify ourselves.
We must clearly affirm that God himself did not sin, and God is not to be blamed for sin. It was man, who sinned, and it was angels who sinned, and in both cases, they did so by willful, voluntary choice. To blame God for sin would be blasphemy against the character of God.
“His work is perfect; for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and right is he” (Deuteronomy 32:4).
Faith is also important to be forgiven, as love is. In order to be forgiven, we have to have faith in the one who is going to forgive us our sin; neither men nor angels can forgive us of our sin, for it is God alone who can.
The only One God, who was, who is and who will be, is the one we have to put our trust upon. As Christian we cannot live without God, so we have to always walk with God, seeking His face and Forgiveness.
Repentance is necessary for God’s forgiveness. Without repentance, one cannot understand or see the sin that one has in life and in what condition one’s life is going. Our God is so gracious that He always forgives our sin when we pray for, with a heart of repentance.
One thing that we need to learn from the life of King David is that, as human beings, he often makes mistakes in life, which is against the will of God and fall; but one nature about King David is that he always repents and turns back to God for forgiveness.
From here we see or we know that God cannot resist a person who repents and seeks Him; for He is our Gracious God who loves us and is ever ready to forgive us. But let us not forget, though our sins are forgiven we get the fruit of what we did.
For one’s own pleasure for a time been, we defile and lose the good grace that He has given us and ultimately affect our generations. So we need to be cautious about our life and also about the familiar spirit that is always trying to pull us into his pit, and from following and living as a child of God.
When we are forgiven for our sin, we tend to become righteous and start to judge others and wrongly hate them, rather than when we need to love them. We must hate Sin but not the sinners, as we learn from Jesus Christ. If God is to hate the sinners He would not have come to this earth to save us, but rather He hates the sin that we fall and are into.
The woman mentioned in Luke 7 was forgiven more of her sins because she loved them much. So, love is important for our sins to be forgiven. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love (1 John 4:8).
Therefore, if, we say that we know God then, we must also have love in us, which God has for us. God does not love us by our performances of our life, but because He created us. God’s love is the only reason that we exist on this earth.
Finally, let us not put ourselves under the bondage of sin and be the slaves of sin, but rather be the master of it as we also see in (Genesis 4:7). Let us continue to love our fellow beings reaffirming in the love of God, and spreading and overcoming this world with the love of God.