The final dance in our backwards living series is as difficult as the moon walk. It stems from the end of Jesus’s physical life on earth in a short 3 words! And these words have the power to absolutely flip your world upside as well as change the world around you! In only five syllables we find a formula for the greatest revolutionary idea and yet, the most challenging phrase to speak, and it’s not because the Greek is so hard (pater aphiemi autos).
Before I speak to this phrase, I want to set this up a little better.
How do you make something easier? Practice, right.
For a CrossFit competition, individuals get the workouts ahead of time and seek to run through them once or twice before doing them for real. These trials allow the body (AND mind) to develop an adaptation, a familiarity, a path of more efficient navigation and execution.
As with any skill, trade, or craft, time invested in an activity will produce a return in that very pursuit.
Most of the time we wait to engage in some practice of a ‘thing’ until we decide it’s needed, after we’ve encountered said ‘thing’ and we realize the great necessity for improvement/development. Maybe this is once we start a job and it requires a new skill, or perhaps once we’ve settled on a major and the career we’ve chosen demands certain capabilities, or picking up a new language once we’ve discovered our inability to communicate in a desired setting, or even after we get inspired to develop a hidden talent like playing an instrument.
In any case, we most commonly choose to practice AFTER we are emerged into an activity.
There are fewer things done solely as practice BEFORE needing to put it to use ON PURPOSE (in most cases). CPR, first aid, and lifeguard training, all things in the medical field, and piloting an aircraft are just a handful of examples. And this is absolutely critical for success in such high-stakes environments. I think we’re all glad a surgeon spends 8 years or more preparing to operate on us.
One that I have had experience with is childbirth!
Before we had our first born, we went to birthing classes for one main reason (as best I can tell): to foreshadow the next 18+ years. This class reveals and seeks to prepare you for the painful, bloody, messy, and shocking destruction of the things you have loved and how the life you’ve lived will never be the same.
I realize that is a bit of a stretch…no pun intended…but the truth remains. We didn’t take childbirth classes for our next two boys. It was only BEFORE the first, but it helped me make it through that process without passing out, throwing up, or quitting in the middle of a contraction.
Let’s go back to the cross. In a painful, bloody, messy, and shocking scene, Jesus is heard crying out these 3 words: FATHER, FORGIVE THEM…
You now know how backwards this. Before anyone asked for forgiveness, Jesus forgives the people who had been stripped, beaten, and nailed to a cross. How did he do that? Practice. Grace.
See, he had grown to understand the desire and intent of his daddy, the purpose for creation, and the BEST way to be human. Grace. And he had been practicing all along the way. It took the Son of God 33 years to get there so you knows it’s going to take us a little longer…like our whole life.
Grace is UNDESERVED FAVOR and isn’t easy. Here’s how I think it’s possible. When we’ve been through the pain, even if it’s just through mental preparation, we know what to expect and it makes going through the fire a little more tolerable. Jesus learned early on and knew that people are flawed and broken and people would fail him. So, he had compassion on them and therefore, could forgive them because he wasn’t holding them on a pedestal but simply trying to pull them up on one.
You and I can do the same. This is truly backwards from the world that says, ‘get even’ and ‘every man for himself’ and ‘get yours’. Everything around us screams self-preservation and promotion is the BEST way to live. But Jesus lives a different way, and it is truly the most freeing way to navigate the world.
I think it’s been said that unforgiveness is like swallowing poison and hoping the other person dies. That bitterness only steals, kills, and destroys us (John 10:10).
So, today, will you live a better way? Will you put your pride down, flip it and reverse it? Will you try it backwards?
Forgive so you can be free.
0 Comments