Forgiveness/atonement Q&A

Sof,

That is longer than a 5 minute convo. Some of my best friends in the world are recovered drug and alcohol addicts. It's a tough thing to forgive yourself. I will attempt to give you a few pieces of advice from personal experience and from what I've learned later.

Assuming you have accepted Christ ...

1) Learn to forgive yourself. God has forgiven you and you should also. I've heard it said like this, when you are saved, God takes all the sins of yours that are written on peices of paper and burns them up. But before He does, the enemy makes a copy so that he can keep showing them to you. The first thing the enemy wants to do is to keep you from coming to know Christ. Second to that, he wants to paralyze your walk to keep others from knowing Him. God asks you to fogive others. You are included in this. He never says "forgive everyone but yourself." You may see yourself as unforivable, but God does not.
2) Learn to love yourself. Don't confuse humbleness and dying to self with not loving yourself. What is the second greatest commandment ... Love your neighbor "as yourself". What does this imply? That it is ok to love yourself. Remember God loves you, so why should you hate you.
3) Learn to see yourself as God sees you. When I see myself as "I" see me, I want to cry or vomit. I see my frailities. My failures. The people I've hurt. When I see myself as "I" see me, I'm very ugly. Then I have to remember that God does not see me this way. If you have children, then you can understand. In my eyes, my children are perfect. I love them unconditionally. They are beautiful and I am so proud of them. God sees us as "justified". Imagine God smiling and laughing while thinking of you. When you beat yourself up, this makes God sad. It would be like your daughter coming up to you and telling you that she feels she is so ugly that she wants to die and that she is bad and that she hates herself. How would that make a parent feel. Learn to see yourself as God sees you. Remember ... you are a child of God.
4) Forget the past. I have done stuff so awefull, I feel I should burn forever. Here is one example (I'm not going to start listing every sin). I use to do drugs alot. As a teenager I would get stoned and go to church with my friends sometimes (for social, not for Christ). Anyways, one time my best friend was going to get baptised and I talked him into getting stoned with me before he got baptised. When I think of me doing that today, it makes me so depressed I could just kill myself. I have repented for many things I've done, many times. Here is the verse that helped free me. Paul (if you only know half of what he had done) says this in Phillipians 3:13 "Forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead". Paul is saying that you have to recognize that you are a new person now. Don't let your past paralyze you. Use the past as a resource to help others (like I'm doing now), but don't live there. When some of my old friends would bring up some of that stuff from my old days .... I would say "That was a different person. I'm not that man now". This doesn't excuse me of responsibility, but I can't fix everything. If God convicts me to make ammends for something in particular, then I do. But the key is what does God want me to do "NOW". I'll give you another example. God has called me into youth ministry. I use the resources of what I (and my friends) went through to help other youth today. I'm not trying to make amends for everything I've done in the past, I simply asked God what does He want me to do today.

Well, this is a start. I would be happy to discuss other things or answer any questions you may have. If this gets too personal (I can understand that), feel free to PM me and we can exchange emails or just talk via PM. If you think others may benefit from this discussion on the board, and you are comfortable with it, we'll discuss it here. I'll be here to help in any way you wish.

Grace and Peace to you.