Forgiveness
I believe I am forgiven, and I am still living every day with the damage I caused. Why did the consequences not lift along with the guilt?
“And David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the LORD. And Nathan said unto David, The LORD also hath put away thy sin; thou shalt not die.”
Nathan confronts David over Bathsheba and Uriah, and the pardon comes immediately: the LORD has put away your sin. What follows over the next chapters is a family in pieces for years. The narrative holds both of those together without any embarrassment. Forgiveness in Scripture restores the relationship with God, and it does not usually rewind the events.
“For I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.”
Paul, writing to a church that had questioned his credentials, calls himself the least of the apostles because he persecuted the church. He never stops naming it. In the same breath he says that by God's grace he is what he is, and that the grace given to him was not wasted. He carried the history and did the work anyway, which is a model rather than a consolation prize.
A path forward
Do the repair work still available to you: an apology, a payment, a changed pattern. Grace does not remove the responsibility, it gives you the freedom to face it.
Stop using the consequences as evidence that you are not forgiven. Those are two separate questions and you keep answering the first with the second.
Serve somewhere this month in an area connected to what you have lived through. Forgiven history is often the most useful thing a person has to give.
Closing verse
“He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.”
- Psalm 40:2
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