Friday, June 1, 2018
Little forgiven, little love
Luke 7:47
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.
Most of my time this week was spent participating in the Prison Fellowship Caribbean Forum 2018. The Forum brought together leaders and volunteers of national Prison Fellowship ministries from nine Caribbean countries. The more than 30 delegates discussed various approaches to improving how our ministries work and how we could work better together. Some participants are pastors while many are not. The discussions were very lively and very productive.
During the various presentations and discussions some participants were invited to share their testimonies about finding faith in God and about their passion for prison ministry. My young female assistant, who is providing all of the secretariat duties for the Forum, was nervous on the first day after hearing a few persons in the room testify that they were former inmates imprisoned charged for murder.
Former inmates, who are involved in prison ministry, bring a certain passion to their work that made me feel inadequate to the task and unqualified to serve. I have never been arrested and so never been incarcerated, I see the prison from outside looking in, but these former inmates see the prison from inside out. Fortunately, former inmates show an appreciation to prison ministers because we visited them in prison and gave them hope.
The intensity of fervour and commitment displayed by former inmates now in the ministry seems to come from them knowing what they have been delivered from in the justice system and, more importantly, what they have been forgiven of by God. Like we say in the streets, who feels it knows it.
In Luke 7:36-50, we have a story recorded of Jesus’ visit to the home of a Pharisee named Simon. We are left wondering why, in the circumstances, he invited Jesus to his house, and how, given who he was, a sinful woman was able to come in and engage with Jesus. It is clear that Simon knew what kind of woman she was and used the event to judge Jesus in his mind.
Jesus, sensing this, goes off on an apparent tangent, telling Simon a story about a man who had loaned money to two other men. Jesus many times used stories and situations of monetary debt to illustrate sin and forgiveness and did the same here to help His host work through the issues presented by the woman.
Simon saw the woman as very sinful, Jesus also saw her as very sinful and very much needing forgiveness. But Jesus goes on to expose the human condition. That often our depth of love and gratitude is commensurate with the depth of the hole from which we were pulled. This is normal in life situations.
Applied spiritually, Jesus was making the point that the love shown for the saviour is often likewise in direct proportion to the sense of the gravity of the sins from which we have been forgiven. Those who have been forgiven much tend to be more passionate in their love and commitment to God. Her demonstration of love was evidence of the forgiveness that she received by faith she placed in Jesus.
When the delegates to the Prison Fellowship Caribbean Forum 2018 visited the remote prison located at Mazaruni near the confluence of the Essequibo, Mazaruni, and Cuyuni rivers, there was an amazing display of empathy for the inmates. Much prison ministry is done from sympathy, much is done from compassion, and still much is done from a sense of obligation. But it takes former inmates to show the empathy that the rest of us cannot demonstrate. No matter how many times we repeat the words, “I felt like a prisoner” unless you were a prisoner it rings hollow to those in prison.
Those former prisoners who were here this week, especially those who were in for very serious crimes, have a sense of the gravity of their sins compared with those of us who have been well behaved Sunday School teachers since we were teenagers. We were just like Simon in today’s story. Simon was probably thinking about himself as a good person, one who behaved himself well as a youth and, when he grew up, became a Pharisee.
Being well behaved, he didn’t have much from which to be forgiven, and so he couldn’t appreciate the conduct of this sinful woman in his house. Many of us are this way without knowing it. We have behaved ourselves relatively well, kept out of trouble, never went to prison and so we have a view of others without even understanding where they are coming from.
We sometimes see persons who are very zealous about their faith, committed to the work of the church, always there for every meeting and always pressing those who don’t seem to be as committed as they are. We back away and call them fanatics or other names. But we don’t always know their story. We might have been forgiven of little and so we love and commit little. Those folks might have been forgiven much and so love much and commit much.
Think on these things:
- How much did you have to be forgiven of?
- Do you believe that your commitment to Jesus and ministry is equal to your view of how much you have been forgiven?
- Do you know anyone who was forgiven of much and now demonstrates a level of love and commitment to match that forgiveness?
Prayer focus:
Let us pray today that we would love the Lord with all of our being for we have been forgiven of sin.
In His Grace
Pastor Alex