And Saul was there, giving approval to his death…But Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off men and women and put them in prison. Acts 8:1, 3
Those are, I think, some pretty sad verses. Fortunately, that’s not the end of the story, because we know very well of Paul’s life & ministry, and we’ve read his letters. We also know that when Paul was doing these horrible things, he believed them to be the work of God, so he slept very well, having a clean conscience (Acts 22:3-5; Acts 23:1).
Do you believe Saul/Paul was forgiven for persecuting the Church? Of course you do. I do too, and so did he (Romans 8:1). Can you imagine Paul writing to the church at Corinth, telling them “I beat my body daily because the sins of my past are too great for me to bear”? I can’t imagine that at all. No, Paul was very convinced of God’s forgiveness, offered to Paul through His grace, bought with the blood of Jesus.
We have been offered that same grace, yet we hear people today say things like, “I know God has forgiven me, but I just have a hard time forgiving myself”, as they hang their head in shame. Consider this — if someone sinned against you and he repented, wouldn’t God forgive him? Wouldn’t you forgive him? Then what right do you have to not extend the same forgiveness to yourself that God has already given? To refuse to forgive oneself is to reject the forgiveness God has given us through Jesus, and we do not have that right.
Paul made some pretty terrible choices, as have all of us, but what part of “no condemnation” doesn’t cover that? Friends, we should thank God each day that we don’t have to live lives of despair and regret. We cannot change anything done in the past; we can only accept God’s mercy and move on to the future. That’s exactly what murderer, persecutor, and sinner Saul of Tarsus did.
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I think you are right about forgiveness. I know my head has hung in shame a few times. Sometimes our arrogance is tied to the independence we desire in not wanting someone to pay the price for us. When I came to realize that Jesus paid the price whether I wanted it or not was a big change for me. The big question as you aluded to is whether we allow God to mold and transform us into a new creature.
Thanks, Bob, my rememberer of my sins works better than my forgetter. Paul used those occasions to emphasize the grace of God, removing the emphasis from himself to the One who gave him life. 1 Tim. 1:15-17, 1 Tim. 1:12-13 “My sin, O the bliss of this wonderful thought, my sin, not in part but the whole is nailed to the cross…”
I can definitely understand the concept of remembering our own sins. Isn’t it interesting that we (all right — I) can’t remember what someone told us this morning, but we hold on to mistakes we made long ago. “Forgive and forget” is so redundant when a divine quality, but so impossible when human. Forgiving oneself is just like forgiving someone else though — you can’t forget it in the sense that you literally wipe it from your memory, but you forget in the sense that you don’t hold it against the other person. Likewise, we shouldn’t hold things against ourselves.
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