Forgiveness and Forbearance

Hi everyone! We know its been a while since our last post... Wedding planning has been picking up and I got a job working fulltime at the Yogurtland Corporate Office. There are a lot of exciting things that we want to share about, but in the meantime, here's a quote from This Momentary Marriage (free pdf here), a book by John Piper that Vanessa and I have been reading together:

""As the Lord has forgiven you, so you must also forgive" your spouse. As the Lord "bears with" you, so you should bear with your spouse. The Lord "bears with" us every day as we fall short of His will. Indeed, the distance between what Christ expects of us and what we achieve is infinitely greater than the distance between what we expect of our spouse and what he or she achieves. Christ always forgives more and endures more than we do. Forgive as you have been forgiven. Bear with as He bears with you. This holds true whether you are married to a believer or an unbeliever. Let the measure of God's grace to you in the cross of Christ be the measure of your grace to your spouse" 

(Piper, John. This Momentary Marriage. Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books 2009, 46.)

Piper draws these thoughts from Colossians 3:12-13. Needless to say, this idea of forgiving and bearing with others does not apply just to married and soon to be married people. It applies to all who have experienced the gracious salvation of God. The bolded section could just as easily be read, "Let the measure of God's grace to you in the cross of Christ be the measure of your grace to your roommate/brother/sister/classmate/pastor/that awkward person at church/that annoying person at church". If all believers treated each other with the same grace we were shown on the Cross, our churches, homes, and campus ministries would look extremely different! Yet, the solution lies, as always, in the Gospel. We must, by faith, continue to sink our roots deeper into the Gospel, God's greatest outpouring of grace onto us.