"It is impossible to risk your life to make others glad in God if you are an unforgiving person. If you are wired to see other people's faults and failures and offenses...you will not take risks for their joy. This wiring--and it is universal in all human beings--must be dismantled. We will not gladly risk to make people glad in God if we hate them, or hold grudges against them, or are repelled by their faults...We must become forgiving people....
It is true to say: The motive for being a forgiving person is that we have been forgiven by God when we did not deserve it...But the bottom of this motive is not God's forgiveness, but what God's forgiveness gives. It gives us God...
A free and clean conscience enables us to see more of God and frees us to enjoy Him. Escape from hell at the cost of Christ's blood shows us more of God's commitment to merciful holiness and His desire for our happiness. The gift of seeing loved ones [in heaven] highlights God's wonder in creating relationships of love. Getting a new body deepens our identification with the glorified Christ. But if God Himself is not there in these gifts--and I fear He is not for many professing Christians--then we do not know what forgiveness is for.
Forgiveness is essentially God's way of removing the great obstacle to our fellowship with Him. By canceling our sin and paying for it with the death of His own Son, God opens the way for us to see Him and know Him and enjoy Him forever. Seeing and savoring Him is the goal of forgiveness. Soul-satisfying fellowship with our Father is the aim of the cross. If we love being forgiven for other reasons alone, we are not forgiven, and we will waste our lives...
God's forgiveness is important for one reason: it gives us God!"
~John Piper in Don't Waste your Life
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