I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality (unless I watch myself very carefully) asking Him to do something quite different.\u00c2\u00a0 I am asking Him not to forgive me but to excuse me.\u00c2\u00a0 But there is all the difference in the world between forgiving and excusing.\u00c2\u00a0 Forgiveness says, “Yes, you have done this thing, but I accept your apology; I will never hold it against you and everything between us two will be exactly as it was before.”\u00c2\u00a0 But excusing says “I see that you couldn’t help it or didn’t mean it; you weren’t really to blame.”\u00c2\u00a0 If one was not really to blame then there is nothing to forgive.\u00c2\u00a0 In that sense forgiveness and excusing are almost opposites….<\/p>\n
A great deal of our anxiety to make excuses comes from not really believing in it [forgiveness], from thinking that God will not take us to Himself again unless He is satisfied that some sort of case can be made out in our favour.\u00c2\u00a0 But that would not be forgiveness at all.\u00c2\u00a0 Real forgiveness means looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its horror, dirt, meanness, and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the man who has done it.\u00c2\u00a0 That, and only that, is forgiveness, and that we can always have from God if we ask for it.<\/p>\n
— C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, <\/em>quoted in A Year with C. S. Lewis, <\/em>edited by Patricia S. Klein, p. 263-264<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality (unless I watch myself very carefully) asking Him to do something quite different.\u00c2\u00a0 I am asking Him not to forgive me but to excuse me.\u00c2\u00a0 But there is all the difference in the world between forgiving and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-forgiveness","category-god"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}