Forgive them Father, for They Know Not What They are Doing

Of all the things we are called to do as Christians, I think by far, the most difficult to comprehend and walk out, would be the identifying with Christ in His suffering at the Cross. In brokenness I have come to the Cross of Christ many times. Primarily for the forgiveness of my own sin. But Jesus, who is sinless, asks us in the Scriptures to identify with His suffering: Suffering on behalf of someone else, or in the case of Christ, for everyone else. I caught a glimpse of this revelation today in prayer. I have never been attacked for my faith before, (except by family) , I think that there are probably few who have in this country, so I always found it difficult to relate to the Scriptures in Acts where the Apostles were beaten and imprisoned and stoned to death for their faith. I know in other countries these atrocities still exist and I thank God we have this freedom in the USA. Somehow, I guess I always thought it would be kind of impossible to identify or even comprehend what Jesus experienced on our behalf.    It was always something that was too great for me to understand, and I left it at that. I know what He did, and I know why He did it, but the pain of it all(physical and emotional and mental) was and is incomprehensible to me. I say all that because I realized today that the key word in the passage is identify. It is always exciting to me when the Spirit impresses upon me a word or phrase in Scripture. It is almost as if I never saw it before. To identify, according to Webster, is to regard as identical, to establish the identity of, to practice psychological identification with, and have sameness of essential character. And I thought I knew what identify meant! As I pulled the definition apart, I began to realize that what I thought was impossible, is now manageable: I can identify with the sufferings of my Lord. While I may never physically hang on a Cross, I choose to lay down my flesh and come before My Savior, in prayer and fasting, to draw nearer to Him and allow Him to draw nearer to me. In that humility, God can give me His compassion for others, and His heart for those who are in darkness. It is only when I identify with Christ in all his suffering that I am given the heart of the Father for the world and, even closer to home, for my own child. For, even in the heart of a mother for her child, there is not the love that it takes to cry out as Jesus did for their forgiveness and spill Himself. I have suffered plenty in my short life; both because of my own sin and due to other's sin. I never counted my sufferings as identifying with Christ in His. I just never thought of it that way. Today, as I was praying with a friend over the phone, I asked God to heal and seal up the hurt and disappointment I was experiencing so that I could love without condition and have the compassion I needed to continue on with my son. You see, I am so deeply saddened by the extreme darkness he is in right now, I need to be able to get past the emotion of my flesh so that the Spirit man can come forward. The same Spirit that enabled Christ at the Cross to cry out "Father, Forgive them, for they know not what they are doing". I have to nail these emotions to the cross, so to speak, because they are interfering now with the work of the Spirit. The enemy of my soul is preying on the weakness of my flesh in the area of my emotions and is continually trying to devour me. Like a lion in the natural world, goes after the weakest one in the herd, so too, is the enemy now after my son. He can't get to me because I am hiding myself in Christ, so he will try to go after my children. It's time to fast and pray!

scheduled

4/6/11

by Claudia

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