In this episode of the Parenting Pathway Podcast, pastors Dave Carl and Nathan Kocurek discuss the challenging nature of forgiveness. Listen as they ask the following questions and discuss what’s standing in the way of accepting forgiveness from God.

We must believe that we are valuable and important to God. We are His workmanship.

For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Ephesians 2:10

These are lifelong questions to grapple with. We see a perfect example in the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32). In this story, we see that the father represents the love of Christ, and the prodigal son represents the sin that exists in all of us. When the son returns to his father, the son asks for forgiveness. The loving father grants him forgiveness and celebrates his return. But the second son is also an important character to our discussion of forgiveness. He is unable to forgive his brother for leaving, or his father for forgiving his brother. In his unwillingness to forgive, the prodigal son’s brother has created a wall of separation between himself and his “heavenly” father.

We desire to be the loving and forgiving father in this illustration to our children, but unless we are willing to dwell in God’s forgiveness, we are unable to truly show our children what forgiveness looks like.

The Singular Purpose of Christianity