The Lines We Hide Behind

The following is our email devotional you can subscribe to at www.askthequestion.ca. It will be followed up by a podcast teaching from this coming Sunday.

DON’T FORGET our new service time and location!

Simon Wiesenthal was a young Jew imprisoned in a Nazi death camp during the Holocaust. One day, while on a work detail outside a hospital, he was asked to accompany a nurse to the side of a dying German SS officer. What happened next forms the basis of a book he wrote years after the fact entitled “The Sunflower”. For several hours that afternoon he sat and listened to the terrible confessions of the dying officer who then asked to be forgiven.

What would you have done?

Grace is something we know to be noble – but we also struggle to come to terms with it’s limits (if there are any). Are there situations which go beyond the limits of grace? Can we ever be in a situation where we need to forgive someone else more than we need to be forgiven, ourselves? Can grace ever be reckless? Can withholding grace ever be appropriate?

I guess it all depends on where you draw the line – and on which side of it you find yourself. So where do you draw the line? To go back to our original question, if you were Simon, what would you have done?

This Sunday I’d like to challenge some of your thinking about grace, forgiveness and where you draw that line. And I’ll also let you know what Simon chose to do...

CSW