How Much Have You Been Forgiven? Susan Barnes
“But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.” Luke 7:47Jesus told Simon a story of two men who each owed a moneylender a debt. One owed a little, while the other owed a huge amount, both had their debts cancelled and Jesus asked Simon, “Now which of them will love him more?”
Simon responded, “I suppose the one who had the bigger debt forgiven.”
“You have judged correctly,” Jesus said. He concluded the conversation with Simon by saying, “But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.”
How much have we been forgiven? Little or much?
Living in a fallen world and mixing with sinners every day it becomes easy to take sin for granted. We think of sin in terms of murder, theft or immorality, but Jesus includes our thoughts and our attitudes (Matthew 5:21-48). We tend to measure sin by how badly it affects other people, when we should measure sin by how badly it affects God. Luther felt that if the greatest commandment was to love God with all our heart, with all our mind, with all our soul and with all our strength and to love our neighbour as ourselves. He believed the greatest sin was to fail to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength and to fail to love our neighbour as ourselves. When we measure sin like this, it makes us aware of how far short we fall of God’s standards and how grateful we ought to be that God sacrificed his only Son on our behalf, so that we can be in relationship with him.
This Easter, let’s remember, how much we have been forgiven, so that we will love much.
Susan Barnes – pursuing a life worth writing about in Australia. Contact 
