(pages 200 - 201)

Forgiveness is available for everyone who asks God for it. I asked for it. God provides forgiveness for you through the sacrifice of His son many centuries ago. If you are a Christian, you will have at some stage in your past asked for forgiveness and been forgiven for your sins. You can believe that you are forgiven as that is promised in the bible. You can tell yourself you are forgiven, whether you feel it or not.
Forgiveness is for all your sins. The slate is clean for everybody who has accepted God and asked for His forgiveness. You need to know, friend, that all of your sins are forgiven, instantly. That burden disappears immediately. No more condemnation! You are acquitted, free! Those who follow Jesus are condemned no more. (Romans 8: 1) Even in a place of incarceration and bondage and desolation such as a prison, any condemnation disappears in the eyes of the Lord if you’ve accepted Him. You need to believe that in faith.
You’re entitled to feel clean, scrubbed up and pure in spirit and conscience, because God has promised that to you, and given it to you through His son Jesus.
Take, therefore, the forgiveness that He has lovingly offered you, and live by Him in faith. Walk His walk, talk His talk and live like Him.
Corrections department institutions may lock up your body as punishment if you are in jail, but they cannot keep your spirit in chains. They can chain the body, but not the soul.
If you are a prison inmate, the bars of a cell may imprison your body, but your soul can be free, attached to the unbreakable lifeline of the Spirit of God. You can escape from prison to freedom. You can escape, whether you are a prisoner behind bars or a prisoner only within your mind and your circumstances. You can escape the prison of your body and be given freedom of the soul, if you follow Jesus.
A vast number of people outside of prisons are in many respects, prisoners themselves, because they don’t know and don’t possess the strength that comes from Jesus Christ, and prefer to battle on under their own faulty resources. Accept Jesus, and your soul, the most important part of you, will have no boundaries and no chains and no end. Accept Jesus and you will have eternal life, and your present situation will be but a dot next to the eternity that Jesus has reserved for you.
God can remove your sins as far away from you as the east is from the west,56 which is a mighty distance apart.
Take two powerful light rays. Point one to the east and one to the west. The distance between them will never get closer, because they’re travelling at the speed of light in totally opposite directions, and permanently streaking further away from each other every second. 57 The distance between them cannot be comprehensively measured. That’s the sort of distance God is talking about when He says He will remove your sins from you if you ask Him for forgiveness.
You should be willing to forget your sins of the past when God forgives you. No use harking back to this or that shameful deed if you’ve now accepted Christ. He’s forgotten your sin, so forget it but learn from it! Don’t waste Jesus’ time. Don’t put Him through that crucifixion again and again, which is what you are doing if you’re not accepting that you are forgiven.
Forgiveness removes the guilt, but not unfortunately, the effects of the sins we’ve committed. For example, God may forgive us, but someone may still be suffering through our past sins. We may be forgiven but we still have to face the consequences. Do the crime and serve the time!
We can be forgiven for drug abuse or continual drunkenness, but our bodies may not be the same again. We cannot undo wrongs or take away hurts we have caused. But we can leave those behind us, and start life fresh and new, even in penal institutions.
When you have forgiven yourself as God has forgiven you, you can have hope for the future through Christ…

• READ MORE