SEEDS OF FORGIVENESS by Nicky Cruz
I wish you could experience the miracle that our family has
experienced. I wish you could feel the difference between how we live
now and how we lived during the days of my youth. Today I love my
brothers and sister with a passion. There’s nothing I’d rather do than
sit around and laugh and talk and cry with my family.
The times that I get to travel back to Puerto Rico and visit are some of my most precious memories. When I go home I’m no longer Nicky Cruz the evangelist or speaker; I’m just a brother. I’m just one of the family, and I love that. In fact, two of my brothers pastor churches in Puerto Rico, and they’ve never even asked me to speak to their congregations. They know that when I come home I come to hang out.
I have so many memories of staying up late with my family, eating and laughing and joking and praying and crying together. Sometimes we stay up until one o’clock in the morning telling stories. Trading jokes. Relishing the joy we all share. It’s like one big fiesta!
But that’s not how it used to be with us. We weren’t always so happy and carefree and loving. When Jesus came into our lives, He brought with Him an explosion of love! He opened the floodgates of mercy and forgiveness. In my family there is a lot of pain in our past, yet not one of us harbors feelings of resentment. No one holds a grudge. We hold nothing but love in our hearts among us. We don’t spend any time in regret; we just rejoice in the Jesus we know today—in the future He brings to us all.
It breaks my heart to see families that hold on to the past. Brothers and sisters who hang on to bitterness and resentment from days long gone. Husbands and wives who have been hurt by words or actions, so they allow the pain to fester, to grow, to eat away at them like a cancer.
Jesus can do for the human heart what no one else can do. He can bring about change unlike anything we could imagine. When He comes to live in your heart, He does more than forgive you, He leaves behind seeds of forgiveness. Supernatural seeds that will not only erase the sin, but erase the pain that sin has brought.
I could never thank Jesus enough for what He has done for our family. For the forgiveness and mercy and grace that He has brought, bringing us back together.
And He can do the same for anyone.
__________
Nicky Cruz, internationally known evangelist and prolific author, turned to Jesus Christ from a life of violence and crime after meeting David Wilkerson in New York City in 1958. The story of his dramatic conversion was told first in The Cross and the Switchblade by David Wilkerson and then later in his own best-selling book Run, Baby, Run.
The times that I get to travel back to Puerto Rico and visit are some of my most precious memories. When I go home I’m no longer Nicky Cruz the evangelist or speaker; I’m just a brother. I’m just one of the family, and I love that. In fact, two of my brothers pastor churches in Puerto Rico, and they’ve never even asked me to speak to their congregations. They know that when I come home I come to hang out.
I have so many memories of staying up late with my family, eating and laughing and joking and praying and crying together. Sometimes we stay up until one o’clock in the morning telling stories. Trading jokes. Relishing the joy we all share. It’s like one big fiesta!
But that’s not how it used to be with us. We weren’t always so happy and carefree and loving. When Jesus came into our lives, He brought with Him an explosion of love! He opened the floodgates of mercy and forgiveness. In my family there is a lot of pain in our past, yet not one of us harbors feelings of resentment. No one holds a grudge. We hold nothing but love in our hearts among us. We don’t spend any time in regret; we just rejoice in the Jesus we know today—in the future He brings to us all.
It breaks my heart to see families that hold on to the past. Brothers and sisters who hang on to bitterness and resentment from days long gone. Husbands and wives who have been hurt by words or actions, so they allow the pain to fester, to grow, to eat away at them like a cancer.
Jesus can do for the human heart what no one else can do. He can bring about change unlike anything we could imagine. When He comes to live in your heart, He does more than forgive you, He leaves behind seeds of forgiveness. Supernatural seeds that will not only erase the sin, but erase the pain that sin has brought.
I could never thank Jesus enough for what He has done for our family. For the forgiveness and mercy and grace that He has brought, bringing us back together.
And He can do the same for anyone.
__________
Nicky Cruz, internationally known evangelist and prolific author, turned to Jesus Christ from a life of violence and crime after meeting David Wilkerson in New York City in 1958. The story of his dramatic conversion was told first in The Cross and the Switchblade by David Wilkerson and then later in his own best-selling book Run, Baby, Run.