I have sometimes heard a brother or a sister say:  “I can forgive, but I cannot forget.”  Brethren, we would not feel very well if the Lord were to say this to us and of us.  How would we be made to feel if our blessed Lord were to say to each of us:  “I am willing to forgive your trespasses against me; I am willing to save you, because I have promised to save all who repent and believe my Gospel; but I can never forget the way you have treated me, and will never be willing to trust you as I could have trusted you; and can never again have the same confidence in you that I would have had, had you treated me in a different way”?  Such forgiveness as this on the part of our Lord toward us would rob salvation of all its joy.  It would turn the sun into darkness and the moon into blood.  It would change the harmony of heaven into notes of discord in our ears.  But this would be the very sort of forgiveness that is implied in the saying:  “I can forgive, but I cannot forget.”

Notice, however, the care and the order apparent in the insertion of that loving clause, “and your sins will I remember no more.”  Notice the introduction:  “I will be to you a God; and ye shall be to me a people.”  In what follows the Divine Love is strongly marked:  “For I will be merciful to your iniquities, and your sins will I remember no more.”  This last crowns it all.  The same thing is meant by the prophet in another place where the Lord says:  “As far as the east is from the west, so far have I removed your sins from you;” and again:  “He hath cast our sins into the bottom of the sea;” so deep down are they that they will never rise up against us any more.

Such must our forgiveness of one another be, brethren and sisters, if we would imitate the Lord.  We should never forget that genuine forgiveness implies a complete forgetfulness of all trespasses in the past.  Our Lord says:  “If ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses.”  To forgive from the heart is to forgive in love; and love thinketh no ill of one’s brother or sister.

Let each one examine himself.  If you feel in your heart that you love the Lord your God with all your heart, and your brother and your sister in the Lord as you love yourself, I feel authorized in behalf of Christ and the church to say to you that Jesus will remember your sins no more.  You have a right to sing the song: 

  “Savior, more than life to me,
  I am clinging close to thee;
  Let thy blood, by faith applied,
  Keep me ever near thy side. 
  Every day and every hour,
  Let me feel thy cleansing power,
  Till my soul is lost in love,
  In a brighter world above.”

TUESDAY, September 20.  Love feast at our meetinghouse.  John 3 was read.  David Correll and Abraham Miller and his wife were baptized.

WEDNESDAY, September 21.  Benjamin Bowman and I start very early to Hampshire County, Virginia.  We get dinner at Rorabaugh’s, and reach Moorefield by night, after a ride on horseback of forty-seven miles.