Skip to main content

 FORGIVENESS

Ephesians 4:32 "Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you."

When someone slanders you; when someone hurts you; when injustice is what is dealt to you by another; when someone has done something to you that you are certain that should not be forgiven, what do you do?

Well, I know this for sure, unforgiveness will always give birth to resentment, bitterness and even a twisted form of self-righteousness. The pain and sorrow and anger get nursed, coddled, protected, and nurtured in such a way that the details of the offense done to you will most likely get morphed into something more than it was. The offender can begin to be regarded as less than human, evil to the core. In some cases, that may be the actual case, but even then, what will you do?

The image that keeps itself somehow fixed on my mind's eye is Jesus Christ, nailed to the Roman cross praying for those who had put Him there. "Father, forgive them. They had no idea what they are doing." Those people standing near the cross mocked Him, reviled Him, laughed at His unspeakable agony. He forgave them when none of them had even come close to seeing the evil that they had done. None of them had any conviction in their hearts that they were committing heinous sin.

The other mental picture is of St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, as he was being crushed to death by stoning. He looked up to heaven and asked the Lord to not hold the sin of his murders against them. Stephen's forgiveness was the instrument of God's grace to transform Saul of Tarsus into St. Paul, the Apostle.  As you may recall, Saul was holding the coats of the men who were hurling the stones, sanctioning the murder.

The greatest human heart-pain comes from those who were supposed to be loyal but betrayed you. You know, the ones who were supposed to protect you but used and abused you. There are some who were walking with you in life, colleagues, who then turned on you to slander you, to destroy or steal everything you had worked so hard to establish. Then there are those whom we have believed could do no wrong only to find out they had "feet-of-clay" like every other son or daughter of Adam and our lives are rocked by shock.

Then there is that face you look at every morning in the mirror. If you have a living relationship with God through Jesus Christ, you cannot escape the truth that you have the capacity to commit every sin under the sun and to even make sin a lifestyle, save for the grace of God. You have to embrace daily the utter, absolute dependency you have upon the Holy Spirit to finish in you the work of salvation begun by God when you first believed and surrendered the whole of your life to Jesus Christ. 

It was my sin, your sin, the sin of the whole world that crucified the Lord Jesus. St. Paul wrote the God made Jesus, who had never sinned, who had no sin, to become sin on our behalf, being sacrificed by God's will that we might become the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. If anyone is in Christ Jesus, they have become a new creation. Old things have passed away. A new Life has begun and is being lived out in us by the Holy Spirit. And THIS is the work of God who reconciled us to Himself by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Forgiving someone their sin against you in no way minimizes the wrong they have done. Forgiveness releases them to God and releases you from the power of unforgiveness that will rot your very soul and eat away your peace like a cancer. Christ Jesus forgave me long before I believed the Good News. The work that brought me salvation was accomplished by what God did in His Eternal Son, Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh. Salvation is never about what we do or don't do. It is singularly, only what God has done for us, His finished work. He calls us, invites us to believe Him, to trust Him and to give over control of our life to Him. He removes the death within us and gives us the gift of eternal life, bringing us into the Kingdom of His Son, in Whom we have redemption by His blood, the forgiveness of our sin...all of it.

BY forgiving, we are honest about the pain and suffering. We say, "Ouch!" We ask the Lord Jesus to heal our hearts and emotions and to keep on cleansing us from any and all vestiges of the associated resentment or bitterness. I can guarantee, because of God's promise, that the One who began to good work of salvation in you, will bring that work to completion. We are able, by the Holy Spirit's power, to forgive the unforgivable in someone else because God has forgiven the "unforgivable" in us by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. It is a choice we make, trusting the Lord God for the fruit of forgiveness to grow in us. Such forgiveness given and supported by earnest prayer for the one who has wished us harm and has wounded our souls will bear the fruit of the Holy Spirit and can change things by God's grace.

You don't wait for folks to come in contrition to you, admitting their wrongdoing. You take it right away to the Lord and release them to Him, letting Him remove the sting and heal the pain in you. You do not allow that offence done to you "live rent free" in your head! You entrust it to God and ask Him for the grace to act toward the one who has hurt you as Christ Jesus has acted toward you. Forgiveness does not mean that you trust the untrustworthy. It does not mean that you resubmit yourself to an abusive relationship. But it does mean that you pray for that one, those ones, everything you would want someone to pray for you. Forgiveness comes down to trusting God for not only your salvation, but the offender's as well.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

 HEBREWS 10:1-2, 10-18 "The sacrifices under that system ( the Old Covenant) were repeated again and again, year after year, but they were never able to provide perfect cleansing for those who came to worship.   If they could have provided perfect cleansing, the sacrifices would have stopped, for the worshipers would have been purified once for all time, and their feelings of guilt would have disappeared.   For God’s will was for us to be made holy by the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ, once for all time.  Under the Old Covenant, the priest stands and ministers before the altar day after day, offering the same sacrifices again and again, which can never take away sins.   But our High Priest offered Himself to God as a single sacrifice for sins, good for all time. Then He sat down in the place of honor at God’s right hand.   There He waits until His enemies are humbled and made a footstool under His feet.   For by that one offering He forever m...
 James 1:5-8 " If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and He will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking.   But when you ask Him, be sure that your faith is in God alone. Do not waver, for a person with divided loyalty is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind.   Such people should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.   Their loyalty is divided between God and the world, and they are unstable in everything they do." We must remember that God is never upset that we don't know or understand how to live out the New Life He has given to us. That Life is now being lived out in us by the Holy Spirit. This Life of the Kingdom is radically different that the life we are accustomed to living in concert with the world. One of the main marks of a true follower of Jesus Christ is that there is change and ongoing change in us by the Holy Spirit. We do not remain as we once were. The Holy Spirit is conforming us to the Image o...
  OUT IN THE OPEN God has not hidden what He has done to redeem humanity. He offers us the only way of true repentance, faith, forgiveness of sin and a new life that is unending. Truth is, though, He never forces repentance, faith, forgiveness and a new life on anyone. He desires a relationship, not the programmed responses of humanoid AI. His love for us has exposed the utter ruin of humanity because of our rebellion and sin. He doesn’t want us to be deceived into thinking that at the end of our lives here on earth we will all get a “participation trophy”. We have all personalized and internalized our rebellion against God. Humanity’s rebellion against God can be shocking horror or the civilized folly or relying on our broken moral compass to bring ourselves back into a state of wholeness. We want to be the ground of truth. We want our emotions enshrined and worshipped by all. The root problem is that humanity is spiritually dead and separated from Life, Himself. Both pride and ho...