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.