A Comparison of True, Effective Forgiveness and False, Ineffective Forgiveness
Brian Lockard (Canyon Verde Elder and Minister of Music)
6:9-15
9 “Pray, then, in this way: ‘Our Father who is in heaven, Hallowed be Your name.
10 ‘Your kingdom come. Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.
11 ‘Give us this day our daily bread.
12 ‘And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 ‘And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
14 For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
15 But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.
Forgiveness is frequently on the mind of Christ’s followers. Whether praying as Jesus taught us in the passage above, reflecting on the forgiveness of our sins while partaking of communion, or putting the words of that prayer into practice, the life of a Christian should be infused with forgiveness, both received from God and offered to others.
The world and its various religions also have forms of forgiveness, but they are different than that which Christ displayed and expected from His disciples. It is necessary for believers to constantly fight worldly influences so that they display Christ’s forgiveness and do not conform to the world’s unforgiveness or shallow, ineffective forms of forgiveness. We do not want to settle for the inferior product. We, as Christ’s body, need to show forgiveness in such a way that unbelievers recognize the Spirit within us doing things that people do not naturally do. In the same sermon that includes the current passage under consideration and the Beatitudes, Jesus calls us to radical forgiveness.
Matthew 5:43-48
43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’
44 But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?
47 If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?
You cannot love an enemy that you are angry towards and have not forgiven. The forgiveness that can lead to this kind of love is what will make us stand out as not being conformed to this world.
Where to begin a discussion of forgiveness? We will begin with the offense (trespass, debt, etc.), whether grievous or minor. Forgiveness isn’t necessary if you haven’t offended someone or had someone offend you, but forgiveness is how God wants us to respond when we have suffered an offense.
Proverbs 19:11
“A man’s discretion makes him slow to anger,
And it is his glory to overlook an offense.”
1) Ineffective Forgiveness
First, we will look at the way the world responds to offenses. A couple examples I use involve governments, but I want to make sure that you DO NOT think I am suggesting that governments should forgive all offenses. God put governments in place for our good and they should carry out the law.
Romans 13:1 Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God.
You should think of the individuals involved in each of these cases and compare their view of forgiveness to your own responsibility, rather than get bogged down in questions of international legal proceedings. Also, forgiveness does not necessarily remove physical, temporal consequences that God has put in place for our everlasting good.
I Cor. 5:5 “I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.”
I want to look at examples in the world, poor imitations which creep into our own practice of forgiveness and compare them with true forgiveness to make certain that we do not “conform to this world” and settle for counterfeit forgiveness.
- A) Worldly Forgiveness Demands an Apology
When the world responds to an offense, it demands an apology before it will forgive. In the flesh, we want to see that the offending one is sorry for their actions before we bestow forgiveness. One example of this is the life of Mrs. Martin, an elderly lady I met who had survived the Holocaust as a teenager. She had been in the concentration camps at the age of thirteen and was horribly abused by the soldiers there. After the war was over, she was glad to see those who had hurt her receive their punishment. (Some were put in prison for life and some were executed for their crimes.) However, seeing justice served did not allow her to move beyond her anger towards those men. As an elderly lady, she was asked if she was ever able to forgive the prison guards after justice was served and many years had passed.
She very clearly said that she had not forgiven them and was still angry. She turned the question around and asked the interviewer, “How could I forgive them?” (A very reasonable question if you are not a Christian!) She had such strong feelings about the situation that she felt she couldn’t overcome them in order to forgive. It was then asked of her, “Would you forgive them if they came to you personally and individually asked your forgiveness?” She replied that she thought she might be able to if the soldiers came to her and apologized. Of course, those soldiers are now dead, so she will never receive the apology that she thinks might allow her to let go of her anger. Not to mention that even if she could have them come apologize, she would never know for certain that the apology was sincere. We can never know a person’s heart, so why would depend on a sincere apology in order to forgive? This is an untenable position which demonstrates that demanding an apology before forgiving is really not forgiving at all.
I don’t know how I would respond if I had experienced such terrible things, but I do know that by taking the world’s way of demanding an apology means that this woman will finish her life still bitter after 70 years of opportunities to forgive. No matter the circumstances – apology or not – Christians don’t have the option to respond in this manner.
Paul instructs in Ephesians 4:31, “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.”
Fortunately for the believer, we don’t have the impossible task of mustering the strength to overcome incredible hurts like those of Mrs. Martin. We can trust in the power of the Holy Spirit to supernaturally overcome those barriers. Paul’s list of things to put away is in the context of a discussion of Jesus giving gifts to His people through the Holy Spirit
- B) Worldly Forgiveness Returns to the Offense
Another worldly response to an offense is to forgive only for a time and then revive the hurt, anger, bitterness, etc. With worldly forgiveness you can never live at peace, because your past offenses could rise again. The best example of this I know is the former President/Dictator of Chile, Augusto Pinochet. He was known to have committed many serious offenses against his own people including thousands of false imprisonments and assassinations. When he left power in Chile, there were enough people in the government willing to forgive him that he was allowed to leave the country and live in exile. People want to get on with life and their business with pursuing other things can look like forgiveness.
For a short time, it seemed that Pinochet had been forgiven his crimes and would live out his days in peace. However, it did not take long for those same people who had forgiven him to have enough time think back on his offenses and decide to bring charges against him. But, once again, it seemed that forgiveness overcame his offenses when enough members of the Chilean government passed a law creating the office of Ex-President, giving Pinochet immunity. Not long after, though, some of the same people pushed to have him indicted again under international regulations, while in Britain. He ended up appearing to receive forgiveness yet again when the House of Lords decided not to prosecute because his health was failing and he would die soon anyway. When he did pass away at the age of 91, unforgiveness returned yet again with protestors (particularly the children of those he had harmed) spitting on his coffin. I think we can clearly see that the world’s forgiveness that only lasts for a certain time is not really forgiveness at all.
This example is governmental in nature, but in our personal lives we don’t want to participate on either side in this appearance of forgiveness that never truly forgives. We can “forgive” simply to not have to deal with the difficulty or because we are too busy. We could also “forgive” in order to protect ourselves from being revealed as offenders while still holding onto the offense.
But, I Corinthians 13:5 calls us to “not take into account a wrong suffered,” or in another translation “keep no record of wrongs.” Do we speak forgiveness out of convenience, but keep a record and return to the offense, repeatedly thinking it through? Do you return to past offenses that you thought you had forgiven only to feel them eating at you as though it were a new offense? Instead we need to pray that the Spirit would empower us to act as Jesus directed Peter in Matthew 18:12 and forgive again and again as it comes to your mind.
- C) Worldly Forgiveness Leaves Broken Relationships
In our third and last sample of the world’s incorrect idea of forgiveness, I want to consider the end of Apartheid (separation of blacks and whites) in South Africa. When the segregation officially came to an end, the leaders of South Africa realized that the wrongs of almost 50 years would need to be addressed. They wanted to restore the divided country, but didn’t want massive retribution or blanket amnesty. Instead, reconciliation commissions were created that allowed past wrongdoers to come forward, admit their crimes and be publicly humiliated.
The idea of the commissions was to provide an opportunity for confession that would lead to restored relationships between white offenders and black victims. The offender would then be protected from future prosecution for the crimes and the victim would have their wrong treatment recognized. However, without some kind of payment or restitution, most victims did not see that justice was served and relationships were never restored. The white and black communities remain divided to this day. With any offense there is a breakdown in relationship, whether slight or complete, that needs to be restored.
If you follow the world’s way of leaving broken relationships after offenses, you will end up with a very lonely, divided world, because everyone will offend you at some time or other. The church in particular needs to be very careful to restore relationships after offenses so that the body of Christ functions as it should and is a witness to unbelievers like Jesus taught in John 13:35, “By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”
We see this described in the church in Galatians 6, “Brethren, even if anyone is caught in any trespass, you who are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness; each one looking to yourself, so that you too will not be tempted.”
At this point you might be saying, “There a huge hole in your discussion. You can’t ask people to forgive every offense with no apology, no payment, and no justice! How can Holocaust victims, those trampled by dictators like Pinochet, and exploited victims of racism forgive completely without payment?”
They can’t! We have a sense of justice, even if it is biased in our favor. In our flesh, cases of real or even perceived injustice will not allow us to forgive in the way that God desires. However, the price that our distorted justice and ultimately God’s perfect justice demands has already been paid by the death of Jesus on the cross.
Romans 4:25 says, “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”
Whatever your demands might be, they are nothing in comparison to God’s demands, and He has been satisfied by Christ’s sacrifice, and that frees you and I to be satisfied as well.
Now that we have considered the depressing, ineffective options the world offers in response to offenses and seen how they don’t line up with Scripture, let us enjoy the incredible truths of God’s response to our offenses – Christ’s perfect example of effective forgiveness that leads to a love that is not of this world.
2) Effective Forgiveness
When discussing God’s response to our offensive actions, I think it is good to remember that we cannot even comprehend how wretched our offenses are to God. He refers to our righteous acts as “filthy rags” in Isaiah 64:6, so you can imagine what He thinks of our offenses. They are worse than the most terrible stories of the past or those available in the media today and yet, He forgives. Truly, we could spend eternity amazed at His forgiveness. Let’s quickly look at three examples.
A) Effective Forgiveness Takes Action Before Repentance.
Romans 5:6-8: “For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
In contrast to the first example, God did not wait for an apology from every individual in order to take action to provide forgiveness. Yes, God’s justice demands payment in order for forgiveness to take place, but Christ died for us, in spite of the fact that we didn’t even recognize our sin yet, much less apologized or repent of it! God took action first, and we should do likewise when we are offended.
B) Effective Forgiveness Doesn’t Change.
This verse is a quote from Jeremiah – Hebrews 8:12“For I will be merciful to their iniquities,
And I will remember their sins no more.”
We never have to worry about God changing His mind about forgiveness and bringing up our offenses. Yes, there are temporal consequences to sin that might keep rearing their ugly heads, but in God’s eyes we are covered by the blood of Christ and He no longer remembers our sins. He doesn’t have a fallen mind like us that can think it has forgiven and then be overcome by a past offense. There is no concern that God will bring up our sins again in this life or the next.
C) Restores relationships.
Ephesians 1:5: “He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished on us.”
Perhaps the most incredible part of God’s forgiveness is that He restores the relationship that we lost at the Fall. God could have forgiven our sins because Christ paid the price and still not like us, but NO! Despite our ugly offenses, God chose to adopt us as sons and lavish us with His grace.
When comparing products would you ever choose the one that doesn’t do what you are looking for? Would you pick the product that Consumer Reports scored lowest in every category when its price was the highest? NO!
3) Our Response to Offense – Recognize the Price has Been Paid
So, how do we apply these examples of God’s forgiveness in our own lives? How can we act before the other party has shown any inclination of apology, don’t bring up those past offenses, and work toward relationship restoration?
The first action we need to take is to repent and confess to God our own offenses so that we might receive the forgiveness that is available as a result of Christ’s sacrifice.
I John 1:9 “If we confess our sins God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
If you have not done this, you won’t make any progress in the area of forgiveness, but if you have recognized God’s forgiveness for you despite your own offenses, there is hope. I became a Christian quite young (8), but I have plenty of memories of holding grudges, wanting payment in some way for things I saw as hurting me. That was my flesh responding, which is not capable of responding as God asks. Physical, emotional, and psychological hurts create very strong, subconscious reactions in our body that cannot be overcome without the help of the Holy Spirit.
Romans 8:13-14 “So then, brethren, we are under obligation, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh13 for if you are living according to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live. 14 For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.”
Without supernatural intervention, my flesh would always have taken the prideful “natural” route of this fallen world as it did in my younger years. Now I can put to death those “natural” reactions of my body and live as an adopted “son of God” who receives and gives effective forgiveness when I submit to the Holy Spirit. Let’s pray now that we will do so more and more.
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