Forgiveness
Bless you reader!
Continuing our theme on love we are starting a new study on what we will call ‘Love Helps’. These will be different themes on how we can learn, by God’s Word, how to better love God and others. We are starting with forgiveness as our first topic.
“And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” Eph. 4:32
Have you seen it?: Two people that apparently care for one another experience an offense that they cannot get over. They become bitter and resentful and eventually grow or move apart.
I have seen it. I have lived it. Both as the offender and as the unforgiver. You may have also noticed that both parties are often obsessed with the subject of the other persons actions (very often as a means to justify their own actions). They are also often quite sincere in their desire to be reconciled ‘somehow’. But this ‘somehow’ always seems to them to be near impossible given the other persons “faults, inadequacies, personality, past actions etc”.
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The other day someone told me that they said something about me that was not only offensive, but untrue. Naturally, I was surprised as well as hurt and I acted bitter and resentful in response. They soon fully acknowledged their wrong and asked for my forgiveness. But I did not want to forgive them. I did not feel like forgiving them. Still, I chose to focus my mind immediately on ways in which I had done exactly what they had done.
“Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” Matt. 7:4.
I thought of many different scenarios where I displayed the same behavior. I then reminded myself of the fact that God would not ask us to forgive others if He did not in fact fully forgive us. A comforting thought!
POOF! I forgave them. Well, not really. Over the next hour a ‘root of bitterness’ would spring up as I remembered the offense and I would get resentful and angry again. But every time I would go back and look at my own similar behavior and the unforgiveness would go away. Eventually the bitterness faded and I was able to return to focusing on being a good friend to this person that had just previously hurt me. This is a great characteristic of true friendship, befriending people that are not always deserving of friendship.
Not only is forgiving a truly Godlike behavior well worth practicing (Eph. 4:32 et. al.) it also allows us to carry on in loving one another.
July 20th, 2010 at 7:58 pm
July 22nd, 2010 at 10:20 am
WOW! So very well spoken Anthony! Forgiveness is a hard one for most people! We only see faults of others to justify ourselves when indeed we are sometimes just as guilty as the other party. Forgiveness is something I learned early in life. But my situations have changed since I have gotten a little older, God could clearly see it was easy for me to forgive so he then gave me a new task. He told me to buy a gift for this girl that clearly did not like me. We worked in the same office and she despised my knowledge and I think she felt as though I was a threat to her job. So to make a long story short she tried to make me look bad in front of the boss. Well durning this time God told me to start complementing her and he told me to buy her a gift. I was like God you gotta be kidding me??? So after talking with God I obeyed. This went on for about 6 months. In return God blessed me with another job where not only my boss complimented me on my work so did my colleages! It was truly a blessing. I was rewarded with a better job, advanced pay, and better benefits! It always pays to listen to God!!!!
August 9th, 2010 at 9:29 am
Good stuff! The Casting Crowns song “East to West” has some very powerful lyrics. In the last year, I have come to a new realization of God’s forgiveness. I pretty-much did what the Prodical Son did in that parable….I asked God for ‘my inheritance’, he gave it to me, I squandered it over the course of about 12 years, and when I came back to God, he accepted me without hesitation, he has blessed me tremendously, and is essentially ‘throwing me a party’.
A few months ago, I was reading about forgiveness and would like to share something I learned:
This was new to me – Only God can Forgive AND Forget. We humans are simply not wired to “forget” wrongs against us. The Bible never tells us to forgive and forget. It does say that God forgives us this way, he forgives and does not remember our sins. We are to forgive others because we have been forgiven. We aren’t commanded to forget, to do something that is impossible in our human nature. Complete forgiveness human-to-human does not imply that we forget the offense ever occurred, I believe now that it means “I remember the offense and the hurt, but the anger/resentment and other negative feelings aren’t there anymore.”
That understanding was freeing for me. Until this point, I wondered how I could ever “Forgive and Forget”. I felt burdened, thinking that I had to forget or somehow put out of my mind the offenses of another toward me if I was to honestly say I had forgiven that person. To realize that I could give my feelings about the offense to God and ask him to help me ‘feel’ differently toward the offender was the lifting of a weight like I had never experienced before. God has and will continue to help me in this area.
September 24th, 2010 at 3:40 pm
Hi Monda,
Just noticed how you obeyed God and God is still blessing you with better and better jobs..
I think He must really love you..
anthony