Forgiveness

Twenty-three years ago, my soon-to-be wife gave me the greatest gift a person can ever experience. She taught me the importance of forgiveness. True, lasting forgiveness.

All of us have been wronged and hurt by others. Sometimes it’s an ex, a wife or husband, a child, a parent or other family member, or a friend. Whatever the situation may be, it leaves wounds and they don’t always heal on their own. Sometimes the person knows what they did and sometimes they don’t.

At the time, I felt justified in not forgiving someone that hadn’t asked for it. After all, God only forgives our sins after we confess them and seek forgiveness. Or, at least that was what I was taught.

The problem is we aren’t God and that’s not exactly biblical. In the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus taught us how to pray, he ended with,

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.

But then he went on to explain,

For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you:

But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

We see this echoed again in Matthew 18:21ff. where Peter asks, “Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times?” And the Lord goes on to tell the parable of The Wicked Servant. In short, the king forgave him a debt of 10,000 talents, but then the man went out and nearly throttled someone that owed him a 100 pence. When the king heard of it, he chastised the wicked servant and delivered him to the tormentors in prison until he paid every last bit of his far greater debt.

Now, I’m not going to get into the long-term spiritual implications of this. Rather I want to relate it as my wife did to day-to-day life.

When we have been wronged and deeply hurt by someone it sticks with us. It holds us down and keeps us back from what we could accomplish, from what we could be, and what we could experience. It keeps us from having real joy in our own lives. In effect, it keeps us in the prison of the torment of our own hurt.

We may tell ourselves, “They can’t hurt me. That person will never hurt me again”, but we cycle back around to those memories, to those hurts from time to time. We may hate the person and that hate may even be justified. But it keeps us in bondage.

As Cindy asked me, “Have you ever forgiven them?”

That hit home. I had not and I realized I had carried that hurt around for decades. In that moment of vulnerability, in that moment of brokenness and honesty with myself, I was able to finally, truly forgive them and I did the hardest thing I’d ever done. Picked up the phone and called them.

I was fortunate. When they answered the phone, they told me they had been expecting the call for years. I’m not sure it went the way they expected, but by the end of the call our relationship was restored and it has been ever since.

Not all of you have that luxury. I’m not even telling you that you need to or have to reach out to them. That’s between you and God. Do what he tells you. But, at the very least you need to finally be able to truly forgive them for your own sake and be released from the prison of resentment and bondage to them.

Forgive them. Let them go. And set yourself free.