Forgiveness

       Former president Bill Clinton tells of his first meeting with Nelson Mandela.  In his conversation with this great leader of South Africa , the president said, “When you were released from prison, Mr. Mandela, I woke my daughter at three o’clock in the morning.  I wanted her to see this historic event.  As you marched from the cellblock across the yard to the gate of the prison, the camera focused in on your face.  I have never seen such anger, and even hatred, in any man as was expressed on your face at that time.  That’s not the Nelson Mandela I know today.  What was that all about?”

       Mandela answered, “I’m surprised that you saw that, and I regret that the cameras caught my anger.  As I walked across the courtyard that day I thought to myself, “They’ve taken everything from you that matters.  Your cause is dead.  Your family is gone.  Your friends have been killed.  Now they’re releasing you, but there’s nothing left for you out there.”  And I hated them for what they had taken from me.  Then, I sensed an inner voice saying to me, ‘Nelson! For twenty-seven years you were their prisoner, but you were always a free man!  Don’t allow them to make you into a free man, only to turn you into their prisoner!’”

       Mandela knew that an unforgiving spirit creates bitterness in our souls and imprisons our hearts. That is why Paul writes in Colossians 3:13:  “Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.”

       Paul is writing here to Christians who are together in community.  But he is echoing the clear and repeated teaching of Jesus.  This is the stuff in red letters at the start of the New Testament.

       In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, Jesus gives us some very important instruction on worship and forgiveness.  He says:  “If you are presenting your offering at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your offering there before the altar, and go your way; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and present your offering.”

       A person comes to worship.  In Jesus’ day, in keeping with the Jewish law, the worshipper brings a sacrifice for the altar—perhaps a lamb or some doves.  In our time, it would simply be a believer coming to the Father in prayer.  The worshipper is suddenly aware of a painful thought—the painful realization that he or she has offended another person.

       If you come to worship—whether at church or in your private time of prayer and you come to this knowledge, what do you do?

       Jesus gives the steps to take.  First, stop.  Don’t push the realization aside.  Don’t plunge on although that might be your instinct. Stop!  Go.  Go your way—go and be reconciled to your brother.

       The word reconcile literally means to alter or change.  There is a prefix attached to the verb that means “through.”  In other words, Jesus is telling us to go to our angry brother or sister and go through a process that will result in a change in the broken relationship—exchanging hostility for friendship.  We are to go and confess both the wrong and our sorrow for the wrong—seeking the forgiveness of the one we have wounded.  Then, Jesus says, we are free to return to God in prayer.  Even if the offended brother or sister will not forgive we are free to return to worship.  If we have confessed in honesty and humility, have offered recompense where that is appropriate, and have earnestly sought forgiveness, then we have done all we can.  The brother or sister’s failure to forgive them becomes a matter between them and God-not between us and God.

       Harry Emerson Fosdick said that when he was a boy he overheard a conversation between his dad and mother at the breakfast table.  He heard his dad say, “Tell Harry he can mow the grass today if he feels like it.”  As his father left, he heard him call back, “Tell Harry he’d better feel lit it.”  That’s what Jesus says to us about forgiveness.  It’s not an option.

        Mark 11:25 records these words from Jesus:  “When you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.”  Forgiveness is not an option.  It’s a command.  To fail to forgive is to court disaster.  Every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we make this agreement with God—that He forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.  We ask God to forgive us to the same degree and in the same way, as we are willing to forgive.  For us to be unwilling to forgive is for us to destroy the very bridge we have to walk over.

       The verse from Colossians, which is our text, is about forgiveness.  It contains some great news about forgiveness right at the end—“The Lord has forgiven you.”

       The good news of the Gospel is the fact of forgiveness—that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin—that if we confess our sin He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.  That is a fact that should be liberating to us in our relationship not only with God but also with ourselves.

       But with the great fact of our forgiveness also comes an obligation.  This is in the first part of the verse—“Bear with on another and be kind and forgive each other.”  

       You have been forgiven!  You forgive!

       God requires us to forgive for at least three reasons.

       First, the people God is calling us to forgive are people whom God loves just as He love us.  Perhaps the greatest grief a parent can experience is to have children who have nothing but anger for each other.  God has brought us together in a family.  He desires us to live together in such a way that we demonstrate to the world by our relationships with each other the love that God has shown us.  Forgiveness is essential to peace, peace is essential to unity, and unity is essential to our witness to God in the world.

       So as members of the body of Christ we need to ask ourselves, “Is there anyone in my church family whom I need to forgive?  Would the people around me recognize me as a forgiven and forgiving person?  Are there any hurts I am holding on to?”

       Forgiveness is also the only way to new beginnings.  The trouble with revenge is that it never evens the score because alienated people never keep score by the same mathematics.  Enemies never agree on the score.  Each feels the wounds he receives differently from the wounds he gives.  How many Beruits can ever equal a Holocaust?  How many of her put downs equal his verbal slaps in the face?  We cannot get even.  This is the inner futility of all revenge.

      But forgiveness takes us off of the escalator of revenge so that both of us can break the chain of wrong.  We start over.

       And third, we need to forgive because forgiveness is essential to our own well being.  The trouble with holding a person down in the gutter is that you can’t do it without climbing into the gutter yourself and staying there.  For every measure of revenge you take on another by a refusal to extend forgiveness, you take an equal amount of revenge on yourself.  It cuts both ways.  Anger and bitterness are quite capable of consuming us from the inside out.  The anger that leads to unwillingness to forgive is just as potent as the guilt of actually offending or hurting another.  That is why going to another person to extend an apology and seek forgiveness can be very difficult, not only for the one seeking forgiveness but also for the one being asked to extend it. 

       You see, all the time the one offended has been blaming you—mentally sticking pins in your doll—thinking all kinds of bad things about you—building elaborate systems of self justification to prove to himself that he is right in being so angry—so-hurt—so disappointed.  When you suddenly go to him and apologize and seek to set things right, he has to shift gears and tear down castles of self-justification at an alarming rate.

       Or if he refuses to grant forgiveness, then he will work twice as hard as self-justification to prove to himself that you really are as rotten as he’s felt all along, even though you pretend to be sorry.

       You can’t hold a person in the gutter of guilt without living yourself in the gutter of grudges.  That is just too expensive a way to live.  Extending forgiveness is essential to our own well being.

       You see resentments and anger put the whole physical and mental system on a war basis instead of a peace basis.  An outstanding medical doctor, Walter Alvarez, writes:  “I often tell my patients that they cannot afford to carry grudges or maintain hates.  Such things can make them ill and can certainly tire them out.  He writes, I once saw a man kill himself inch by inch simply by thinking of nothing but hatred of a relative who had sued him.  Within a year or two he was dead.”

       When we say of another, ‘He burns me up,’ that’s true.  He really does.  You want to burn him up, all you succeed in doing is burning yourself up.  Again, when you say, ‘I blowup!’ It’s true.  You do.  You really want to blow up the other guy, but you only succeed in blowing up yourself.

       When you forgive, you do not change the past.  But you do change the future.

       One thing we can do to change the future is to realize that in this world in which we live, all of us at times are going to be treated unjustly, and we are going to be hurt.  As I promise in our new member class.  You are going to be hurt here in this church.  Count on it.  We aren’t living in heaven, and all of us are not perfect.  At times we hurt others, and we treat others unfairly and they sometimes treat us that way.  This fact means that we do not need to take easy offence or wear our hearts on our sleeves.  We need to learn to make allowances for one another.  That includes husbands and wives, parents and children.  As church members we must always be eager to forgive if we have a difference with anyone.  Paul says that we are to bear with on another.  If we have already made up our minds to allow others to slip a bit in their relationships with us, with one another, if we are not going to demand perfection from one another, and if we are already prepared in our minds and hearts to forgive a person when they slip, then it’s going to be hard to hold resentment very long in our relationships.  We are front loaded for forgiveness.

       Now don’t get me wrong.  We need to draw an important distinction here.  God does not call us to be either stupid or masochistic.  He doesn’t call us to be doormats.  There is an important word we need to remember on the subject of forgiving and forgetting.

       Remember how Peter asks Jesus, “If my brother sins against me an repents, how many times do I forgive him—as many as seven times?  Jesus says: “No, seventy times seven.”

       Did you note the important word?  The word is repentance.  The Bible draws an important distinction between those who sin and repent and those who do not.

       We also need to draw that distinction.  For example, if a person comes to my house and steals my silverware and then comes to me, confesses the wrong and returns the silverware, I am commanded not only to forgive the person but to forget the behavior—to invite him over to dinner and now watch him like a hawk the whole time.  If, on the other hand, a person steals my silverware and does not repent—I will still forgive that person for my own well being if not for his—but I won’t trust him in my house.

       The late Lewis Smeds who was a professor at Fuller Seminary once said that “Forgiveness has no strings attached, but reconciliation has many strings attached.”  Forgiveness doesn’t mean that you will open yourself to being hurt again.  You can keep your distance from somebody you forgive.  Reconciliation, on the other hand, implies a restoration of the relationship.  It usually involves asking the other person to change their behavior so that you’re not hurt again in the future.  You can say, ‘I forgive you.  I release you.  But, I’m going to demand that before we can be reconciled, some things have to change.’  It’s important to understand this distinction if we are seeking reconciliation with others.

       “During reconciliation, we need to be very specific about what needs to change in our relationships.  If you don’t talk about the events that make it hard for you to trust again, you haven’t completely reconciled.  Let the other person know what needs to be different in the future in other for you to trust them.  If they continue to ignore your request and violate your trust, then you might want to reexamine whether reconciliation is possible.  God still requires you to forgive them, but He doesn’t expect you to stay in harm’s way.”

       But for the one who repents and who shows the fruit of repentance we need to open ourselves in trust.  To say that we have forgiven the person but we refuse to forget means that there is not true forgiveness at all.  It means that we’ve erected a monument of spite in our minds.  We are to follow the old adage, “write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.”

       Of course there’s a big question here.  Can our minds really allow us to forget?  Probably not.  The human brain is capable of recording 800 memories per second for over seventy-five years without getting tired.  You never really forget anything.  You just don’t recall it.  Everything is on permanent file in the brain including those geometry theorems from high school.  They are still in there somewhere.

       But there are different kinds of memory.  Dr. Norm Wright, a Christian Psychologist, observed, “When I’m counseling someone, I distinguish between two types of memory.  There’s emotional memory, and there’s historical memory.  Emotional memory brings back the painful situation, and it grips us all over again.  Over time, our emotional memory for particular events fades and is replaced with a less impassioned historical memory.  Because this can take months or years, people should expect the old, painful memories to resurface.  When we understand that forgiveness is a process and that memories need time to heal, we can restore old relationships without expecting our emotions to change overnight.”

       Because of the persistence of memory, we are not talking in the sense of forgetting as an actual erasing from memory.  We are speaking instead in the sense of 1Corinthians 13 where Paul writes: “Love does not take into account a wrong suffered.”

       Paul says that true forgivers don’t keep score.  Webster defines forget as “to lose the remembrance of something or to treat with inattention or disregard.”  That is the thought.

       A famous violinist once said that when he failed to practice the violin each day, first he knew it, then his family knew it, and finally his audience knew it.  When we fail to have fellowship with God on a daily basis as Christians, we know it.  Pretty soon our families know it, and finally everyone knows it because our relationships begin to break down.  The best preventative maintenance that I know of against letting resentment get a hold on your life is to develop and keep a strong walk with Jesus Christ.

       To what degree or in what way are we to forgive?  Paul says that we are to forgive just as we have been forgiven—to the same degree and in the same way—totally, forgetfully, joyfully, willingly.

       Dr. Smedes wrote in Christianity Today, “When it comes down to it, anyone who forgives can hardly tell the difference between feeling forgiven and doing the forgiving.  We are such a mixture of sinners and sinned against, we cannot forgive people who offend us without feeling that we are set free ourselves.”

      “To forgive is to put down a 50-pound pack after a 10-mile climb up a mountain.

       “To forgive is to fall in a chair after a 15-mile marathon.

       To forgive is to get a prisoner free.  And then to discover that the prisoner was you.”