Forgive and Forget

Matthew 6:14-15; Luke 23:32-34

Forgiveness. It’s wonderful to receive it … but it’s really tough to give it!

In the Scripture today, Jesus was up on the mountainside teaching a large group of disciples. What He was really doing was explaining to them just how totally differently they would need to live if they wanted to be His disciples. The instructions given in the Sermon on the Mount are not universal laws for all humanity … they do not aim to describe the kind of behaviour one expects from unsaved people. But rather they are instructions for those who have decided to leave behind a life of sin and follow Jesus Christ into the fullness of abundant life. They are like a manifesto of Christian living!

Now the particular section we are concentrating on today is the section that relates to forgiving others. It is actually part of Jesus’ teaching on prayer. He teaches us that when we pray for God’s forgiveness we should also pray for God to help us to forgive others … because God will apply the same degree of forgiveness to us that we apply to others. And just in case you think that there is some doubt as to what Jesus really meant here, Jesus follows this teaching up with the parable of the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18 which culminates in the statement: “This is how my Heavenly Father will treat you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.” So the principle is clear: The level of forgiveness you extend to others is the level of forgiveness you should expect to receive from God!

Now another point by way of introduction is that the phrase, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” is a part of the Lord’s Prayer … which is a model for daily prayer. We know this because it teaches us to pray, “Give us today our daily bread.” That is clearly something we have to pray every day. And just as important, Jesus is saying, is that we ask God to forgive us and to help us to forgive other people daily. He is describing the Christian lifestyle as a lifestyle of forgiveness … a lifestyle where every single day of our lives we both receive forgiveness from God and give forgiveness to other people.

Now before you get unhappy about all of those grudges and offences you’re going to have to let go of, remember that this is Jesus the Lord of Life teaching here; and that Jesus the Lord of Life is busy teaching His disciples how they can best live out the richest, freest, best version of life available to humanity. This is not Jesus trying to spoil life for us … this is Jesus giving us the secrets of true life … the secrets of a life lived in fellowship with Him. So if this is the way Jesus taught us to live, then we can rightly ask the question: “Is this then the way Jesus lived?” And of course the answer is in Luke 23, where Jesus hanging in absolute life-threatening agony on the cross cries out: “Father, forgive them.” Jesus didn’t talk the talk … He walked the walk … with every fibre of His being. Jesus not only spoke about forgiveness being a part of the abundant life … he modelled perfectly how forgiveness is part of the abundant life.

So let’s just for argument’s sake accept that Jesus is right (!!??) and that without forgiving others we’ll never truly be able to enjoy the fullness of the abundant life he died to give us … and let’s try to understand:

1. What forgiveness means ;

2. How we go about forgiving people; and

3. What that forgiveness will do for us in the long run.

Forgiveness is …

The easiest definition of forgiveness is this: “To forgive is to release a person from the wrong they have done to you and decide not to hold that wrong against them anymore.” Please notice I said the definition is easy … not the application! When Thomas Edison was working on his crazy, new-fangled contraption called a “light bulb”, it took a whole team of men 24 straight hours to put just one together. The story goes that when Edison was finished with one light bulb, he gave it to a young boy helper, who nervously carried it up the stairs. Step by step he cautiously watched his hands, obviously frightened of dropping such a priceless piece of work. But when the poor young reached the top stair, he dropped the bulb. It took the entire team of men twenty-four more hours to make another bulb. Finally, tired and ready for a break, Edison was ready to have his bulb carried up the stairs. And who do you think he chose to carry the light bulb? That’s right, he gave it to the same young boy who dropped the first one. That’s the pinnacle of forgiveness – not to count people’s previous failures against them.

Now I don’t think that one is always supposed to immediately trust the person who has harmed us. But forgiveness is when we decide in our own hearts and minds that we are going to release that person from what they did wrong … and that we are no longer going to hold it over their heads … no longer going to use that wrongdoing to fuel our anger against them Lewis Smedes, in an excellent book on forgiveness says, “When you forgive someone, you slice away the wrong from the person who did it. You disengage that person from his sinful act. You recreate him. At one moment you identify him as the person who did you wrong. The next moment you change that identity. He is remade in your memory. You think of him now not as a person who hurt you, but as a person who needs you … Once you branded him as a person powerful in evil, but now you see him as a person weak in his needs. You re-created your past by recreating the person whose wrong made your past painful. So the releasing is a releasing of the person from their connection to the wrong they did. It is the beginning point of seeing them as a person again instead of just as a wrongdoer. It is a conscious choice that we make that we will not bring up their past wrong-doings and hold them against them in future.

Can you see that forgiveness is a manifestation of love? Remember 1 Cor. 13 says that “Love keeps no record of wrongs.”

Lewis Smedes adds something very interesting. He says that forgiveness is not the same as pardon. You may forgive one who has wronged you and still insist that they bear the consequences for their action. Forgiveness simply means that one releases the person … but not necessarily that one is either able to or expected to do away with their consequences. That’s why we can forgive our children when they do wrong … but sometimes in order to teach them we still have to punish them … or allow them to feel the consequences of what they have done. This does not mean that we haven’t forgiven them. It means we love them.

What does forgiveness achieve?

 The beauty of forgiveness, and the reason why it is so vital for abundant life is that when we release the other person, we also automatically release ourselves. I’m sure you noticed that in the parable of the unmerciful servant, it was the person who would not forgive the other’s debt who ended up being tormented. And this is exactly what happens to us when we refuse to forgive. We are tormented by the sin that was committed against us. And forgiveness is the only thing that can ever release us from that torment.

Forgiveness gives release to the sinner and also release to the one sinned against. Holding onto the grudge adds nothing to our lives … it only robs us of our peace, joy and ultimately of our experience of abundant life. Apparently in some parts of Africa people traditionally capture monkeys by setting up cages and placing bait inside. The bait can be anything a monkey would want, such as food or an unusual object. The monkeys are lured to the cages but are too smart to actually go inside. Instead, they reach through the bars, grab the bait, and try to pull it out. Because the object is too large to go through the bars, the only way the monkey can get away is to drop the bait. But monkeys refuse to let go. They kick and squeal but keep holding on. They stay trapped in bondage because they refuse to let go of the bait. So many Christians accept the role of being the devil’s monkey? They grab Satan’s bait, which is called offenses? Satan sets his trap, using offenses as bait. If you grab the offense, you will be his prisoner as long as you hold on. Many people are incarcerated in the devil’s dungeon because they refuse to let go.

You must choose to let go of all past offenses and keep your hands off all future ones.

Unforgiveness means we desire to hurt the people who have wounded us. But ultimately it only serves to hurt us. It’s like the little boy who was sitting on a park bench in obvious agony. A man walking by asked him what was wrong. The boy answered, “I’m sitting on a bumble bee.” “Then why don’t you get up?” the man asked. The boy replied, “Because I figure that I am hurting him more than he is hurting me!” The healing process begins when we get up off the park bench. God will only heal our wounds when we stop inflicting pain on the one who hurt us.

How can we go about forgiving someone?

Even before we take a step towards forgiveness we will already have been praying the Lord’s Prayer … we will have been praying for the Lord to help us to forgive the other person. Once we have asked for this help … we can begin the process of forgiving.

The very first step of forgiveness is to make a conscious decision that we are going to release the person. There will be no immediate change in our feelings … it will simply be a cold, unfeeling decision that we are going to obey Jesus in this matter and release the person and choose no longer to hold their sin against them. That is step #1.

But because we are in a spiritual war and the devil is going to keep on tempting us to live in Unforgiveness … the next part of the Lord’s prayer says … “and deliver us from evil.” If you are trying to forgive someone you can bet that the devil’s going to remind you of the painful event to try and get you back into unforgiveness. So stay faithful in praying that the Lord will give you strength to forgive and to keep forgiving.

Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch Christian who was also a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp for almost the duration of World War II. After the war she had a speaking ministry where she particularly taught on the power of forgiveness. Corrie once told of not being able to forget a wrong that had been done to her. She had decided to forgive the person, but she kept rehashing the incident and so couldn’t sleep. Finally Corrie cried out to God for help in putting the problem to rest. She wrote, “God’s help came in the form of a kindly Lutheran pastor, to whom I confessed my failure after two sleepless weeks.” “Up in the church tower,” he said, nodding out the window, “is a bell which is rung by pulling on a rope. But you know what? After the sexton lets go of the rope, the bell keeps on swinging. First ding, then dong. Slower and slower until there’s a final dong and it stops. I believe the same thing is true of forgiveness. When we forgive, we take our hand off the rope. But if we’ve been tugging at our grievances for a long time, we mustn’t be surprised if the old angry thoughts keep coming for a while. They’re just the ding-dongs of the old bell slowing down. And so it proved to be. There were a few more midnight reverberations, a couple of dings when the subject came up in my conversations, but the force — which was my willingness in the matter — had gone out of them. They came less and less often and at the last stopped altogether: we can trust God not only above our emotions, but also above our thoughts.”

We need to trust God to heal our memories … but while He is busy doing that we need to be willing to recommit ourselves to our decision to forgive … sometimes that will be over and over again.