I Forgive You ... This Is Not the End of the Story.

This past Sunday, our pastor's sermon focused on forgiveness as a command of God.  God does not suggest or imply that we should forgive.  He commands that we forgive -- and without following in the Creator's footsteps on this one, we will not receive forgiveness.  If we aren't merciful and just to forgive, He won't do that for us, either.

Bring on the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant of Matthew 18: 21-35.

In this parable, we learn that a king demands repayment of a very large loan given his servant. The servant cannot repay, and the king orders the servant and his family sold to repay the debt.  The servant begs for time to pay. The king's heart softens; he forgives the debt.

The forgiven servant goes on his way and meets a fellow servant who owes him a debt. He physically chokes the man, demanding immediate and full payment.  The other man begs for mercy, but the forgiven man has him thrown in prison until he comes up with the cash.

Learning of this from eye-witnesses, the king has the formerly forgiven man tortured until he pays his debt in full.

In verse 35, Christ states, 

"This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart."

Whammo.  Did you feel that?

The parable stems from a question the apostle, Peter, asked.  How many times should I forgive my brother who sins against me?  Christ cited the well-known "seventy times seven times" -- which seems shockingly many to most people.  Four hundred ninety times to forgive one person for doing the same thing again and again?  Four hundred ninety times to forgive one person for four hundred ninety separate offenses?  The message does not focus on the calculations, but on the forgiving.  Offer it.  Mean it.  Make the effort and feel the difference.  Do it as many times as you must, and don't stop offering mercy to another person.

God doesn't stop offering it to you ... get the picture?

And what do we find as the alternative if we don't forgive?

As humans, we don't feel an automatic desire to forgive.  The minute we perceive wrong-doing toward ourselves we begin to think vindictively.  How can I "get my enemy back" for this?  Our wheels begin to turn in a negative direction, we grease them by remembering the awful deeds done, and many of us give the whole works a tune-up regularly, sharing the terrible, horrible, unforgivable event with those who will offer us what we truly desire:  sympathy.

As we rage inside, cry outside, feel degraded and spiteful, and work very, very hard on feeling like a victim, we create our very own torture chamber.
No one else can see or feel it the way we do.
We may lose or gain weight, begin having health problems, feel anxious or depressed.

In actuality, refusing to offer forgiveness can bring the same result as not asking forgiveness for our own sins.  The results devastate the one who holds the boxful of hurt, no matter if he gave or received.  We lose the listening ear of God, and he cannot look upon us in our sin.  


Our humanness shuts the door on forgiveness because it feels like giving in or giving up.  At the upper limits, it feels like paying high respect to someone who does not deserve it.  Why would I give such a gift to someone who has not earned it?  I prefer that someone earn my forgiveness when I have suffered so greatly.

I want to exact as much pain and suffering from the perpetrator as he inflicted on me.  I want to witness his suffering, not just hear about it.  I want to measure the dose and force-feed it.  I want an eye for an eye.  I want restitution, not just once, but over and over again.

If left to my own devices, I will never succeed in righting a wrong or in feeling freed from the bonds of what I suffered at the hands of someone else if I insist on rehashing it, reliving it and repeating it to anyone who will listen.


What of listening?  There are three ways to listen, as I experience it.  We listen with our ears, through reading the Bible and "hearing" God's messages for us, and through the mouthpiece of God found in others who cross our paths and say things that give us that Spirit nudge.  When we listen we will not hear God ever say something like, "Please wallow in self-pity for now."  We will not hear him say, "I will wipe away all the pain from this and you can go on as if nothing ever happened."  We will hear him say, "Forgive.  Forgive as I have forgiven you."

The truth:  forgiveness frees us.  Those bonds of memory do not affect the person who inflicted the pain.  The rehearsing doesn't make that person suffer.  The reliving doesn't remind him of his wrong and cause him to ask forgiveness.  None of these things happen for one reason:  unforgiveness affects only me.  And, as I read the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, it will affect my relationship with God.

God forgives me whenever I ask, no matter what my sin looks like.  No matter how harshly I have judged, how badly I have hurt, how thoroughly I have wronged someone, He forgives me ... just for the asking from a contrite heart.  My heart.  No one may ask forgiveness for me.

This same God paved the way for me to have this privilege to come to him and ask forgiveness by sacrificing his Son to an unearned death.  Offering him up to torture, to ridicule and to a blameless conviction ... and through a horrible, painful death on a cross for all to see, he gave to us -- and so much of the time we don't get it.  We have this free gift, and we squander it, wanting it only for ourselves.  Little do we realize, we miss a very important command:  to forgive others as God forgives us.

And if I can't understand that and act according to my selfish  desires because I "deserve better", do I really deserve the forgiveness I ask of God?


Similar articles:

Forgiveness:  Doing the Impossible
How to Pray:  Christ's Example
Forgive without Punishing

Ten Ways to Love: Forgive without Punishing

  When a woman marries, she may have only an inkling about forgiveness, aside from a few "that's okays" casually tossed in the direction of the "I'm sorrys" that come from small offenses.  Misdemeanors often go unnoticed, sentence served, case dismissed. 

Medium-sized transgressions might let us stick to "no harm done" reactions, but both sizes can build to an invisible invader called "resentment."  Carry a grudge around with you long enough, unspoken and boxing it up with others of its kind, and that's what you get.   To conquer it requires breaking it down into parts; your job comes in deciding which pieces need to be dealt with in forgiveness or understood in loving forgetfulness.

Large-sized wrongs, on the other hand, provide very large hurts, therefore, reasons for offering big forgiveness.  The bad stuff.  Shocking, horrible, beyond-belief wrongs that two people in a marriage never thought possible.  The things people quit trying to overcome and bandage with divorce papers.  When a couple takes this route, suffering succeeds only in hiding love and people build fortresses of regret and resentment to further block the small deeds that make love real. And so, they stop "feeling" it.  Forgiveness can conquer any of these sins.

We always have the option to forgive.  We always have the ability to forgive.  We do not always have the grace to forgive, nor the strength, desire or decency to offer it.  Worse, we want what is ours, so to speak.  We want to have the wrong erased ... sometimes along with the wrong-doer.  We want to have the wrong-doer feel our pain, and to never cease feeling sorry for it -- our own, self-prescribed restitution.

At this point, at the place we stand and wish for destruction of our enemy or for him to feel the pain of his erroneous ways toward us, we make our biggest mistake:  trying to devise proper punishment.

Paul writes in Colossians 3:13

Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. (emphasis added)

As the Lord forgave you.  As the Lord forgave YOU.

A person offering forgiveness should:

Forgive as the Lord forgave you.
Completely.
Without reservation.
Without asking restitution.
Without charging a fee.
Without doubt.
With no grudges or resentment.
With love and trust.
Without remembering, rehearsing or reliving the wrong to remind you of it, just to keep you on the right path.
With God's help, guidance, direction, grace, power, sustenance, love, and desire for righteousness.

In other words, forgive with the completeness of God, to the best of our ability.

Imagine the lines above coming from God, but in reverse.  Imagine taking God's forgiveness while he holds reservation about it ... doesn't trust you to do better and go on from here having learned something.  Think about forgiveness at a price -- a dollar amount, a physical trade, a mental toeing the line.  Consider taking it while knowing He resents giving it, or has a list of wrongs against you that you don't know and can't understand.  Imagine asking His forgiveness and having Him remember and remind you about your sin daily or weekly or EVER ... just to keep you in line.  Imagine Him offering forgiveness, but doing it without help, guidance, direction, grace, power, sustenance, and love ... and expecting righteousness without fail.  These are the things humans do to each other to exact punishment in exchange for forgiveness -- a sad, second-rate rendition of forgiveness.  We attach strings.

To forgive without punishing we need to:

Not punish a person by reminding him of his sin and how/how much it hurt.
Not advertise his bad choices to others.
Not throw a person's sin in his face to vindicate your status as victim.
Not withhold loving action until he straightens up and flies right.  We need to always love.
Not expect perfect behavior.  We don't offer it, how can anyone else?
Be prepared to continue offering forgiveness.  People make mistakes.
Pray for everything we need to uphold forgiveness.  God is our rock, our fortress, our deliverer, our strength, our all.

I can easily understand what forgiveness feels like it when I receive it even if I have difficulty accepting it. Conversely, I cannot easily feel the goodness and completeness of giving it. I often prefer to wallow in self-pity a while and would like for the person who sinned against me to suffer consequences. Dire consequences, please.  Turn up the pain and suffering dial to "Super-Boil".  I have trouble not playing the martyr and not suffering at length. I can see forgiveness as something the other person should somehow deserve -- whether earned or bought -- when I want to see it that way.  All of that = WRONG.

The desire to punish and the lack of timely forgiving action oppose God. They have no worth, other than to harm, and I have to -- have to -- work at seeing through God's perspective rather than my own damaged and warped view.  My human view.  This includes seeing myself as insufficiently capable of that kind of godliness and Christlikeness, unless I enlist God's help to sustain my weakness and, truth be told, inability to learn from my own mistakes.  The number one mistake?  Not offering forgiveness as soon as possible.

I need forgiveness from God as I prepare to offer forgiveness.  I need forgiveness for harboring hurtful thoughts, for thinking in a dastardly way about someone, for feeling dislike and hate as they bubble to the surface ... the byproducts of feeling wronged.  When I ask forgiveness, I also need to ask for guidance, strength and humility in giving His brand of forgiveness -- the kind that ignores the effect on me and lets me work past it and on to something better.

When we sin against God, he forgives us when we ask, and then picks right up and continues with his plan -- maybe around what we have done or maybe pushing right through it and He uses the situation for good.

We, in our own offering of forgiveness, need to come to the same place -- to forgive without punishing, and to continue forward toward the good.  When we stop looking back to the place of pain, the forgiveness will come easier, and the view into the future brightens.  If we continually look back into the darkness of the past (hurt and pain), we will succeed only in dimming the light ahead of us and have to work harder to feel the warmth and goodness of clarity that comes from forgiveness.

To forgive and not punish really takes the extra work out of it for us.  Is it not harder to hang onto the snarling, many-toothed desire to bite down and not let go, like an animal hanging onto its prey, than it is to not bite down and hang on at all?

Easier said than done?  Of course.  Yet,  God provides the tools and we can do it, with practice, determination, and a willing heart.


Other Articles in This Series:

• Ten Ways to Love: An Introduction
• Ten Ways to Love: Answer without Arguing
• Ten Ways to Love: Enjoy without Complaint
• Ten Ways to Love: Give without Sparing
• Ten Ways to Love: Listen without Interrupting 
• Ten Ways to Love: Share without Pretending
• Ten Ways to Love: Speak without Accusing
• Ten Ways to Love: Forgive without Punishing 
• Ten Ways to Love: Pray without Ceasing 
• Ten Ways to Love: Trust without Wavering 

Self-Assessment Can Change Your Marriage

As I have written before, respect shares the Real Marriage Wheel with love. We women love love. We dream of it long before we really understand it, and some of us never really quite get that far. We have storybook and Hollywood ideas about love, dreaming of men who like to talk for hours about subjects that interest us, who will watch love story films, look with starry eyes over our shoulders as we cook a romantic meal and listen attentively to every word we say during it ... and encourage us to continue. Men like that do exist, but my own particular man stands under the description as follows: will talk for hours about hockey and tell about every detail of a trip or work day, but please just give him highlights of my day ... he has listened to people all ... day ... long ... ugh (no offense); he likes action movies/will tolerate a chick flick from time to time but not in equal ratio; willingly chops vegetables, stirs sauces and serves beverages for a meal but no stars in eyes. I know this. I respect his differences, even though I hope they might adjust sometimes, and they do. About as often as he deigns to watch a chick flick.

We women do not do so well with giving our husbands respect, which is the half of the wheel we must keep moving. Respect is our C- on the report card, if grading our natural tendencies, and if, in fact we don't score substantially lower.  If you must know, I failed.


We assess the behavior of others, especially husbands, as if we have the responsibility of raising them,  and offer silent disrespect in return for their obvious ignorance. What goes on in our heads filters into our hearts, and from there infuses our actions and words.

Frankly, we women sit in a few columns on the chart of characteristics under the labels  "UNFORGIVING" and "JUDGMENTAL" and also "SPITEFUL/RUDE". More than that, we see ourselves as forgiving, accepting and nurturing/helpful.

In my own experience, we do begin the married life as innocently we see ourselves. We take apologies as they come from the rookie husband, knowing he is just out of the nest his parents harnessed him in for all those years, and we move forward (forgiving).  We overlook the personality traits and habits we do not like, and hope they will level out or disappear (accepting).  We like to guide and instruct, finding myriad opportunities to do so with our new husband, and he accepts our help willingly, having just escaped that nest and welcoming our guidance (nurturing/helpful).

And then we beat each of these into the ground.

The difficulty begins when our positive characteristics don't effect the hoped-for change in this man we married. We get ourselves worked up, wanting our own brand of positive change right now. We try to talk him into it (men aren't big on this lots of talk -- action, lady, action!). We try to share examples of other couples to highlight their successes and why can't we try that? Bad choice, comparison. Gets the dander up, and fast. We suggest, we request, we gently nudge. Men sense nagging.  Their radar cranks into action.  We're doomed.

This would be a good time for self-perception, which we don't have, or have so little it doesn't make a difference.  After dating and engagement, we feel quite golden, and while our new husband may have tarnished a bit, we still shine.  In our own eyes. We don't hear nagging, we hear uplifting words of hope and love. Men hear disrespect and yammer-yammer-yammer.

Here's a thought: show, don't tell.

Take action to show respect.  Make eye contact, smile, engage your brain and your heart, and the right words will begin to follow.  Still, you will have to pay close attention to what flows out and how it flows out of your mouth, but that's a human requirement.  Be one of the first on your block to actually do it (wry smile).

We women need to stop, drop our defenses and roll with self-assessment. Get out a mirror, replay the conversation with full reality turned on, see ourselves for the words we really say, the faces we really make and the actions we really take.  We must take the opportunity to pray for the insight into our own ways, the ones blind to us, and let God do what God does so well ... cleanse us of that awful behavior and thought process, and make us new.  We can return to that shiny, show-room model our husbands brought home from the wedding reception and enjoyed for many happy months or years.  A little spiffing up in various areas will do the trick.

When you deal honestly with yourself, thinking of words, actions and mannerisms that demonstrate  respect, you won't see many in yourself. We, in the society of women today, have lost a large portion of that decent, womanly trait. Certainly, many have never lost it, but they do not comprise the majority. Other women haven't lost it, but have hidden it behind tolerance for societal shifts. They don't stand firm in their conviction for living respectfully toward their husbands.  They bend and sway with the times, on a breeze.

Not standing firm leads to infiltration of other attitudes and actions. The world begins to enter the recesses of the mind, bringing with it a steady drip. If you don't fix the leaks in yourself, you find yourself swimming against the current. If you don't have the strength, you stop struggling and go with the flow.

Swim against the current! Strong women do not give in to whatever new notion comes down the pike. They also have enough strength to share, and to pull someone without the same strength along with them, helping and encouraging.

We have that kind of respect for ourselves, when the chips are down. It's now -- as the world consumes our men and siphons their self-respect by pouring on the disrespect -- that we must play our cards right. Poker faces, everyone! It's time to get down to the nitty gritty.

When you and God get together on this, you will feel amazingly different.  It may take some tweaking in your methods, and more than a few speed bumps in your path to assess yourself correctly, but if you listen to the still, small, insistent Spirit inside you, the results will astound you.  They will also make you feel happier than you have felt in a long, long time.

Thousands of women know the results first-hand, maybe more than thousands.  Worth it.

Totally worth it.