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 

Pray for Your Enemy

Enemies.  Harumph. Grrrrrr, even.

 I think most of us have one, maybe more, for our own reasons.  In some instances, my husband can play the part of my enemy.  In past situations in which I have felt wronged, many people have acquired enemy status in my mind.  Usually, the enemy role flits past, reverting to protocol, so that husband, friend, brother, stranger on the street can go -- often unknowingly -- back to the role they hold everyday in my life. Poof! No more enemy.

You may not get that kind of simple fix.  You may have a larger enemy.  A husband with whom you have strained relations; you have tossed hateful words and thoughts at each other like grenades, built fortresses of wounded emotions and broken heart fragments, and dug pits of misunderstanding for each other to fall into.   Misunderstanding breeds contempt.  Contempt leads to enemy status.

Maybe you have infidelity to overcome and both parties involved have wronged you, becoming your enemies.  You may have betrayal, or financial indiscretion to fight.  Perhaps your enemy wears the face of a parent, neighbor, friend, or even a child.  Your manager or a coworker may play that role. Whomever you envision in the crosshairs when you think of the word "enemy" has less to do with your feelings than it does with your insistence on keeping them in that place.  You may feel hatred, despair, loneliness, fear, anxiety, depression or inability to remove the battlefield you have constructed from your thoughts.  You need to know that you can do better than that.

You can pray for your enemy, and no, not for his or her destruction, as good as the vindication might feel.  Pray for his well-being.  Pray for her to find happiness and peace in her life.  Pray for them to come to God and to grow in faith.  Pray for your enemy's success in healthy relationships, or in money matters.  Pray that your enemy will survive and thrive.  You will not believe the difference in your own heart and life.

"But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them

 that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;"

Matthew 5:44

Ugh! That seems a tall order, especially when I feel myself in the trenches in my own one-sided war, keeping my enemy in the crosshairs under practiced hatred or disdain.  People learn to hate, and hate feeds itself, growing larger without any base in truth.  Instead, we follow our feelings, which lie, change quickly and deceive.  I have to practice love to keep it; hate works the same way.  In hatred of my enemy, the actions I choose play into my feelings and move into my thoughts, overtaking any good I might see or feel. 

Loving my enemy and really considering how to bless those who curse me, do good to those who hate me, pray for someone who spitefully uses me and persecutes me seems impossible.  As the saying goes, "God didn't say it would be easy.  He did say it would be worth it."  This applies not only to living as a Christian, but to buckling down and LIVING AS A CHRISTIAN.  Harboring hatred and disdain for an enemy looks a lot like opposition to Christ, because (cough-cough) it IS.

But, why do I want something good for someone who has hurt me?

I want to do something good for someone who has knowingly or unknowingly hurt me because it frees me.  Not to mention, God requires it and Jesus said it.  Period.

Forgiving my enemy -- when I put my mind to it and want that forgiveness in place -- frees me.   My human heart wants to keep protecting itself, and the Father of Lies (Satan, the devil, the Deceiver, etc.) wants me to keep opposing God.  I coddle hurt feelings, nurture scuffed pride, and revisit painful memories that aid in my self-pity and anger.  And for what?  To keep feeling bad? 

The whole while, the opposite is true.  I could learn to stop hurting.  I could learn to relinquish my pride.  I surrounded myself with positive role models (never align yourself with another suffering individual, and never, ever one of the opposite sex).   I read blogs about how to recover from emotional infidelity, about rebuilding marriage, and about success stories in the Christian realm.  Mainstream sources told me I should decide if I should stay and to focus on what would make me happy and feel vindicated and to search out all the parts of the puzzle in order to know the full story of something I never wanted in the first place.  And for what?  To rub salt in the wound?  Red flags flying, people! 

God wants us to fight for our marriages, and demanding to know hurtful information will only serve to pile on the pain and aid negativity -- and give step-up for Satan, allowing him access to lead us not only into temptation, but to possible retaliation.  When does the search for information end?  Why not walk on hot coals and stab yourself in the eyes, too?  I believe in human truth as the absence of lies, and I have learned that telling someone hurtful truths just for the sake of informing does not come from God.  That kind of truth hurts in a way that doesn't heal, but causes suspicion.  Don't sleuth it out of the darkness.  Point yourself to the Light  of the Truth -- God's truth -- and it will set you free.  His truth requires and provides forgiveness, requires righteousness, and offers freedom --- unmatchable, unfathomable freedom that you can't understand until you give yourself up to it. It's a different path than the one the world offers:  abandon the wrong-doer, divorce, cut your losses, remove that person from your life, move on with the new.  We are supposed to rehabilitate murderers, addicts and thieves but not those who hurt us in life? 

I learned to let go of the hurt, pray it all out, scream and cry in front of God to do it.  More than once.  But it grew easier.  Each time I "gave it to God" and took it back, the pain reduced.  Seriously.  God gave my pain a half-life every time I turned it over to him.  Scientifically, that meant at some point, my pain would be zero.  And I would have to work at having it, not just sit around waiting for the struggle to go away.  You can have it, too. Keep praying for it, keep your self-control and know that God is in charge. Trust, believe, have faith.  The whole nine yards.  And that means handing control to God and giving up a prideful hold on the situation.

Scoff, scoff.  I hear you!  Keep reading.  Don't click away in a huff. 

I had a hard time accepting that forgiveness and praying for my enemy would free me.  I thought about it for quite a while, and I imagined what it would feel like, but it ended there, with me waiting to feel this awesome forgiveness.  God put others in my path to direct me, and I learned I could take action and see what comes, or I could continue prowling around in the rubble, looking for pieces and hoping to rebuild from scraps.

One morning, I sat down and laid out for God some major points.  I discussed the matter as if I were gathering information for filing  my taxes, with a few sighs of "do I have to do this?" and a few tears of self-pity for good measure.  Fortunately, God requires no paperwork or back-up.  He takes what we give and he makes it work, and gives back to us, to boot. 

I hit these points with the Father:

• I wanted to feel the forgiveness I was offering. 
• I wanted to feel merciful toward the person I prayed for, and in a benevolent way, not in a high-and-mighty way.  I wanted to offer grace like God does. 
• I wanted to have peace, the kind that comes with understanding of God's ways. 
• I wanted to feel free of the pain that strangled me , or that punched me in the chest at inopportune moments.
• I wanted to accept that I couldn't change the facts or repaint pictures of the past.
• I wanted to have the strength to pray for my enemy -- for good, not evil.
• I wanted to have the opportunity to help someone else because of my experience.
• I wanted the person I held as an enemy to find joy and peace.

I prayed these things out to God, and then just began praying for my enemy, without second-guessing myself.  I could feel that the words came from the Holy Spirit, because no way could I come up with the blessings I was asking.  When the Spirit takes control, a person can overcome selfishness and hurt.  It takes surrender, though, and for many people, surrender seems like failure.  It's SOOOO not.

Until you take this challenge on yourself, you can't know the feeling of euphoria in having done God's work His way.  A feeling of purpose entered my heart.  I could even name my enemy, which I could not do before.  That helped a lot in prayer, I have to say.  While God does know our needs, it helps to name them for our own peace of mind and to connect better with God.  It's being honest and courageous before God, and I believe he blesses us for that.

I felt the freedom.  I had to regain it a few times because I gave it up in order to backtrack to the low places out of habit and human nature, and out of desire to protect ME.  Yet, each time I returned to praying for that list of needs, I found I could drop one or two because I had them covered, with God's encouragement and strength.  In only a few weeks, I could pray immediately for the forgiveness and for my enemy, feeling the difference between clinging to God and climbing toward him.

I'm praying for you -- I don't even need to know your name or your enemy.  Give it a try and don't give up or give in.   You. Can. Do. It.