Forgiveness : Colossians 3:12

Forgive is a big word. It’s huge, even gigantic. Just seven letters but it’s something that takes years to learn how to do well. And more than learning how to do it, it takes grace from God.

But before we go any further, we need to define what forgiveness is. Or, let’s start with what forgiveness is not. Forgiveness is not a compromise of morality. Don’t ever think that God would confuse moral clarity and moral responsibility with grace and forgiveness. God’s justice ensures that the murderer will not get away with murder, and the sex offender will not get away with molestation.

Forgiveness is not a violation of justice. God will never compromise His justice.
Forgiveness is not merely the avoidance of conflict. There are a lot of us who do not like conflict. And since we don’t want to have hard feelings or hard words with someone else, we skirt around issues of conflict. Sometimes forbearance is the right thing to do, but simple avoidance of conflict is not the same thing as forgiveness.

Forgiveness is the application of grace and truth. I reference John 1:14 here, which says that Jesus came to us “full of grace and truth.” That is how we know that the mercy of forgiveness is not a compromise of the firmness of justice. Grace and truth coexist. Forgiveness never means calling something that was very wrong just Okay

Forgiveness is a new way of looking at others. It’s a radical and counter-cultural perspective on life. If you believe in forgiveness-that God forgives, even though He is not obligated to, and that we’ll have the best kind of life if we hold other people in our lives with a loose grip-then here’s how you’ll view other people. You will see people for what they can be and what they were intended to be, rather than simply as they are. You’ll learn to not focus on people who simply irritate you. You can focus on them, of course, if you choose to, and keep yourself in a continual state of irritation; and you end up irritating the living daylights out of other people around you. But it doesn’t have to be that way. 

Forgiveness means looking at people who really have wronged you and deciding that you’d like to set things right-but in the end, you’re not going to play God. And forgiveness means that you view the deranged people who shoot up school rooms and then turn the guns on themselves as people who are going to be standing before the judgment seat of God. They will answer to God..

You see a lot of ugliness in life from an unwillingness to forgive. Many people can tell us stories of family feuds. Often money is at the center. We hear of problems starting between family members who fight over the estate money after parents die. Or family members in business together get jealous of one another, start fighting over money or control and before long they are no longer talking. It may even come to lawsuits against one another. A lack of trust and inability to forgive does huge damage. When we can’t or won’t forgive each other relationships are destroyed more and more as time passes.

Husbands and wives who won’t forgive, find the marriage drifting apart more and more. They might live under the same roof but there is no love. There’s hardly communication. And when they do communicate, it’s usually more fuel on the fire. There’s no good will between them. No willingness to give their spouse the benefit of the doubt. Words and actions are misunderstood and the meaning twisted. In most cases, the marriage eventually ends because none of us can live under such intense pressure for a long time.

People who won’t forgive wrongs done in the workplace grow increasingly bitter. They resent the employee or employer who wronged them. And that grows into bitterness that clouds our vision so we can’t be objective anymore. We see nothing but negative things in our workplace and eventually we either quit or get fired because our attitude is so toxic and our work quality suffers.

Is it any wonder that God tells his people to forgive one another. He loves us too much to want us to go down the destructive road of unforgiveness. That’s why he gives us a call to forgive.

It Takes Hard Work

The call to forgive is a call to hard work. If you think that’s the approach for wimps who can’t stand up for themselves or something like that, you’re not alone. But you’re also not right.

It’s not easy to forgive someone who has wronged you. For simple wrongs, it might mean accepting someone’s apology and then moving on. But even that is not easy for us. We start to second guess people’s motives. We wonder if they are really sincere. The next time we interact with them, they don’t seem any different and certainly not any better. Our minds quickly think, “If she was really sorry when I forgave her last week, she would not have acted similarly today. She would have tried harder to keep her words in check.” The list goes on. We can quickly second-guess the sincerity of others, which then gives us a sense of moral superiority. And that’s just over small disputes we have.

It becomes all the harder when people hurt us deeply. We have sayings like “Once bitten, twice shy”—meaning we won’t give people a second chance very quickly if they hurt us once. We may give a different person a first chance but the person who hurt you will not easily get close to you again. We say, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”—meaning we are fools if we give someone a second chance.

It Takes Grace but more than human effort, it takes divine help. It takes God’s grace. And the best way for me to help you see that, I think, is through a few examples.