Learning to Forgive
After riding by horseback around his estate in freezing rain and snow, George Washington woke up with an inflamed throat and was unable to breathe properly. When doctors examined his condition, they prescribed a procedure called “bloodletting,” which followed the prevailing medical opinion that removing blood from the body would reduce inflammation. In this case, records indicate that they removed about 80 ounces of blood, equaling about 40 percent of his blood volume. Washington died later that evening.
If his doctors had followed modern medical practice, they probably would have inserted a tube into his throat to provide an airway. If that were not possible, they may have performed a tracheotomy (or tracheostomy), inserting a breathing tube through an incision in his neck and throat. Furthermore, they may have added fluids to his body through an IV instead of removing blood. Such procedures may have prevented Washington from dying.
When well-meaning people follow bad advice and act based upon wrong information, bad things happen to well-meaning people and to others. This not only happens in primitive medical practice. It happens today in our relationships with other people, and our relationships often suffer as a result. One example of this pertains to forgiveness. Wrong advice about forgiveness causes your relationships to suffer. To overcome this problem, you need to forgive one another as God has forgiven you.
When a friend or spouse, parent or child lets you down and requests forgiveness, how should you respond? It is popular to say that you must “forgive and forget” the sin. However, is this good advice? Is it biblical? Moreover, if it is good advice, what does it mean to do this? To answer consider first the way that God forgives your sin, and then respond to others the same way.
God dismisses your sin.
The writer of Hebrews describes the way that God responds to your sins. He tells us that God says, “I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more” (Heb 8:12). God also says, “Their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more” (Heb 10:17). What do these encouraging words mean?
The word merciful means that God responds to your sins in a merciful, gracious, and forgiving way. He does not respond to your sins, as your sins deserve. He does not hold them against you, but he removes them from your record instead.
What does remember mean? It does not mean that he forgets your sins as a person with dementia forgets the names of his relatives. Nor does it mean that he forgets your sins as a student forgets the answer to a question during an exam. Furthermore, it does not refer to a kind of divine memory erasure, like the experimental science of removing, selectively and artificially, memories or associations from a person’s mind.
God is omniscient. “His understanding is infinite” (Psa 147:5) and “he knows all things” (1 John 3:20). So how can he forget anything? In what sense does he “not remember” your sins? The word, “remember,” does not emphasize the absence of knowledge in the mind of God about your sin. Instead, it emphasizes a change in the way that he acts towards his knowledge of your sin.
Remember means to “choose to think about something.” In this sense, it does not refer to memories that “come into your mind.” It refers to how a person chooses to respond to the memories that do “come into your mind.” In the case of God, it refers to how he chooses to respond to the memories that are always in his mind.
Furthermore, it means to “bring something to mind” to draw attention to it and to do something about it. In a positive sense, it is used of “remembering the poor,” which means to do things that meet the needs of those who are poor (Gal 2:10). This means more than having some thoughts about the poor; it means doing something for them.
In a negative sense, remember is used of God pouring out judgments in a future time on the people who have advanced the cause of false religion and corrupt materialism in the world (Rev 18:5). This means more than God having some thoughts about these people. It means that he will do something big and terrible in the future based upon what these people have done in the past, even though it had seemed that he was doing nothing.
So how can God choose not to hold your sins against you? How can he choose not to bring your sins to mind and not to take action against you in the future? After all, he is a just God who always does what is right (Gen 18:25). He cannot overlook your sin.
The basis for this response is the “once for all” sacrifice of Jesus. Of Jesus, the writer of Hebrews says, “With his own blood he entered the Most Holy Place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption” (Heb 9:12). Your sins, and the sins of those with whom you have relationships, deserve the judgment of God. You deserve to pay this penalty forever in darkness, pain, and separation from God. However, Jesus – who is God and therefore perfect, and who is man and therefore able to take your place – stepped in to take the judgment on himself that you deserve. As the eternal God, there was no need for him to experience suffering and death for eternity. He was able to fulfill your sentence completely and return from the grave in victory. Because of this, God is genuinely able to “let go” of the record of your sin, as a child let’s go of a helium balloon.
How should you respond to this forgiveness that Christ provides? For everyone in the world, the answer is the same. “Whoever believes in him will receive remission [forgiveness] of sins” (Acts 10:43). Have you believed on Jesus and repented of your sins? Have you admitted the wrongness of your sins and the emptiness of your religious behavior? Have you turned from those things to believe on Jesus alone for salvation from sins and a restored relationship with God? If not, then you need to do so today. If yes, then you need to learn how to apply this truth to your relationship with God and your relationships with others in a daily, practical way.
You should learn to confess your sin.
When you believe on Jesus Christ for salvation from sin, God forgives the full record of your sins once and for all. He will never bring your sins into judgment (though you may still suffer some degree of consequences for them in this life). But what about those sins which you commit as a Christian?
The apostle John instructs us how to handle this problem. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). The word, “confess,” means to “acknowledge the facts” and to “say the same thing.” When a believer commits sin, he weakens the closeness of his relationship with God. Though you can never sever your relationship with God through sin, you can strain it.
When you mistreat or argue with your spouse, your parent, or your child, your family relationship remains. You continue to be a spouse, child, or parent, yet your relationship becomes strained. Your hurtful words or behavior makes it difficult to interact with one another in an open, unhindered way, and so it is with God. When you commit sins as a Christian, you remain a child of God; but you grow increasingly unable to trust in God, to speak with him, and to obey him in an open, unhindered way.
The answer to this problem is confession. This does not refer to the Roman Catholic concept of confession, which involves a visit to the priest at the nearby cathedral or a visit by the priest to your home. Instead, it involves speaking directly to God in prayer. When you speak to God, you should acknowledge the sin (or sins) which you have committed. Call them what God calls them. If you lied, call it a lie and “being dishonest.” Don’t call it a mistake or “a slip of the tongue,” and don’t leave God to “fill in the blank” for your unspecified sins. If you will agree with God this way about your sin, then he will freely and fully forgive your sin, restoring open access to him in fellowship and prayer.
You should forgive the sins of others.
Just as the “once for all” sacrifice of Christ for your sins makes it possible for you to enjoy a vibrant, functioning relationship with God, it also enables you to enjoy a vibrant, functioning relationship with other people. If you are aware of any way that you have sinned against another person, then you should do more than confess that sin to God. You should also confess it to the person against whom you sinned. Be honest about your sin. Call it what God calls it and ask for forgiveness. This happens in a healthy church. We commit sins and we seek forgiveness from one another.
On the other hand, how should you respond when someone sins against you and asks you to forgive that sin? Should you hold on to that “balloon” or should you let it go? The apostle Paul answers this question directly. To one church he said, “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you” (Eph 4:32). Be kind means to be gracious and friendly. Be tenderhearted means to be affectionate and compassionate. Forgive one another means to say, “I forgive you,” and to say this generously and freely. In fact, you are supposed to do this just as God has forgiven you through the “once for all” sacrifice of Christ.
Any sins have been committed against you already are judged in Jesus. You have no reason to inflict any further pain, hurt, justice, or vengeance on the person who has hurt you and is seeking to forgiveness. Therefore, God calls you to forgive one another as he has forgiven you. Learn to let go of the sins and failures that have come up between you and other people. Stop walking around with a huge bunch of balloons in your hand. Let them go and enjoy your relationships instead.
How does God forgive? Does he “forget” your sins? Not exactly — He is omniscient and cannot forget anything so far as information is concerned. Though he knows all things, he chooses not to think about your sins, to brood over them or to dwell on them in his mind. He does not to bring them up to you again and does take further action against them. Now, if a crime or felony has been committed, it is appropriate to report this crime to the proper authorities. No believer may cover up another person’s crimes against the law (Rom 13:1-7).
Nevertheless, regarding interpersonal sins and failures, how should you respond? I am speaking about broken promises, hurtful words, needs that have gone unmet, dishonesty, disobedience, lack of respect, and so on. What should you do when the memory of a person’s past sins such as these “pops back into your mind?” Do you choose to set that memory aside? Do you continue to think about it, to bring it up, and to find ways to take more action against it?
To another church Paul gave similar advice. He said, “Bear with one another, and forgive one another, if anyone has a complaint against another; even as Christ forgave you, so you also must do” (Col 3:13). Bear with one another means to be very patient and to put up with one another for a long time. This assumes that you and I, though we may be Christians and members of a church together, may be difficult to put up with sometimes J To “bear with one another” requires you to respond in a special way to the various things that you can accuse other people of doing to you. Do not walk around with an internal list of all the things that people have done against you.
How many times should you forgive one another? The apostle Peter asked the same question. “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (Matt 18:21-22). By saying this, he taught us to forgive repeatedly and indefinitely, for this is how he forgives you and this is how he has made it possible for you to forgive others. When you refuse to forgive others, even for repeated sins, then you violate the grace of God and treat other people in a way that God should be treating you but doesn’t.
According to Jesus, this kind of person stirs up the anger and wrath of God, and he will live a tortured life of pain and inner turmoil (Matt 18:34-35). After a parable on this subject, Jesus said, “His master was angry and delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him. So my heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses.” As you can see, God hates an unforgiving spirit. In fact, when you refuse to forgive the sins of other people, then you will fail to experience forgiveness from God (Matt 6:15). About this, Jesus said, “If you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” Then regarding forgiveness from God, he said, “If you do not forgive, neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses.”
To say that God will not forgive your sins if you refuse to forgive the sins of other people does not mean that you lose your relationship with God or that you have no relationship with God. It means that God will not respond to you in a forgiving manner. If you will not forgive others, then do not expect God to deal graciously with you in this life. As your life unfolds in the future, you will be treated by God and by others the way that you have treated others yourself. If you have been a forgiving person, you will experience forgiveness. If you have not been a forgiving person, then you can expect unforgiving treatment yourself later on.
To forgive as God forgives, you do not need to “forget” the sins that people have committed against you. God himself does not forget, for he knows all things. Instead, God chooses to “not remember” your sins. He no longer holds them against you. He will no longer judge you for them in eternity. When you believed on Jesus Christ for salvation, you received forgiveness from God forever.
To enjoy this life in the present, you must live an honest life, both before God and with one another. Acknowledge your sins when they occur. Confess them to God and to those whom you have hurt. You must also learn to “not remember” the sins of those who have asked for your forgiveness. Though you cannot “forget” these sins, you can choose not to rehearse them repeatedly in your mind. You can choose not to bring them up again and to act based upon their past behavior. Forgive one another as God has forgiven you. When you do this, you will bring new and lasting life to your relationships and will prevent them from dying.
Thomas Overmiller serves as pastor for Faith Baptist Church in Corona, NY and blogs at Shepherd Thoughts. This article first appeared at Shepherd Thoughts, used here with permission.