Forgive Others (And Don't Forget Yourself!)
I have swept away your transgressions like a cloud, and your sins like mist; return to me, for I have redeemed you. Sing, O heavens, for the Lord has done it; shout, O depths of the earth; break forth into singing, O mountains, O forest, and every tree in it! For the Lord has redeemed Jacob, and will be glorified in Israel. Isaiah 44:22,23; Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses. Mark 11:25; For if you forgive others their trespasses, you heavenly Father will also forgive you. Matthew 6:14; Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even Gentiles do the same? Matthew 5:44-47; Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you... Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. Ephesians 4:32; 5:1,2;
The essence of Christianity can be summed up in one sentence: God forgives us, through Jesus Christ. He forgives us as Judge: and once we are acquitted, nothing legally can be held against us any more. He forgives us as loving Father: he takes the initiative to welcome us home, and we are called upon to respond in devotion and gratitude. Once forgiven, we 'go free' - we are 'ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven!' We are absolved of the guilt associated with our previous wrong-doing, and of the shame we feel when we realize we have let ourselves, and others, and, above all God, down. We are ashamed to realize we are more like those who have offended us tham we are different from them. Forgiveness is not an abstract theological idea. It is a basic necessity of a healthy life. Forgiving is not forgetting. It is remembering but going on loving just the same. Forgiveness is serious, and costly. A five year old had worked for a month making a ceramic ashtray he wanted to give his parents for Christmas. A day or two before Christmas day he was running down the hallway, putting on his coat and waving all at the same time when he slipped and fell, crushing the carefully wrapped package with a terrible breaking noise. There was a moment of silence, and then when the child realized what had happened, he broke into uncontrollable sobs. In an effort to comfort him, the father said 'Don't cry, son, don't cry. It really doesn't make any difference.' But the mother, far wiser than he in things like this, brushed him aside and said, 'But it does matter, it matters a great deal.' And then she swept up the child in her arms and wept with him. But when that had passed, she stooped over gently and said: 'Let's pick up the pieces and see what we can make of what is left.' This is what the Everlasting Mercy is all about. It does not discount the importance of perfection; it takes evil seriously and is in the business of salvaging. God takes the mess we have made of our lives and comforts and heals us. But forgiveness is a two-way street. You want to be forgiven? That's great, but others need your forgiveness, too. Most people want to be forgiven, but few people are good at forgiving. C S Lewis was right: 'Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have someone to forgive.' We enjoy the release from guilt and shame when we are forgiven and accepted, but easily nurse our pride and a grudge against those who have hurt us. To be wronged is nothing, said Confucius, unless you continue to remember it. This is the essence of loving. We are invited to love others as we love ourselves. There's a right and a wrong kind of self-love. There once was a nymph called Narcissus Who thought himself very delicious. So he stared like a fool at his face in a pool and his folly today is still with us. A narcissistic person is in love with themselves! 'Love others as you love yourself' is not actually a command, but an assumption. All normal humans love themselves - even when they know the worst about themselves. They want what is good for themselves, what will gratify their needs. People who over-indulge in drugs or alcohol, or sex with many partners actually don't love themselves enough. We can only love, help and forgive others out of the reservoir of healthy self-love. If you love yourself enough to feed yourself well, you should love your neighbour enough to want him or her fed too. You can read this: what about the illiterate person or newcomer to your country who can't read? Do you like being laughed at? Well, then, don't ridicule others. Do you pray for yourself? Then pray for others. That is, we are to be like Jesus, the best-integrated person who ever lived. He loved others, lived for others, taught and healed others, and died for others, forgiving those who were killing him. He was truly 'the Man for others.' The parable of the unforgiving servant (Matthew 18:23-25) shows that one who accepted forgiveness is expected to forgive others. The person who wronged you is to be forgiven seven times a day if there are seven lots of repentance in one day! (Luke 17:4). Peter once asked Jesus how often he was expected to forgive another. Seventy times seven, Jesus replies: no restriction is permissible in his kingdom. God will forgive anything, and everything, and you are to be like God. Even Judas Iscariot could have been forgiven, but he didn't go to the right place - the cross - and ask for it. He was remorseful, but that isn't the same as repenting. In the words of an old writer, 'It is not sinning that ruins us, but sinning and not repenting.' Forgiving is good for your emotional and physical health, too. Renowned psychiatrist Paul Tournier recounts how he was treating a young woman for anaemia, but without success. He sent her to a colleague who admitted her to a sanatorium. A week later came the report, 'On analyzing the blood I did not arrive at anything like the same figure as your quote to me.' Dr Tournier went on: 'If I hadn't been the kind of person who is very careful to check his figures, I might have thought my previous analysis was wrong, but I knew it wasn't.' So he went to see the patient and asked her if anything out of the ordinary had happened in her life since last he saw her. 'Yes,' she replied, 'something has. I have suddenly been able to forgive someone against whom I bore a bitter grudge, and all at once I felt I could say "yes" to life.'
He loved others as himself. He was prepared to personally pay the price for our forgiveness. When he died on the cross for our sins, it was not because he undervalued human life, not because he was sick of living, not because he was caught up in the political circumstances of the time, not because everything was too much for him; but because he loved himself as representative [human person] and he came to fulfil God's plan of salvation for us by reconciling us to God. The order of God's commandments are right: Love God with all your heart, and you will love your neighbour as you love yourself. Lance Shilton, 'Loving Yourself', Melbourne: New Life, November 14, 1991, p.10. The forgiveness of sins has a fundamental significance in the teaching of Jesus Christ. History reveals no prophet or founder of religion who came forward, as he did, with the claim to have power under God to forgive sin... The certainty of forgiveness in Christ is, if not the sum, at least the secret of Christian religion... The real truth is that our forgiveness, at its noblest, is no more than a faint echo or imitation of that eternal and transcendent Divine pardon made ours in Jesus, with which everything began. H R Mackintosh, The Christian Experience of Forgiveness, London: Fontana Books, 1961, pp. 12, 35. The major teaching of the parable [of the prodigal son] is that God's forgiveness is completely unearned. The son did nothing to merit it - rather the reverse... Forgiveness is an act of grace as far as humans are concerned. At the same time it shows a link between forgiveness and penitence, which is essential if the moral aspect of forgiveness is to be maintained. In the parable, the son had to be willing to accept forgiveness if the father was to bestow it... The main point of the [Lord's] prayer [is that] those who ask for forgiveness and yet harbour an unforgiving attitude to others are asking the impossible... [Then there] is the obligation of the offended person to take the initiative in setting the processes of reconciliation in motion. Anyone about to offer an offering to God must first be reconciled with the offender (Matthew 5:23,24). That one must take the initiative, which requires... a forgiving attitude... In the story of the prodigal son the father takes no steps to urge the prodigal to repent, but he certainly takes the initiative in the actual reconciliation. Donald Guthrie, New Testament Theology, Leicester, England: Inter-varsity Press, 1981, pp. 579-580. ..... [In my prayer of] confession I use the categories of the 'seven deadly sins' of Catholic piety: anger, lust, envy, greed, gluttony, sloth and pride.... As I offer each category to God, I ask the Holy Spirit to reveal to me what my sin has been. For example, as I sit quietly with anger, sometimes the Spirit will lead me into little nooks and crannies of my being, and I'll discover resentments or irritations or bitterness I hadn't been conscious of. When I feel the Spirit has plumbed an area of sin, I'll ask the Lord to forgive me, to let me experience his forgiveness, and to give me the power to forgive those who have hurt me. There are times when I realize that God wants me to make some sort of intervention or restitution with certain individuals, and then I must ask him for the courage to follow through. Kenneth Swanson, Uncommon Prayer, New York: Ballantine, 1987, p. 206. Only saints, and the bovine, can say that there is no one they dislike, and it was not always true of the saints. Some people have given us great cause to dislike them. They may have injured us, by deed or word, deeply and irreparably. It is hard not to hate them. God has a special concern that we pray for them. He is wanting to rid us of the mild dislike, or burning hate, and this is one way to do it. He uses prayer as a filter. The very effort to pray for them will help us. The prayer will help us even more. You cannot hate people you pray for. The two things cannot live together in the same heart... If you are disliking them without a cause (and we often do dislike people without a cause) prayer brings you to that realization. If you are disliking them them for a trifling cause (their manner, or some petty annoyance they gave you), the whole thing looks trifling in the light of God. You feel ashamed of your own pettiness... Pray to love them. God has in his gifts a supernatural love by which the Christian can even love people he or she does not like. Once this is given, prayer is not impossible. It is not even hard. W E Sangster, The Secret of Radiant Life, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1961, p. 245. If you are not getting answers to your prayers, check yourself very thoroughly and honestly as to whether you have resentments on your mind. Spiritual power cannot pass through a personality where resentment exists. Hate is a non-conductor of spiritual energy. I suggest that every time you pray you add this phrase, `Lord take from my thought all ill will, grudges, hates, jealousies'. Then practise casting these things from your thoughts. Norman Vincent Peale, Thought Conditioners, New York: Foundation for Christian Living, n.d., p.24. It is a testimony to their strength of character, forged in the greatest adversity, that many of the ex-hostages [held in Beirut] speak of the need to forgive their former captors. 'I'm a Christian and a Catholic,' Terry Anderson said last week. 'It's required of me that I forgive, no matter how hard it may be.' Jill Smolowe, Lives in Limbo, Time, December 16, 1991, p. 94. Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savour to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back - in may ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you. Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, London: Collins, 1973, p.2. The past is, perhaps, not totally lost, but it is no longer ours; it is in the hands of God and is his business. It will be retrieved in the tota simul possessio of eternity, but should not be stored away on earth. As far as we are concerned, we must realize that we are like children, at the beginning, not the end, of a road. Whatever past achievements might bring us honour, whatever past disgraces might make us blush, all of these have been crucified with Christ; they exist no more except in the deep recesses of God's eternity, where good is enhanced into glory and evil miraculously established as part of the greater good... Abba Theodotus said, `Do not judge a fornicator if you are chaste, otherwise you will be transgressing the law too. For he who said, "Do not fornicate", also said, "Do not judge".' We are all, equally, privileged but not unentitled beggars before the door of God's mercy. Simon Tugwell, 'The Beatitudes' in John Garvey (Ed), Modern Spirituality, an Anthology, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985, pp. 65-67. When we forgive we adore, invoke, surrender to God as Universal Mercy: 'Our father, forgive us... as we forgive others.' All the idols of our self-serving, even if they wear the sacred names of justice, loyalty, peace, tradition or humanity - all have to go... Faith is never merely a reaction to evil. It is an encounter with the only kind of Love that can redeem us. It is not the problem of evil that is first (and last), but the Mystery of Love and Goodness. Tony Kelly, 'Free to Forgive', National Outlook, February 1984, p. 18. Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who `forgives' you - out of love - takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails sacrifice. The price you must pay for your own liberation through another's sacrifice, is that you in turn must be willing to liberate in the same way, irrespective of the consequences to yourself. Dag Hammarskjold, (Markings), quoted in Michael Hollings, Hearts Not Garments, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982, p.82. I have nothing whereof I may glory in my works; I will therefore glory in Christ. I will not glory because I am righteous, but because I am redeemed; not because I am clear of sin, but because my sins are forgiven. St. Ambrose (fourth century) quoted in H R Mackintosh, The Christian Experience of Forgiveness, London: Fontana Books, 1961, p. 14. A clergyman I know was a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp. He showed me his hand. He has no fingernails. They had been drawn out one by one as a punishment for an alleged offense, of which he was quite unaware. I asked him how he felt about this sadistic, inhuman, brutal behaviour, and the people who could perpetrate such dastardly crimes. He said simply, 'Every week I lead my congregation in the Lord's Prayer. We say together "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." I couldn't be a Christian if my heart remained unforgiving.' John N Gladstone, 'Magnificently Charismatic', unpublished sermon preached at Yorkminster Park Baptist Church, Toronto. Corrie ten Boom was stuck in a concentration camp, humiliated and degraded, especially in the delousing shower where the women were ogled by the leering guards. But she made it through that hell. And eventually she had, by grace, forgiven even those fiends who guarded the shower stalls. So she preached forgiveness... [in] Europe, in the U.S., and, one Sunday, in Munich. After the sermon, greeting people, she saw a man coming towards her, hand outstretched: 'Ja, Fraulein, it is wonderful that Jesus forgives us all our sins, just as you say.' She remembered his face; it was the leering, lecherous, mocking face of an SS guard of the shower stall. Her hand froze at her side. She could not forgive. She thought she had forgiven all. But she could not forgive when she met a guard, standing in solid flesh in front of her. Ashamed, horrified at herself, she prayed: 'Lord, forgive me, I cannot forgive.' And as she prayed she felt forgiven, accepted, in spite of her shabby performance as a famous forgiver. Her hand was suddenly unfrozen. The ice of hate melted. Her hand went out. She forgave as she felt forgiven... Our only escape from history's cruel unfairness, our only passage to the future's creative possibilities, is the miracle of forgiving. Lewis Smedes, 'Forgiveness: The Power to Change the Past', Christianity Today, January 7, 1983, p. 26.
Jesus, friend of sinners, you call us to love our enemies, to do good to those who hate us, to bless those who curse us, and pray for those who treat us badly. Jesus, reconciler, when someone slaps us on the cheek, you call us to offer the other; when someone takes our coat, you bid us give our shirt as well; when someone takes what is ours, we may not demand it back. Jesus, Son of God, our friend and brother, when we love our enemies and do good we are children of God, who is kind to the wicked and ungrateful. Jesus, teacher without peer, you have turned the world upside down. A New Zealand Prayer Book, Auckland, Collins, 1989, p.121-122. Your goodness, your gentleness, your loving-kindness, your patient forgiveness, your love for your enemies - Lord, I want to be like you. You are so kind, Lord; forgive my ingratitude. You are so strong; forgive my stubborn independence; you are my Master and Lord; forgive my disobedience; you are so pure and holy; forgive my sins. Amen.
Benediction: May our forgiving God create in you a clean heart, and renew a right spirit within you. May you know you are not cast away from his presence, and that his renewing Holy Spirit lives within you. May you experience the joy of salvation, and the strength of a willing spirit cause you to delight to do his will, always. Amen. </body
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