Forgiveness is one of those words that is often on our lips but rarely in our hearts. It is regularly heard but seldom understood. So today, let’s seek to understand it.
Forgiving does not simply happen with the passage of time. It is a willing act. Forgiveness is not helplessly waiting for the passage of time to dull your feelings or fog your memory. Nor does forgiveness say, “don’t worry about it,” or “no big deal.” These are excuses to minimize the debt. They say that what you did wasn’t really wrong, it wasn’t that serious, or that you are not to really blame. Such statements are fraudulent forgiveness. Genuine forgiveness says: “What you did was both wrong and inexcusable. But I won’t demand that you pay. Instead, I will pay the debt myself.”
As hard as it is to forgive like this, it is just as hard to be forgiven. For to be forgiven requires you to admit, “I was wrong and I have no valid excuse.” Saying this does not earn your forgiveness (that has to be earned by the forgiver). Rather it makes us want to be forgiven. As long as you want to justify your actions, you cannot want to be forgiven. For this reason, pride is the enemy of forgiveness. Whether you are confessing your sins to God or to another person, pride kills our desire for true forgiveness.
So forgiveness requires two things. It requires us to empty ourselves of all pride when we do wrong. And it requires the forgiver to pay the whole debt. That’s real forgiveness.
But real forgiveness is a rarity. When we are wronged, we usually fake forgiveness but don’t really give it. We file our hurts away in memory banks so that we can use them as leverage on later debts. This way we retain the power to avoid confessing our own sins against others. Thus, instead of living in the peace of mutual forgiveness, we live with temporary and fragile truces. And when we are wronged, we are reluctant to say anything out of fear of upsetting the truce. Without forgiveness, we fear that naming our hurts will only open the flood gates for our own unforgiven sins to be trotted out in a hopeless attempt to “reconcile” accounts—matching up sin for sin, wrong for wrong, injury for injury. Such counterfeit forgiveness leaves behind a string of broken relationships that litters our lives.
But there are worse consequences than these. The problem goes deeper than just poisoning our relationships with one another. The problem strikes at the heart of the Gospel itself. If, in our personal lives, forgiveness is no longer asked for and given in its true sense, we start to believe the lie. And when this happens, the forgiveness of God in Christ becomes just as hollow for us as the counterfeit forgiveness that we offer our neighbors.
Don’t let this false forgiveness color your view of Christ. Instead let the true forgiveness of Christ inform your forgiveness for others. For Jesus always and only deals in real forgiveness. As the true Forgiver, He has already paid your debt by His death on the cross. And as the true Forgiver, His forgiveness toward you is never based on the passage of time, or your good behavior. Nor does He store your sins away to be brought up later as tools of control. Rather, in Christ, God promises you that He will not think anymore of your sins, or bring them up against you, or allow your sins to harm His feelings toward you.
Knowing this we can lay aside all pride and joyfully confess our sins knowing that God will forgive them truly. And so we pray, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”