The Hope For Forgiveness

I am convinced that there are few actions that are more difficult in life than the act of forgiving someone who has wronged you. I am not talking about the minor accidents and bumps of life that can be easily addressed by a simple, “I’m sorry about that.” I am referring to the things that make our emotional temperature rise. The things that make our chest tighten and our mind grow dark with anger. The devastating results of a lack of forgiveness can be seen all around us as we survey the landscape of broken homes, estranged parents, fractured friendships and even dysfunctional Churches. Ironically though there is something strangely comfortable and alluring to us about resentment and anger. To be sure no one sets out in a relationship seeking to be resentful or angry. Instead we hope to find joy, happiness and fun, but then someone says or does something wrong. Perhaps they say or do several things that are wrong. Then our hopes of joy and happiness come falling to earth as we slowly begin to realize, “This person can hurt me too” or “This person can and has let me down.”

The hurt, pain and consequences are real and sometimes profound. There is a part of us that demands that a price be paid for the wrong we have endured. This is where we are tempted to get cynical. Rather than believing in God’s power to renew relationships and to heal wounds, we content ourselves with the consolation prize of resentment. It hurts too much to hold out hope for reconciliation and so we settle for nursing our grudges and boldly prophesying that, “It’s never going to change.” What I have just described is one of many variations of the easy road. You don’t have to be exceptional or spiritually insightful to move toward cynicism, resentment and unforgiveness. Just throw the gear of your heart into neutral and the natural inertia of life will pull you to that unforgiving place. This is why we live in a world that is profoundly affected by the power of unforgiven wrongs. It was into this world that God sent His Son to demonstrate for us what the true dimensions of forgiveness look like.

Hebrews 9.22 tells us that “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” In other words a price must be paid to purchase forgiveness. We instinctively know this. That is part of what motivates our disappointment and anger when people hurt us. We know that the hurt is real and that it can only be removed by a real payment. Jesus is the payment, His is the blood shed, in order to pay the high price that true forgiveness requires. As believers, we have come to understand this and have come to look to the cross for confidence that we are truly forgiven. We have come to see ourselves as being forgiven, restored and reconciled because of the price that has been paid for us. We have begun to see our sins in the light of the cross, and, as a result, we refuse to give in to the voice of cynicism that says, “It’s never going to change”. We have hope for our future. We have hope for our change.

We need to learn to apply this same hope to the relationships that we have with others. To do for them what we have done for ourselves. To love them in the same way that we have loved ourselves, namely by believing that the blood of Christ can lead them to repentance, forgive them and make them new just as it has for us. This hope does not mean that we minimize the hurt, or call sin by a different name. It simply means that we never stop loving the offender and hoping for his or her restoration. C.S. Lewis describes this dynamic this way: “I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must … hate the sin but not the sinner. For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life – namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself … In fact, the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things. Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them … but it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again.”* We know by faith that it is possible that "somehow", "sometime" and "somewhere" offenders can be cured and restoration can be made. We know that it is possible because Christ has made it possible and we have experienced that possibility in our own hearts. I pray that the Lord will give us the grace to be able to hold out this type of hope and forgiveness to those who have offended us. Perhaps when we realize how much we have been forgiven it will make the difficult task of forgiving others easier.

* C. S. Lewis The Joyful Christian (Simon & Schuster, 1977) p. 143.