Forgive?

Posted on September 18, 2015 Updated on September 18, 2015

I think it would be easy to forgive Puss in Boots for just about anything. With his eyes all big and glossy, your heart starts to melt and you feel all sorts of soft emotions. But what about the people who really hurt us in life? The ones who often don’t ask for our forgiveness and don’t even apologise?

If we wait for a Puss in Boots moment with people who have wronged us, we will be waiting for a very long time.

Forgiveness is a choice, not a feeling.

One of my worst qualities is that I am unforgiving. If I am honest, I don’t quite like the concept of forgiveness, yet I know this is something God has told us to do seventy-seven times. I seem to have an acute sense of what is fair and I tend to be quite spiteful at times. These are terrible qualities.

Because of this in me, you would understand then, why the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant drives me absolutely insane. Everything cries out within me; this is not fair!!

Matthew 18:21-35 tells the story of a servant who owed the king ten thousand talents. He was unable to settle his debt and the king wanted to put him in jail, but the man fell to his knees and begged for mercy. The king had compassion on the man and decided to cancel the debt entirely.

But as soon as the man left the king, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him one hundren denarii and demanded payment. The servant begged the man to be patient with him, but he had the servant thrown in jail until he could pay off the full debt.

The man went from having huge debt cancelled in an instant, to punishing a fellow servant for a small debt owed to him. But we get so caught up in what the man did to a fellow servant, overlooking that we are that same man! We do this to each other all the time. We punish each other for things done against us rather than forgive one another freely.

We have a wonderful example to follow. The King cancelled our debt instantly when we asked Him to forgive us. He didn’t weigh up all our wrongs to see if we deserved His forgiveness and He didn’t make us do something for Him first either. Yet we are still unforgiving in nature.

God does not half-heartedly forgive us and neither should we half-heartedly forgive others. We need to be asking God to give us perspective of the sins we have been forgiven for, in light of the sin that has been done against us.

Unforgiveness is something that needs to be dealt with aggressively.

God commanded us to love one another. When we are unforgiving and bitter towards someone, we are not loving that person the way God has called us to.

Joshua Harris points out that the cross is unassailable proof that we can be and are forgiven.

We need to see the cross not only as something done for us, but something that was done BY us.

If we can send Christ to the cross and still be reconciled to God, then we can forgive sin that has been committed against us. “Withholding forgiveness is a form of reverse pride that says ‘MY standards are higher than God’s’. This makes you the saviour”.

Psalm 103:10-12

He does not repay us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our inequities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our trangressions from us.

In closing, I’d like to add that choosing to forgive the people who have wronged us does not mean that God did not weep over the pain we felt. God is not detached and distant from what we feel. He will judge everyone accordingly one day, just as the king dealt with the servant in the parable. But we need to leave this judgement up to God.