“Me? Forgive You? Hah!”
Matthew 6:9-13
David P. Nolte
It is a dangerous prayer to pray. If the Lord would answer it in the form we ask, we’d be in a bad way. Ironically Jesus taught us this kind of prayer. He did not intend it to become a mantra, but a model: He said to “pray in this manner,” and He taught them what we call The Lord’s Prayer. Let us stand and pray that prayer together
“Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.” Matthew 6:9-13 (KJV). And Amen.
That’s a “Dangerous prayer?” Yes, because we are asking God to be as forgiving to us as we are to others. Yet some still say to offenders, “Me? Forgive you? Hah! I’d swallow a live toad before I’d forgive you!”
But we need to be more forgiving. Peter came and said to Him, "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.”
Then He told a parable about a king who forgave a slave whose debt was $1,000,000. But that slave went out and found a fellow slave who owed him $50.00 and demanded, “Pay back what you owe.” And when the debtor could not pay he was put in prison. When the king heard about it, he said to the first slave, “You wicked slave, I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not also have had mercy on your fellow slave, in the same way that I had mercy on you?” And he had him imprisoned.
Have you ever felt angry or hurt or betrayed? Have you ever pouted and shouted and spouted “I can’t forgive! I won’t!”? If so, you don’t want to pray, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors!” because if you forgive others, God will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then He will not forgive your sins.” Matthew 6:14-15 (NASB).
What is this? Forgiveness on an exchange basis? “I’ll forgive you for two so God has to forgive me for two?” Not even close!
But the hardness of heart that won’t let grace out to others is the same hardness of heart that shuts out God’s grace to us. The unforgiving are unforgiven.
One problem is, we have a distorted concept of forgiveness.
• We may think it is rolling over on our backs in meek surrender to further abuse.
• We may think it is just giving the offender license to offend again!
• We may think it is a weak and wimpy response! NOT! Forgiveness is strength under control!
Let me share some thoughts about real forgiveness.
I. FORGIVENESS DOES NOT REQUIRE FORGETTING:
A. Maybe you think that since you have not forgotten the offense, you have not forgiven. “Forgiving is forgetting!” so they say. But:
1. We are not God and able to erase something from our consciousness at will.
2. How are you supposed to forget when every day you feel the pain or see the scars or suffer the consequences of what they did to you?
3. How are you going to forget a crime perpetrated against, or harm done to, a loved one?
4. How can you forget if the offender lives with you or works with you and you are constantly reminded of the offense when they are present? In a blog Alan Smith wrote: “Doctor: ‘I see you're over a month late for your appointment. Don't you know that nervous disorders require prompt and regular attention:? What's your excuse?”
Patient: “I was just following your orders, Doc.”
Doctor: “Following my orders? What are you talking about? I gave you no such order.”
Patient: “You told me to avoid people who irritate me.”
Alan Smith continues, “Unfortunately, we don't always have the option of avoiding people who irritate, people who hurt us, people who offend us. In fact, sometimes those who irritate us the most are found right in our home (or in our church building). That makes forgetting really hard.”
B. If there is forgetting involved in forgiveness, I would say it is a disciplined and deliberate commitment to stop mulling it over and hitting the replay button and ruminating on the event.
1. Every time you replay the hurt in the DVD of your mind, you live it again; you suffer again; you open a wound again.
2. While we can’t simply forget what was done to us, we can control our reaction; we can deliberately displace those angry, vengeful thoughts by focusing on something good. Easy? NO! Essential? YES.
C. Don’t be like the boy who carried a little notebook and pen with him all the time. His mom would see him take it out and write a note in it every time he and his sister had a fight. She asked him one day, “Ronny, what do you write in your notebook?” He said, “Well, Jesus said to forgive 70 times 7 and that means 490 times. Missy is at number 212 and when she makes it to 491 she’s going to get it.”
1. Forgiveness is not “forgetness” but it sure excludes keeping count!
2. Keeping the offense in mind is foolish and dangerous:
a. It is foolish because it is you that suffers for it. Every time you hit “Replay,” you, not the offender, relive the pain of the offense. It is like cutting yourself and expecting the offender to bleed.
b. It is dangerous because Jesus said, “If you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.” Matthew 6:15 (NASB).
D. You may remember the offense, but don’t harm yourself over and over by nursing a grudge. Instead
1. Be like Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, who was reminded one day of a vicious deed that someone had done to her years before. But she acted as if she had never even heard of the incident. "Don't you remember it?" her friend asked. "No," came Barton's reply, "I distinctly remember forgetting it."
2. And consider that Robert E. Lee, after the Civil War, visited a Kentucky lady who took him to the remains of a grand old tree in front of her house. There she bitterly cried that its limbs and trunk had been destroyed by Federal artillery fire. She looked to Lee for a word condemning the North or at least sympathizing with her loss. After a brief silence, Lee said, "Cut it down, my dear Madam, and forget it." It is better to cease rehashing and recalling the injustices of the past than to allow them to remain, to let bitterness take root and poison the rest of our life. (From Michael Williams).
So, while forgiveness does not demand forgetting, it does involve refusal to stimulate its memory! There’s more.
II. FORGIVENESS DOES NOT MINIMIZE THE HURT:
A. To brush the offense aside, saying, “Oh, it’s okay. No offense taken.” when it was not okay and you were offended, does nothing good for you or the offender. When God forgives us it doesn't mean that He says that your sin is OK. It's not OK.
1. You can't forgive people if you are not willing to admit that they did, indeed, hurt you.
2. To say “it’s okay” fails to deal with your need of freedom from, anger, resentment and pain.
B. There is nothing wrong with saying, calmly, candidly, with love, “I was hurt when you did so and so.”
1. That opens the door for communication.
2. That can motivate repentance.
C. But even if it does nothing to change the offender, you, at least
1. Are being truthful with yourself.
2. Are honestly dealing with the wound to allow bitterness to drain.
D. And, if what happened was no big deal, no offense, and if it is okay, there is nothing to forgive so why have you been hurting about it?
1. It’s like a woman who had mad-on against her neighbor, but when that woman tried to apologize, she’d sniff and fold her arms and say, “Oh, no. It’s okay. I’m a bigger person than to let something that trivial offend me.” Their relationship, therefore, remained cold and distant and the issue was unresolved.
2. Lewis Smedes wrote: "Forgiving is going to a person either in your fantasies or in reality and saying, 'I don't understand. I'll never understand. It wasn't OK and it isn't OK, but I forgive you.' Forgiving doesn't make a person a doormat. Forgiving isn't the same as tolerance. Forgivers don't have to be fools. Forgiving is healing yourself of something that happened to you that you cannot tolerate, but you forgive it as the only way to heal the wound that it left you with."
Forgiveness does not demand forgetness nor does it minimize the offense.
III. FORGIVENESS DOES NOT HARM BUT DOES GOOD:
A. We may have it in our personal power to retaliate but forgiveness is to abort the use of that power and to use it instead to show Christ’s love to an offender.
B. But some protest, “Are you crazy? Are you kidding me? I can’t forgive! What he did hurts too much!”
1. But Jesus said, “But I say to you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.” Luke 6:27-28 (NASB).
2. Paul wrote, “Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,’ says the Lord. ‘But if your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Romans 12:19-21 (NASB)
C. Forgiveness is
1. Canceling a debt somebody owes you, and not because they asked or deserve it, but because of the forgiveness God extends to us and our need to forgive.
2. Releasing to God the option of vengeance. God’s judgment is right, just, and true while ours is biased, prejudicial and downright selfish.
3. Doing some good thing, the right thing, to the one who wronged you.
D. Let me illustrate with two opposing views of revenge:
1. One story is a picture of revenge. A trucker is in a restaurant minding own business and a motorcycle gang begins to harass him. One in particular got right in his face. "Big man in the 18 wheeler, out of your truck you’re a wimp", he shouted, pouring coffee all over his food. The trucker pays his bill and walks out.
One biker says to the waitress, "He’s not much of a man out of his truck." Waitress causally chuckled and said, "Not much of a truck diver either! He just ran over 6 motorcycles on the way out."
I hate to admit it but I love that kind of story! I bet you do too! We like to see a bully put in his / her place and wouldn’t mind being the “place-putter-inner.”
2. So, now the second, opposite story. Bill, a soldier, had been the terror of his company. He would punch a fellow out for the slightest pretext. But Bill became a Christian and people noticed a huge difference. Bill had done an “About Face!” He never punched anyone any more. He treated people with respect.
One man, who had suffered his wrath, thinking Bill had grown soft, decided to get even. In the mess hall, he walked by Bill and spilled a bowl of hot soup on him. Bill jumped up by reflex. Everyone thought that the other fellow was going to meet his maker.
But Bill said, "At one time I would have beaten the daylights out of you for that. But Christ helps me forgive you." That's self-control. That's what we all ought to learn - and until we learn it, we can't know the joy of forgiveness: of being forgiven and being forgiving!
Forgiveness is not doing harm, but doing good for the offender.
IV. FORGIVENESS DOES NOT DEPEND ON FEELINGS:
A. One of the least reliable guides is emotion. Our feelings can misguide us easily.
B. Some say, “follow your heart.” “Let feeling be your guide.” Why would you do that?
1. The Bible says that every intent of the thoughts of our hearts “are only evil continually.” Genesis 6:5 (NASB).
2. Jeremiah said, “The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it?” Jeremiah 17:9 (NASB).
C. Remember:
1. Martin Luther’s words, “Feelings come and feelings go, And feelings are deceiving; My warrant is the Word of God-- Naught else is worth believing..”
2. If your feelings lead the way you never know where you’ll end up.
3. Sometimes we just don’t feel like forgiving. As June Hunt in her book “How to Forgive When You Don’t Feel Like it” wrote: “We must remind ourselves, for our good, and for the good of others, that forgiveness is not a feeling. Indeed, forgiveness is a purposeful decision – an act of the will not dependent on our emotions. No matter what has been done to us, or how badly it hurts, we must forgive because of this inescapable and profound truth: God has forgiven us all the more.”
D. Patricia Whiteside didn’t feel like forgiving and never forgave the people who acted so insensitively to her and to her three ailing children many years before.
There was the doctor who wrongly diagnose her second child and didn’t discover that she had Cystic Fibrosis and failed to treat her until too late.
There was her neighbor who stopped allowing her son to play with Kemp, her blond, blue-eyed boy because he looked so gaunt and sick.
There was the man at the next table in the restaurant who rudely quizzed them about children. “How many do you have? None? Really? Why not? What’s wrong with you? Shouldn’t you be doing something?”
Years later, Whiteside had never forgotten or forgiven those people. She didn’t feel like forgiving. “To forgive,” she said, “would feel phony.”
To forgive would dishonor her pain and her children’s pain, all of whom succumbed to Cystic Fibrosis in childhood.
When we learn the grace of forgiving others, then Healing can replace hurts; Blessing can displace bitterness; Tranquility can supplant turmoil, and we will experience the Infinite Grace of God as He forgives us.
Forgiveness sets a prisoner free – and when you forgive, you discover that the prisoner was you.
The debt owed to you is so minuscule compared to the debt for which God forgave you.
Let go, Let God, Let it be. The price of not forgiving is too high!
“Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.” Ephesians 4:32 (NASB).
He will gladly and eagerly forgive you if you forgive others and come to Him, just as you are, in faith.
