THE NEED TO FORGIVE OURSELVES
When we meet each other either in the street or in a shop we say hello yet in the middle East the greeting is far more significant: shalom.
Shalom is a biblical word and although usually translated 'peace', the word also means total harmony- with God, with each other and with our innermost self.
Such inner harmony and wholeness can never be ours if we are conscious of guilt and worried because we know we have done something wrong.
So when we say, ‘Forgive us our trespasses’ we also need to forgive ourselves.
For all the trivialising of sin in today’s society, many do feel uncomfortable and ill at ease because of something they did wrong in the past.
Sin certainly leads to alienation from God because as Paul puts it in his letter to the Ephesians: Sin when literally translated means to miss the target of life.
The life set out by God – what we ought to be and what we could be.
But sin also damages the sinner.
We lack the peace and harmony we seek, and need forgiveness.
Someone in a Bible class said, ‘that while we can forgive and forget the sins of our children, it is difficult to forget our own’.
Many would agree with that.
We even find it difficult to believe in God's forgiveness because we cannot forgive ourselves.
We may have hurt others and perhaps feel a sense of shame because we have failed to live up to our own highest ideals.
The past cannot be changed and we don't know what to do.
A plane has landed and taxies to the appropriate bay, and then waits while someone places a small block of rubber in front of its wheels.
Thus one of the most powerful machines ever made, using some of the most sophisticated technology ever invented, is effectively blocked from going anywhere by a small piece of rubber.
In the same way one failure, one weakness, or even one mistake that we can't seem to bury and forget can prevent us from 'taking off' in our lives.
To reach our goal, to reach our full potential in the sight of God.
Things come to a grinding halt because we cannot free ourselves from the shame of our sin and failure.
All too easily, we feel trapped by our sins, our weakness and our failure.
We say, 'I can never be free. I try, but somehow keep on failing. That's the sort of person I am, so I guess I must just accept it.'
But it's no good dwelling on our failures or wallowing in the past.
Rolling in the muck is not the best way to get clean! We need to be forgiven.
We may feel a failure and know that we have let ourselves down.
We are not the people we thought we were.
We have failed to live up to our expectations and ideals.
But to have failed is not the same thing as being a failure by definition.
The gospel sets us free from the feeling that we are trapped by past failure.
All of us have failed at some time or another and many of us realise how difficult it is to live by high ideals.
And there is no higher ideal than the Christian faith!
We know that there is always a battle going on between the good we want to do and our selfish desires that can drag us down.
We may feel ourselves at times to be a bundle of contradictions, or even a walking civil war.
But that does not mean we are failures - Failure is not a permanent state of being.
It is only a step in our experience. It should be a learning experience that can spur us on to new endeavour. We must learn from our mistakes.
We take our burden to the cross, claim God's forgiveness and rise renewed and determined to live in the power of the resurrection of Christ.
The distinctive mark of the Christian is not that we do not fail, but rather that every time we do fail we rise up again.
We may at times be beaten, but we are never ultimately defeated.
We may lose a battle, but in the end, with the help of God, we can never lose the war.
No wonder the great Methodist preacher Leslie Weatherhead used to say, 'The forgiveness of sins is the most therapeutic idea in the world.'
As we have seen, our disobedience alienates us from God and the persons we have wronged.
Forgiveness essentially means, therefore, the healing of those relationships broken by sin.
It is not a matter of being let off the hook. There is nothing sloppy or sentimental about it.
If you break a leg doing something wrong, even though the sin may be forgiven the bones will normally take just as long to heal as if you had not been forgiven.
A wrongdoer who also breaks the law of the land, and is guilty of a crime for which they have been arrested and tried, will still have to pay the penalty imposed by the courts, and rightly so.
We suffer the consequences of our sin and stupidity, and for that we have no one to blame but ourselves.
True forgiveness takes us much deeper.
Whereas sin alienates us from God, the Bible clearly teaches that through His grace, healing can be received, harmony restored and forgiveness experienced.
This means that intimacy with God, the Father is restored, a broken relationship healed, and we are free to move forward again.
Paul teaches that through the cross we are 'justified by grace through faith' (Romans 3:23-25).
In other words, we are treated Just as if' we had never sinned.
By His grace, love and compassion God forgives what we have been, accepts us as we are and enables us to become what He calls us to be.
We accept this by faith, and thus make our own what God freely offers to us.
Sin also causes rifts in human relationships.
When we wrong another person, our relationship with that person is inevitably strained and damaged.
Suspicion, hurt and fear replace trust and naturalness.
We cannot pretend that nothing has happened – we can forgive but to forget is another matter.
There has to be an honest facing up to what has gone wrong and why.
Only then can forgiveness take place. It needs to be accompanied by a willingness to repair the relationship.
This often means very hard work, which can take a great deal of time and effort.
It is, of course, much easier to talk about forgiveness and harmony than to put such teaching into practice.
Indeed there may well be such deep problems on either side of a broken relationship that counselling or other professional help is needed.
Nevertheless, a positive and prayerful attempt to seek God's help in extremely difficult situations can do nothing but good in furthering the way of healing and wholeness, even if it does need to be backed up by some additional therapeutic work.
Be that as it may, we need to look more closely at what it means to be forgiving, and why it is so important.
