During the past week, I’ve been sharing a few of my older talks. Last time, I shared a messaged about forgiveness. I want to follow that up with this message: why forgive?
I hope it speaks to you.
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Last time we I made a very important statement regarding grace:
The gospel of grace begins and ends with forgiveness
We talked about the fact that God expects us to forgive. In fact, He more than expects it … He commands us to forgive.
God linked our willingness to forgive others to His ability to forgive us. He did it in the Lord’s prayer when He told us to pray: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” – or “Extend grace to us in the same measure as we extend grace to others.”
But, as we learned last time, forgiveness is an act of faith. It’s truly believing that God is a better judge than you are. By forgiving, you are trusting God to deal with the situation better than yourself.
We also tried to be honest: Forgiveness is not easy. It’s not just a matter of saying, “Oh well, I forgive you.”
The idea of forgiveness goes against everything in us. When I feel wronged, I can come up with a hundred reasons why not to forgive: He needs to learn a lesson. I don’t want to encourage irresponsible behaviour. I’ll let her stew for a while; it will do her good. She needs to learn that actions have consequences. I was the wronged party – it’s not up to me to make the first move. How can I forgive when he’s not even sorry? When I finally decide to forgive, it’s like a leap from sound argument to mushy sentiment.
So why forgive?
Well, we already discussed the first reason: God commands us to forgive.
Another reason to forgive is only forgiveness can stop the cycle of blame and pain, breaking the chain of ungrace. In the Bible, the most common Greek word for forgiveness means, literally, to release, to hurl away, to free yourself.
The word resentment describes what happens when the cycle of ungrace continues. It means, literally, to “feel again”: resentment clings to the past, relives it over and over, picks each fresh scab so that the wound never heals.
Forgiveness offers a way out of the cycle. It doesn’t settle the questions of fairness and blame – it fact, it often evades those questions – but it allows for a fresh start.
You see, forgiveness is not just for the guilty person. It also frees the innocent party. When you forgive, you release yourself. As one author put it: “The first and often the only person to be healed by forgiveness is the person who does the forgiveness … When we genuinely forgive, we set a prisoner free and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us.”
A third reason to forgive is that forgiveness loosens the stranglehold of guilt in the perpetrator.
Let me read you a few stories from Yancey’s book to explain:
In 1993 a Ku Klux Klansman named Henry Alexander made a confession to his wife. In 1957 he and several other Klansmen had pulled a black truck driver from his cab, marched him to a deserted bridge high above a swift river, and made him jump, screaming, to his death. Alexander was charged with the crime in 1976-it took nearly twenty years to bring him to trial-pled innocent and was acquitted by a white jury. For thirty-six years he insisted on his innocence, until the day in 1993 when he confessed the truth to his wife. “I don’t even know what God has planned for me. I don’t even know how to pray for myself,” he told her. A few days later, he died.
Alexander’s wife wrote a letter of apology to the black man’s widow, a letter subsequently printed in The New York Times. “Henry lived a lie all his life,- and he made me live it too,” she wrote. For all those years she had believed her husband’s protestations of innocence. He showed no outward sign of remorse until the last days of his life, too late to attempt public restitution. Yet he could not carry the terrible secret of guilt to his grave. After thirty-six years of fierce denial, he still needed the release only forgiveness could provide.
Another member of the Ku Klux Klan, the Grand Dragon Larry Trapp of Lincoln, Nebraska, made national headlines in 1992 when he renounced his hatred, tore down his Nazi flags, and destroyed his many cartons of hate literature. As Kathryn Watterson recounts in the book Not by the Sword, Trapp had been won over by the forgiving love of a Jewish cantor and his family. Though Trapp had sent them vile pamphlets mocking big-nosed Jews and denying the Holocaust, though he had threatened violence in phone calls made to their home, though he had targeted their synagogue for bombing, the cantor’s family consistently responded with compassion and concern. Diabetic since childhood, Trapp was confined to a wheelchair and rapidly going blind; the cantor’s family invited Trapp into their home to care for him. “They showed me such love that I couldn’t help but love them back,” Trapp later said. He spent his last months of life seeking forgiveness from Jewish groups, the NAACP, and the many individuals he had hated.
Forgiveness is not the same as a pardon: you may forgive one who wronged you and still insist on a just punishment for that wrong. However, forgiveness will release its healing power both in you and in the person who wronged you.
Reginald Denny, the truck driver assaulted during the riots in South Central Los Angeles, demonstrated this power of grace. The entire nation watched the helicopter video of two men smashing his truck window with a brick, hauling him from a cab, then beating him with a broken bottle and kicking him until the side of his face caved in. In court, his tormentors were belligerent and unrepentant, yielding no ground. With worldwide media looking on, Reginald Denny, his face still swollen and misshapen, shook off the protests of his lawyers, made his way over to the mothers of the two defendants, hugged them, and told them he forgave them. The mothers embraced Denny, one declaring, “I love you.”
I do not know what effect that scene had on the surly defendants, sitting in handcuffs not far away. But I do know that forgiveness, and only forgiveness, can begin the thaw in the guilty party.
Rebecca’s story a powerful illustration of forgiveness and the power of grace.
She had married a pastor who had some renown as a retreat leader. It became apparent, however, that her husband had a dark side. He dabbled in pornography, and on his trips to other cities he solicited prostitutes. Sometimes he asked Rebecca for forgiveness, sometimes he did not. In time, he left her for another woman, Julianne.
Rebecca told us how painful it was for her, a pastor’s wife, to suffer this humiliation. Some church members who had respected her husband treated her as if his sexual straying had been her fault. Devastated, she found herself pulling away from human contact, unable to trust another person. She could never put her husband out of mind because they had children and she had to make regular contact with him in order to arrange his visitation privileges.
Rebecca had the increasing sense that unless she forgave her former husband, a hard lump of revenge would be passed on to their children. For months she prayed. At first her prayers seemed as vengeful as some of the Psalms: she asked God to give her ex-husband “what he deserved.” Finally she came to the place of letting God, not herself, determine “what he deserved.”
One night Rebecca called her ex-husband and said, in a shaky, strained voice, “I want you to know that I forgive you for what you’ve done to me. And I forgive Julianne too.” He laughed off her apology, unwilling to admit he had done anything wrong. Despite his rebuff, that conversation helped Rebecca get past her bitter feelings.
A few years later Rebecca got a hysterical phone call from Julianne, the woman who had “stolen” her husband. She had been attending a ministerial conference with him in Minneapolis, and he had left the hotel room to go for a walk. A few hours passed, then Julianne heard from the police: her husband had been picked up for soliciting a prostitute.
On the phone with Rebecca, Julianne was sobbing. “I never believed you,” she said. “I kept telling myself that even if what you said was true, he had changed. And now this. I feel so ashamed, and hurt, and guilty. I have no one on earth who can understand. Then I remembered the night when you said you forgave us. I thought maybe you could understand what I’m going through. It’s a terrible thing to ask, I know, but could I come talk to you?”
Somehow Rebecca found the courage to invite Julianne over that same evening. They sat in her living room, cried together, shared stories of betrayal, and in the end prayed together. Julianne now points to that night as the time when she became a Christian.
“For a long time, I had felt foolish about forgiving my husband,” Rebecca said. “But that night I realized the fruit of forgiveness. Julianne was right. I could understand what she was going through. And because I had been there too, I could be on her side, instead of her enemy. We both had been betrayed by the same man. Now it was up to me to teach her how to overcome the hatred and revenge and guilt she was feeling.”
Conclusion
Forgiveness is never easy. And yet, it’s necessary.
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