This is a page about forgiveness.
On January 25th, I poor-decisioned myself right out of a job. As soon as I had to stay home the first day, God began pounding me with the issue - both the concept and the act - of forgiveness. It began initially as a question of how to relate to my Parents since their divorce, but quickly jumped that boundary to expose a broader picture, and a broader sin.
As I read and copied down all the new testament scriptures to do with forgiving someone and looked up their meanings, I saw that what I had been using as forgiveness was not what the Bible described as forgiveness. I had been using a substitute, or more accurately, a counterfeit. When someone hurt me but I still wanted to get on with the relationship (or simply enough time passed), I would "put it behind me" or "let it go". I might refer to it (mentally) as "water under the bridge" and "just get on with my life".
What was really going on, though, was that every hurt or transgression against me created a debt to me (it shouldn't have been to me, but more about that later). The Bible bears out this concept of debt: sin equals debt. Before I accepted Christ, I owed a debt for all my sins. It is referred to as debt in Mattew 6:12-15. In Matthew 18:21-35,(NIV) the concept of debt is perfectly matched to concept of sin and forgiveness. The word cancelled is translated forgiven. Related scriptures are Mark 11:25&26; Luke 6:37&38; Luke 11:4; Luke 17:3&4; Luke 23:34; 2nd Corinthians 2:5-11(which is referring to the guy in 1st Corinthians 5:1-5); Ephesians 4:32 and Colossians 3:13.
Anyway, so in my economy, when someone did me wrong, it created a "chit" (token, voucher), that I held. Just like you get at a casino, and then you go to the window and turn it in when you want payment. But when I wanted to "put it behind me" and "get on with my life", I basically stuck it in my back pocket. I may not have been able to see it, and consequently might not have even thought about it or remembered it, but I still owned it.
Now, I was having a lot of trouble figuring out exactly what to do about this, so I went and talked to an old missionary lady named Mrs. C. I explained my "chit" theory, and then asked "so am I supposed to give them back to the people and let them deal with it?", and she said "No, you're supposed to give them to God." The phrase "give it to God" is so over-used, inappropriately used, and applied to everything with a wide brush, that I completely missed her meaning the first time she said it. After a few more minutes of questioning, I realised that she was saying that the chits rightfully belong to God. That when He says "It is mine to avenge, I will repay", He's not just being dramatic (Romans 12:19, from Deuteronomy 32:35). It is no longer our right or duty or privilege to extract our own payment. The window at the casino is off limits to us. If the person that "did me wrong" has cleared that debt with God already, then no debt exists. If they haven't, then the debt still exists but not to me- only to God.
I know this is getting really long, but bear with me. It became very, very, very clear to me that if this was what forgiveness really meant, according to the Word of God, that I had never consciously and by an act of my will - ever - forgiven ANYONE in my whole life, and I can remember back to before I was a year old. You can imagine my chagrin. And I thought I was going to have trouble with forgiving my parents!
To add to this, as those same scriptures make crystal clear with no room for misinterpretation, since I had not forgiven anyone, God was in a very literal way not able to forgive me. It's the rules. I knew that it didn't compromise my salvation, but I had thrown myself to the torturers (Matthew 18:34) and the only get-out-of-jail-free-card is "...forgive your brother (everyone) from your heart," (Matthew 18:35).
I told Mrs. C. that I was afraid to say I forgive everyone because I didn't know how to behave in a forgiving way, eat, sleep, or breathe as a forgiving person. She said that when we get saved (for all the different varieties of reasons that people do), that we don't have any idea how we're going to act saved. How to respond to the same old stimuli- bratty siblings, peer pressure, flattery, flat tires- as a new creature in Christ. At first (it seems like forever) we probably do it more wrong than right and second guess ourselves all the time. Do a lot of false guilt and real guilt, self-recrimination and you-name-it. But every day we learn a little more. Try, fail, try, succeed, try, have no clue. And she said being a forgiving person is the same way, first you must understand clearly what it really means - not just some cut-rate personal version of it - and then you just have to do it. God's responsible for the instruction and strength, as long as we stay willing and obedient.
