Paul's words in Colossians 3:13 (NIV) are deeply disturbing. "Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you."
I believe that forgiving one another is one of the most difficult things God asks us to do. Ask me to financially support Christ's church? Sure, no problem. Ask me to share my faith with strangers? Yeah. Okay, I'll do it. Ask me to roll up my sleeves and be a servant? Just name the time and place. Ask me to accept people who are different from me or ask me to show unconditional agape love, and I will put my best effort into doing that. But ask me to forgive those I hate, and I will cross my eyes and tell you how crazy you are!
Forgiveness? Are You Serious?
Over the years I have had the opportunity to share Christ with dozens of people. One of the most common objections I hear to Christianity goes something like this. "Jon, I like everything you are saying, but you don't know my ex-wife. She has totally destroyed my life and ruined my children forever. When she left, the personal rejection was almost too much to bear. Jon, my whole life began unraveling the moment she walked out that door. Since then, she has spread one malicious rumor after another about me to people in the community in order to get custody of our children. People I work with whisper behind my back and some of our closest friends do not even call anymore. Even though she walked out of my life, she has turned my own children against me by telling them lies like, 'Daddy doesn't love you any more and Daddy loves his work more than his own family.' Just recently she hired a vicious lawyer to seek full custody of my kids. This lawyer has no conscience and is trying to take everything I own. Every time I turn around it's something else with her. Jon, I can't forgive a person like that. Could you?"
When I was younger, I befriended a foster child who lived in my neighborhood. Over the years we became good friends. But before I knew him, he had been deeply wounded by his real parents. His dad used to extinguish cigarettes on his back and beat him unconscious. His dad would regularly abuse him sexually. He would smack him around and tell him how worthless he was. He would force him to do terribly wicked things. One time, his dad even tried to drown him in the bathtub.
As a child, my friend's stories horrified me and changed the way I looked at life. His dad was a drunken, doped up, abusive monster. Dare we mention forgiveness to someone who has endured so much? Forgiveness is one of the hardest things God asks us to do.
The Struggle to Forgive.
The reason forgiveness is difficult for all of us lies in the fact that every single one of us has been hurt deeply by another person or by a group of people. An insensitive boss has hurt some of us. For others, it was an irresponsible teenager, an overbearing parent, an unfaithful spouse, or a reckless drunk. For others the cause of hurt was a greedy contractor, an abrasive co-worker, a vengeful ex, a careless health professional, a conniving neighbor, a well-intentioned friend, or a parent who initiated a divorce.
But make no mistake about it. All of us have been hurt, and the pain we have experienced sticks in our memories just like a stubborn stain sticks to old carpeting. And every day something stirs up the stink of those old painful memories.
Yes, you have been hurt. You have been hurt deeply. You have been wronged. You have endured an injustice. And yes, there are scars and the pain still lingers. Without minimizing the pain you have experienced in any way, today I want to spend time talking about the forgiveness that God calls us to in scripture. In his book Forgive and Forget Lewis Smedes talks about the four stages of forgiveness.
The first stage of forgiveness is that we hurt.
A lot of times, we bury our hurts. That is, we suppress our memories and we deny our pain. Sometimes it is just too painful to acknowledge our hurts. Sometimes out of sheer pride, we grit our teeth and refuse to admit that certain people have enough power to hurt us. Sometimes to keep the peace in our homes we close our eyes and ignore the painful blows that are being thrown at us every day. Sometimes we live in denial and try to escape the cold realities of life. Often we minimize and justify the hurt we have received, and we blame ourselves.
It stands to reason then that the first step of forgiving one another is to look full in the face of our personal hurts and call our pain what it is. Yes, my insecure-pencil-pushing-power-hungry boss hurt me. Yes, my parents' abusive parenting patterns scarred me deeply. Yes, my spouse's infidelity and deception continues to tear me up inside. Yes, my spouse's addictive behaviors are tormenting my children and my life. Yes, my child's rebellious behavior is killing me.
The first stage of forgiveness is accepting the fact that we hurt. Without hurt, there is nothing for us to forgive. During this stage, own your hurt. Call your hurts for what they are.
The second stage of forgiveness is that we hate.
Hate is our natural, instinctive response to hurt. Hate is our visceral compulsion to lash back in a fury of rage. Hate is our violent mental agitation that wishes ill, even death, even hell, on those who have victimized us. Hate is a malignancy that actively seeks to destroy the one it has set in its sights. Hate is the negative energy that, to borrow Dr. Smedes' expression, "...wants to belch the foul breath of death over a life that love alone creates."
The last thing hate wants is to make things better. It wants to even the score. It wants to hate the person, not the sin. It obsesses on evil. It wants to make things worse.
Please don't misunderstand. In saying that hate is the second stage of forgiveness, I am not saying that hate is healthy. Hate is a malignancy that will grow and grow until it destroys our lives. Hate can become our identity. With time we can actually become our hate. Hate can consume our lives. It is a vicious cycle that wreaks enormous destruction.
Dr. Smedes says, "It travels with us, sleeps with us, hovers over us while we make love, and broods over us while we die. Our hate does not even have the decency to die when those we hate die-- for it is a parasite sucking our blood, not theirs."
When I became a freshman in high school, I was one of the lucky freshmen who ended up in a physical education class designed primarily for seniors. As a scrawny, defenseless freshman, I had not one friend. Whenever they chose up teams for sports, I was always the last one chosen. Whenever our team lost, I was the one who would get blamed. Whenever someone was having a bad day, he would pick on me and shove me around and call me names and punch me in the ribs.
During the day, the seniors would do nasty things to me. One guy picked his nose and flung his stuff on one of my nice white shirts. And they would never call me by my name. They only had derogatory nicknames for me. One time in P.E. class I missed a critical shot and the instructor looked at me in the eye, and in front of everybody said, "Morrissette, you are pathetic."
To make a long story short, I became filled with hate. I didn't smile. I didn't joke around. I would walk around with my head hung low. I would angrily lash out at people. My thoughts became focused on revenge. I ground my teeth. Even my grades started slipping. The intense hurt that I experienced translated into intense hate, and it became my new identity.
One day I remember coming home from school and being a jerk. My mom confronted me and said, "Jon, you are too young to be this angry." It was then that I realized something had to change. Hate was destroying me.
Most of us here don't want to admit the fact that we hate. We want to put on this pious exterior and pretend to be a super-Christian. We think we're too good to hate. As Dr. Smedes says, "Hate is too ugly for us. We cannot admit we have a bucket full or even a spoonful of it in our system. We deny, we disguise, and we suppress the real hate that ferments in our souls."
Friends, just as we have to face our hurts, we have to face the ugliness of hate. The most destructive thing you can do is to deny the fact that you hate. Hate is a sin that has to be exposed and healed, lest it destroy us.
The third stage of forgiveness is that we heal ourselves.
Whenever we have been hurt, and all of us have, and whenever the hate begins to set in, we basically have three choices. We can continue nourishing our hate until it destroys us. We can revenge those who hurt us and become just like our enemies, thus starting a vicious cycle of attack, counter-attack, punch, counter-punch, eye-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth, leg-for-leg and ultimately life-for-life. The third alternative is that we can heal our hate and discover the power of forgiveness.
In the book Miracle on the River Kwai Ernest Gordon tells the story of a group of Scottish soldiers who were forced to work on a jungle railroad by their Japanese captors. As the work progressed, the Japanese captors resorted to barbarous behavior. One afternoon, a Japanese officer discovered that a shovel was missing. The officer became enraged and demanded that the missing shovel be reproduced, or else! When no one in the squadron budged, the officer got his gun and threatened to kill them all on the spot. It was that obvious the officer meant what he had said.
But then finally one man stepped forward. The officer put away his gun, picked up a shovel, and beat the man to death. When it was over, the survivors picked up the bloody corpse and carried it with them to the second tool checkpoint. It was at the checkpoint that they discovered no shovel was missing. There had been a miscount at the first checkpoint.
Word quickly spread throughout the camp than an innocent man had been willing to step forward and die to save the others. The incident had profound effect. The men began to treat each other like brothers. When the Allies eventually swept in, the tables were turned and the survivors lined up in front of their Japanese captors who were now their captives. But instead of attacking, the Scottish soldiers insisted that there would be no more hatred, no more killing, and no more bloodshed. Now what we need is forgiveness.
We have three choices. We can nourish the hate until it destroys us. We can become like our enemies by revenging our hurts. Or we can heal our hate and discover the power of forgiveness.
Let me say that it is God's explicit will that we heal our hate and discover forgiveness. Without minimizing the enormous hurt that you've experienced and without denying the destructive hate that you feel inside, you need to know that God wants you to be healed and to say to those who have hurt you, "Brother, you are forgiven."
So how do we get cured of hate?
Friends, forgiveness is God's remedy and is the only cure for our hurts and our hate. The day after Ronald Reagan was shot, he told his daughter Patti Davis that his physical healing was directly dependent on his ability to forgive John Hinckley, his would-be assassin.
Forgiveness is always the key to healing, health, and wholeness. Forgiveness alone has the power to look hate full in the face and forgive it, and conquer it, and destroy it, and put it to death. Forgiveness alone has the power to stop the flow of deep hurts from a dead past into our living present. Forgiveness alone has the power to wash away the stains from our painful past. Forgiveness alone has the power to break nature's reign of hate.
When Jesus was being nailed to the cross, he looked his enemies straight in the eyes and said in Luke 23:34 (NIV), "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." 1 Peter 2:23-24 (NIV) tells us, "When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed." It is forgiveness that breaks the chains of hate and brings healing.
The fourth stage of forgiveness is that we come together.
This coming together is the climax of forgiveness. The fourth stage is the restoration of the relationships marred by hate. Just as God's forgiveness brought peace between us and God, so our forgiveness to one another brings peace between us and those we hate.
The fourth stage of forgiveness involves several things. First, it involves helping those who have hurt us to understand our pain. It involves our going to that person and saying, "Hey, this hurt me. Your behavior impacted me. Your wrong destroyed my life." It involves helping our enemies fully grasp the impact of their behavior. God is our model in this. In Christ, he revealed the violence that our sin causes in our relationship with our heavenly Father. Our offenses against God grieve him. They cause separation and alienation from him.
Second, this fourth stage of forgiveness also involves helping those who hurt us to feel our pain. It involves having our enemies confess their wrongs against us. It involves having them repent and promise to change their ways. God asks us to genuinely repent of our offenses against him. God asks us to change our ways and to pledge ourselves to obey him.
Friends, let me tell you what forgiveness is not. Forgiveness is not becoming a doormat. Forgiveness is not forcing ourselves to forget all the hurt that we have endured. Forgiveness is not excusing our enemies' behavior, as if they had no free will and were genetically or socially programmed to inflict pain in our lives. Forgiveness is not avoiding or skirting the real issues and beating around the bush about the hurt we have endured. Forgiveness is not accepting our pain and saying, "Oh well, I could have it a lot worse." Forgiveness is not tolerating willful sin and saying, "I love the sinner and hate the sin."
Rather, forgiveness is respecting yourself and others enough to say, "No more!" Forgiveness is our willingness to face our pain for what it is, in all its ugliness. Forgiveness is our willingness to confess our hate and to repent of it before it destroys us.
Forgiveness is our willingness to seek God's healing through the power of Christ's example on the cross. Forgiveness is our willingness to look our enemies in the eye and say, "No more hurt. No more pain. No more retaliating. No more fighting. No more killing. No more bloodshed. Now is a time for forgiveness. Now is a time for peace."
This fourth stage of forgiveness is not always achieved. Not everyone wants to make peace. Not every story has a happy ending. But let me assure you of this. The quickest way to restore relationships is through the healing power of forgiveness. Forgiveness is the quickest fix to your relationship crisis.
Application
Now, let's have a little application and close this message out. In Colossians 3:13 (NIV) we are commanded, "Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you." Forgiveness is to permeate this and every Christian community. But it helps to know that in Christ, God has already charted the course of forgiveness. We just have to follow in his footsteps and trust that his way of forgiveness not only works, but heals us of our hate.
Just now, I want to close with a letter that was written to a man on death row, by the father of the person whom the man on death row had killed.
You are probably surprised that I, of all people, am writing a letter to you, but I ask you to read it in its entirety and consider its request seriously. As the father of the man whom you took part in murdering, I have something very important to say to you.
I forgive you. With all my heart, I forgive you. I realize it may be hard for you to believe, but I really do. At your trial, when you confessed to your part in the events that cost my son his life and asked for my forgiveness, I immediately granted you that forgiving love from my heart. I can only hope you believe me and will accept my forgiveness.
But this is not all I have to say to you. I want to make you an offer-- I want you to become my adopted child. You see, my son who died was my only child, and I now want to share my life with you and leave my riches to you. This may not make sense to you or anyone else, but I believe you are worth the offer. Ihave arranged matters so that if you will receive my offer of forgiveness, not only will you be pardoned for your crime, but you also will be set free from your imprisonment, and your sentence of death will be dismissed. At that point, you will become my adopted child and heir to all my riches.
I realize this is a risky offer for me to make to you-- you might be tempted to reject my offer completely-- but I make it to you without reservation.
Also, I realize it may seem foolish to make such an offer to one who cost my son his life, but I now have a great love and an unchangeable forgiveness in my heart for you.
Finally, you may be concerned that once you accept my offer, you may do something to cause you to be denied your rights as an heir to my wealth. Nothing could be further from the truth. If I can forgive you for your part in my son's death, I can forgive you for anything. I know you never will be perfect, but you do not have to be perfect to receive my offer. Besides, I believe that once you have accepted my offer and begin to experience the riches that will come to you from me, that your primary (though not always) response will be gratitude and loyalty.
Some would call me foolish for my offer to you, but I wish for you to call me your father.
The father of Jesus