Spiritual Survival Guide
3: Forgiveness
The Heart and Art of Forgiveness
But Jesus doesn’t leave us on our own, sitting in our cells, full of hurt and hate, and now commanded to do something we just can’t do. Jesus also gives us his Holy Spirit—God’s own force who comes to us to en- courage us and empower us to take the next step in the art of forgiving. That’s what forgiving is—an art, a combination of a gift we receive from the Spirit of Christ and a skill we acquire by actually doing it. Here are a couple of quick guidelines to get you going in the art of forgiveness: 1. Pace yourself. Don’t rush it. Stop and think about what’s bothering you. Maybe it’s something that can easily be excused. Maybe it’s some- thing that you need to be forgiven for. Take some time to pray about it. Pace yourself. And yet . . . 2. Don’t wait too long. Forgiveness is an urgent matter. In fact, Jesus told people to stop what they were doing, even right in the middle of wor- ship, and go immediately to make things right. Jesus teaches us to make the first move. Don’t drag your feet. Why? Because bitterness will inevi- tably set in, and your hatred will take root in your heart. Because death may intervene. Because it will only get harder to forgive in the future. Because the longer you leave it, the more your offer of forgiveness will sound and feel more like a bitter dredging up of bad things from the past than an opportunity for a new future. 3. Forgive as often as you need to. One of the toughest things about forgiveness—and in this way it’s similar to grief—is that you’re not always sure you’ve completely done it. Sometimes little things can trig- ger the old feelings of hurt and hate all over again. Those old wounds, those feelings of contempt, and the desire for revenge can just bubble up to the surface. And then you need to forgive again. Forgiveness is sometimes not so much a one-time act as it is an ongoing, mysterious process.
Forgiveness, at its heart, comes down to two words: taking away . The biblical word for forgiveness literally means “taking away,” “bear- ing away,” “removing.” Above all, forgiveness is used to describe what God takes away, bears away, and removes from us . And so, if we want to know what we’re called to do in the tough work of forgiveness, we need to see how God forgives by “taking away.” The Bible says that God disconnects the wrong we’ve done from who we are. He separates and peels off our sins from our person. He takes it away and sends it packing so that he can see us in a whole new light. Where does all this wrong and sin go? It gets nailed to Jesus Christ’s cross. And when it goes there, the Bible tells us, it goes straight to the very heart of God. Like a desert absorbs the rain, our sin is totally absorbed deep down in the fire of God’s overwhelming love—never to come cir- cling back at us, defining us, accusing us, or convicting us ever again. Forgiveness is God’s new creation, a new way of seeing and a new way of being. The heart of forgiveness is God absorbing our hatred and lies and selfishness without ever retaliating. The heart of forgiveness is God’s white-hot love for us. We believe that Jesus calls us to a life of radical love, to a life of forgive- ness, to love’s toughest work and biggest risk. Jesus calls us to love our enemies, to forgive when we’ve been hurt unfairly and deeply—to for- give even when what we feel is hate. Jesus calls us to a new way of seeing other people—taking the sin away from the sinner who wronged us. Jesus commands us to love and forgive our enemies even when it’s really hard, even when the enemy is faceless or invisible, or when the enemy is our own regret.
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