Forgiving

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Wednesday, May 27, 2015

When you forgive this man, I forgive him, too.  And when I forgive whatever needs to be forgiven, I do so with Christ’s authority for your benefit, so that Satan will not outsmart us.  For we are familiar with his evil schemes.  2 Corinthians 2:10-11 ^(NLT)

The Gospel reading along with the Corinthian text in today’s lectionary is Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son. ^{(Luke 15)}  It’s an important connection; it’s all about forgiving.

The problems at Corinth were, in many ways, so desperate that Paul’s advice about handling the issues called for radical loving forgiveness.  His letter remains a constant reminder how church, family, and individual friendships cannot long endure without forgiving spirits.

Evidently some of the flock at Corinth had been harshly critical of Paul’s leadership, and the relationship between the apostle and the church there was severely strained.  A few letters and visits by Paul for holy conferencing had straightened-out the issues (seemingly); then there was a resurgence of the same problems, all over again! 

This certainly isn’t new in human relationships. 

Relationships have their patterns; some issues between people just go to sleep for a while, then resurface over and over again.  Infidelity in a marriage, a harsh criticism, broken promises, and so on, are “forgiven” but hardly “forgotten”.  It doesn’t take much to poke that hornet’s nest to bring the relationship to the boiling point.

And so it goes!  You may have experienced this; most of us know this first hand! 

Paul evidently wrote a severe letter to the elders at Corinth, warning them that if the ringleaders of this rebellion were not disciplined the church had little hope of surviving as a unified part of the body of Christ. 

Apparently those elders in charge got the message and somehow communicated it to those who were bad-mouthing Paul, and there was repentance, because Paul’s next communication (we have it as 2 Corinthians) has Paul’s personal stamp of approval and instructions for the church to receive back the offenders – to restore them to full fellowship.

I don’t know what you call that kind of discipline, but my kids used to call it a come to Jesus meeting. 

Now, the connection between Paul’s Corinthian church reconciliation and the story of the Prodigal’s homecoming is obvious.  The whole issue is restoration of relationships that have been stretched or broken.

Paul forgave, and made sure everyone knew it was so.  On top of that he made sure everyone knew the origin of the contentious ruckus was Satan’s way of breaking-up the church, while forgiveness is God’s way of telling Satan to take a hike!

Disagreements are going to happen in the human family; we can’t help that. 

Some disagreements will turn into heated debate because it’s hard sometimes to hold dear and strong beliefs and not speak loudly to defend them. 

But, in the end, it is only forgiveness that will honor God; never the dissolution of friendships and family.

No matter who is right or wrong; Calvary proved that!

For You Today

If you’ve been wronged, or been put on the outside in a friendship, church or family relationship, or if you are the one who did the “putting” to someone else…isn’t it time to put it to rest?

That’s what mature Christians do; Satan has had his way far too long; don’t let him outsmart you with his evil schemes.

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[1] Title image: By Ken Poirot (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

The Cost of Unforgiveness

Friday – September 6, 2013

As we close this week of thinking about the cost of unforgiveness, let’s recall where we’ve been so far:

·        Monday – forgive because it’s commanded (or you also remain unforgiven)

·        Tuesday – forgive by clearing away the dead stuff which kills the new life Christ wants to birth in you

·        Wednesday – forgive by choosing to see the offender in your life as a broken part of Christ’s family

·        Thursday – forgive by strapping on the parachute of humility in self-examination

Today

I’ve tried to save “the best” for last in this series.  But the best, in this case, is also the hardest (for me).  We are to forgive by following the example of Jesus.  One of the seven sayings from the cross has a bloody, beaten Jesus saying, Father, forgive them….[1]  Fast-forward a bit and we see Stephen, a leader in the early church, being stoned by a frenzied, religious mob for his faith in Christ.  His last words were emulating Jesus’ forgiveness from the cross…Father, don’t add this sin to their account.

By now we have all figured-out that forgiveness is hard work; it’s God-work.  But the cost of unforgiveness is a much greater cost.  This is exactly why Jesus went to the cross for us; the cost of a cross-less world would have been the judgment of sin on our account.  All of us would have remained unforgiven!

And so…a note to end on for this weekend:

Forgive by remembering Christ’s way is to forgive – and know that genuine forgiveness will always be costly.  Always!

King David understood this.  When he was going to build an altar to worship God, one of his constituents offered him a piece of land – at no charge.  David’s reply?

I will not present burnt offerings to the LORD my God that have cost me nothing. 

2 Samuel 24:24b (NLT)

There is something worth it all about following this Godly example of forgiving someone else’s cost.  I’ve never been put in jail unjustly (or even justly).  I’ve not been put in the hospital because someone beat me up.  I’ve not been so badly treated that you would write a book or TV mini-series about my life.  But I have had occasion to forgive others – more than a few occasions.  

It is hard work, God-work, to let it go, not bring it up, and say goodbye to revenge.  But that’s what God does for us every day as He forgives us!

The cross says so!

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[1] Luke 23:34

The Cost of Unforgiveness (Part Four)

Thursday – September 5, 2013

If we claim we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and not living in the truth.  But if we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness.  1 John 1:8-9 (NLT)

So the guy jumped out of the airplane before learning how to operate the parachute.  The man is frantically trying to figure out how to get it open.  Falling at 125 miles-per-hour, and just 3,000 feet from the ground, he meets another man going in the opposite direction – UP!  As they pass, the jumper asks:  “Do you know anything about parachutes?”  “No,” says the skyward-bound fellow, “do you know anything about nitro-glycerin?”

Human relationships can be like either of the men’s experience – explosive, or freefall!

Attempting to restore a relationship is a potentially-explosive activity.  Failing to prepare yourself by humbly confessing your own sins before God is like jumping out of an airplane before knowing how the parachute works.

Dealing with your own sins before even thinking about someone else’s sins, is so important that Jesus warned his followers to take precautions in this area.  He told them to forget hunting for a little splinter in a friend’s eye before removing the telephone pole from their own eye. ^{(Matthew 7)}   

The cost of unforgiveness is to remain without God’s forgiveness.  The price, or pre-requisite, to begin forgiving others is to be penitent – willing to humble myself before God so that I may be forgiven.  

Today

Strap on the parachute.

Take some time today to review the core of your relationship with Jesus.  See if your attitudes and actions are in line with the Christ-like life.

Remember the split-rail fence?  This confessing of our sins, so God can forgive us, and use us to bless others, is keeping the dead stuff away from the living.  Sin is dead – forgiveness is for the living.

The Cost of Unforgiveness (Part Three)

Wednesday – September 4, 2013

Then Esau ran to meet him [his brother] and embraced him affectionately and kissed him.  Both of them were in tears.  Genesis 33:4 (NLT)

Jacob, Esau’s brother, had been gone from home a long time; more than twenty years.  But before he left, he had made sure Esau’s anger would last a lifetime.  Jacob had stolen the birthright of the oldest son, the blessing of their father, Isaac, and the heart’s affection of their mother.  Esau had nothing left but the fire in his eyes; a burning-hot crematorium of contemplated revenge for when his brother came home.  When Jacob had slinked-out of town in the middle of the night twenty years prior, Esau vowed to send him to his ancestors the next time they met. 

At least that was the plan.

Something happened to Esau in the time Jacob was gone.  We are not told by Scripture exactly what changed the older brother’s mind about exacting his “pound of flesh”.  But when Jacob returned, Esau welcomed him like…well…a long-lost brother! 

Was it just a twenty-year cool-off?  Had Esau had an epiphany, a visit from an angel?  Whatever changed the older brother made the reunion worthy of a Hallmark Movie ending.  There was hugging, kissing, gifts and “you first…no, you first” enough to start a mutual admiration society and homecoming dinner on the grounds.  Sweet!

In part one of this series we talked about needing to put forgiveness on the prayer agenda – the “why” we must forgive – God said so.

Yesterday, in part two, we investigated the first of the “how-to’s of forgiving” – making a decision to dig a hole for all the dead stuff of unforgiveness.

And in today’s text we are reminded of a second “how-to” of forgiving:

It’s your job to Make the first move

If you pick the story apart you will notice that Jacob acted like the visiting stranger.  He sent gifts to his estranged brother, approached the home place by degrees, slowly.  And when they met eye to eye, it was Jacob eyeballing the dust, bowing seven times before the master of the home, his brother Esau. 

We know from the story that Jacob was a changed man, and perhaps Esau picked up on that, and it was enough to start the tears and welcome home party. 

But I think there’s more.

Jacob was doing what a stranger would have done in the Eastern culture of that time, gifts, slow bows, formality and all.  But Esau’s first move was to run to his brother with embraces and kisses.  I believe it was the heart of Esau, seeing his brother acting like a stranger in a place where he should have been family; it pushed him over the edge.

Today

If you will take God seriously where it comes to those you need to forgive, it will happen when you choose to see your brother or sister as a broken part of the body, one who needs an embrace – not a noose! 

And, it’s YOUR job to get the ball rolling.  The only way this works is when YOU make the first move….become vulnerable to another rejection!

OUCH! 

I know….I know….  I don’t like it either, but picking up a cross and following daily demands such things of mature disciples of the Nazarene – it’s what we do!

The Cost of Unforgiveness (Part Two)

Tuesday – September 3, 2013

And no one puts new wine into old wineskins.  For the wine would burst the wineskins, and the wine and the skins would both be lost.  New wine calls for new wineskins.                             Mark 2:22 (NLT)

I wish I could show you a picture of the fence.  We lived in Gainesville, Florida in the mid 1980’s.  Every morning as I drove along 23^rd Avenue

to the church I was confronted by one of the more dramatic illustrations of what it is like to live with unforgiveness.

It was a typically-rural Southern style split-rail fence that surrounded the small pasture with a couple of horses and goats.  It was a serene, Norman Rockwell kind of setting.

The unusual feature was how the fence was finished-off at one end of the property.  I don’t know if they ran out of posts or just didn’t want to cut down the palm tree; they had laid each of the three rails in the trimmed lower branches of the palm, and nailed them to the tree.

Opportunistic, saving the cost of one post…or just not wanting to dig that last post-hole (which probably would have been my choice), they had doomed the life-span of that three rail fence.  Over time the tree had grown – the fence rails and posts had not!  The rails, nailed to the palm tree had objected to the tree’s growth, and the strain placed on the rails and post had uprooted the post and cracked the rails.  It was a mess.  The property owner had made the fatal error of attaching dead things to living ones.

Dead things will not tolerate growing

In yesterday’s (part one) post we looked at “why” we should forgive (God said so).  And we saw that the cost of unforgiveness is that we place ourselves outside of God’s grace; we remain unforgiven for our own sins. 

For the rest of this week, let’s look at the “how” of cleaning unforgiveness from our lives.  The palm tree split-rail fence is our icon to remember the first principle of not holding-on to unforgiveness:

Don’t attach dead stuff to living things

Getting the right mind-set is 9-tenths of winning the battle between the ears; especially when it comes to not forgiving. 

When someone has wronged you, and you feel that sense of resentment building, it is time to name it for what it is – dead!  Unforgiveness is a dead carcass which you have taken into your life.  Picturing it as such will help you deal with it.  Nobody wants to carry around a dead carcass. 

Paul referred to wine’s fermenting process, and how the wine will expand.  If you put it in an older, brittle wineskin, in short order you’ll have a wine tsunami!  The swelling wine will burst the skin and everything is lost.

You must picture the resentment you have towards your brother or sister as if it is a dead skin – or rail attached to the living spirit God wants for your soul life.  If you attach such a thing it has only two ways to go:

·        The dead thing will restrict the growth of new life, or…

·        The living thing will break your dead thing all to pieces.

Either of those choices is anything but the abundant life God wants to pour into you.

Today – do you have any dead stuff attached to your new life?

Make the decision to dig a post-hole for the dead unforgiving things, so you can leave them in the dust behind.  

The Cost of Unforgiveness (Part One)

Monday – September 2, 2013

Make allowance for each other’s faults, and forgive anyone who offends you.  Remember, the Lord forgave you, so you must forgive others.  Colossians 3:13 (NLT)

This text reminds us of the importance of forgiveness, making allowance for each other’s faults (because we DO have them you know!); we forgive because we are forgiven.  Also note – there is no mention of a request for forgiveness (apology).

How are you at forgiving?  Do you make others come to you, groveling, before you’ll even consider it?  Do you say you forgive, and then keep bringing it up, rolling it around in conversation or just thinking about it until you unravel whatever forgiveness you might have given?  Have you not learned to forget to talk about another’s wrong towards you?

Maybe this will help:

Have you ever considered the cost of NOT forgiving?

I’ve known people who took a grudge to the grave.  Trust me – that is not something you want to carry into the next life, standing before the throne with belligerence and malice in your heart. 

Consider the Lord’s Prayer:  forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.  It’s a small line which connects these dots; our own sins are forgiven by God in exactly the same way we are willing to forgive others.  If you refuse to forgive, you place yourself outside God’s forgiving promises; not a good place!

What about the cost of DELAYING forgiveness?

There’s a bit of unwise advice which always makes its way into this discussion about forgiving others.   It is the idea of forgiving “too soon”.  You hear this expressed in a variety of ways: 

·        I’m not ready

·        She hurt me too deeply to forgive right now…

·        What he’s done is unforgivable; why…

The problem of withholding forgiveness is that the longer you hold something, the closer you are to owning it.  In this case, holding hate in your heart becomes a familiar, almost safe-haven for self-justification.  It is a control-device, holding the offender hostage; you have opted to retain power, rather than release the power of God to heal both you and the offender.  When you won’t participate in healing, you prolong the sickness of strife and division.  

Harboring unforgiveness is like going for a test drive at the car dealership. 

The salesman wants you behind the wheel, smelling the new leather seats, feeling that power as you accelerate, and the smooth way that baby handles the curves.  It’s a known fact of human behavior – once you take it for a test drive, you’re half-way to signing on the dotted line.

When you delay forgiving, you also harbor anger or resentment, foolishly thinking it is only a delay against a later, more “convenient” time to forgive.  What you have really accomplished is to place yourself in the driver’s seat of a car you really would never choose to buy (under more sane conditions).  In short, you’re participating in revenge!  Who wants the power of crippling another person held in his hands like a car key?

Tomorrow

In tomorrow’s post we will talk more about how to go about forgiveness. 

For today – get forgiveness on the prayer agenda.  And if you have trouble finding a place to start, start like the man whose child was ill.  He asked Jesus to heal the child.  Jesus told him all things were possible with faith.  He said “I believe; help my unbelief”.

So….I will forgive; help my unforgiveness!