In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus said: “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”
Those words are easier said than done. To those who are wronged, forgiveness is such a hard thing to do. A young man was falsely accused, condemned by classmates and was penalized by his high school principal. A girl was betrayed by the man she loved; he got her pregnant and left her for good. A woman was deserted by her husband; now she’s both father and mother to their two sons.
Like honesty, forgiveness is such a lonely word. Oftentimes, hatred empowers a person who is wronged by someone. But Jesus told us to forgive. “If you forgive other people their failures, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you will not forgive… neither will your Heavenly Father forgive your failures” (Matthew 6:14-15).
Someone once said, “We are most like beasts when we kill. We are most like men when we judge. We are most like God when we forgive.” At one time, General James Oglethorpe and John Wesley met in a party. One of the topics they talked about was forgiveness. “I’ll never forgive,” General Olglethorpe told Wesley. “Then I hope, sir,” Wesley replied, “you never sin!”
“It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own,” Jessamyn West said. Arthur W. Pinero seems to have the same thing in mind when he quipped, “If you have a thing to pardon, pardon it quickly. Slow forgiveness is little better than no forgiveness.”
A Turkish soldier had beaten a Christian prisoner until he was only half-conscious, and while he kicked him he demanded, “What can your Christ do for you now?” The Christian quietly replied, “He can give me strength to forgive you.”
Don’t hold a grudge against a person who has done something wrong to you. Your hatred towards him may or may not hurt him, but it is certain to destroy your own health. Booker T. Washington understood it when he said, “I will not permit any man to narrow and degrade by soul by making me hate him.”
By forgiving someone you are also forgiven by our Almighty for the sins you have done. The words “forgiving” and “forgiven” are inseparable. They go together. They are never separated. At the death of Queen Caroline, Lord Chesterfield said a sad thing: “And unforgiving, unforgiven dies.”
Forgiveness, however, does not happen instantly. It takes time. In The Freedom of Forgiveness, author David Augsburger writes: “Forgiveness is not an act – it is a process. It is not a single transaction – it is a series of steps. Beware of any view of instant, complete, once-for-all forgiveness. Instant solutions tend to be the ways of escape, of avoidance, or of denial, not of forgiveness. Forgiveness takes time – time to be aware of one’s feelings, alert to one’s pain and anger, open to understand the other’s perspective, willing to resolve the pain and reopen the future.”
Once you have forgiven a person, forget the wrongs. “A forgiveness ought to be like a cancelled note, torn in two and burned up, so that it never can be shown against the man,” Henry W. Beecher said. Sydney Harris was even more apt: “There’s no point in burying a hatchet if you’re going to put up a marker on the site.”
If you don’t forgive and forget, the errors done to you by another person will keep coming back. “Forgiving is the only way to heal the wounds of a past we cannot change and cannot forget,” wrote Lewis Smedes, author of The Art of Forgiveness. “Forgiveness changes a bitter memory into a grateful memory, a cowardly memory into a courageous memory, an enslaved memory into a free memory… When we forgive… we open the door to an unseen future that our painful past had shut.”
Forgive and forget, so goes a popular adage. And it takes two person to do so. Theologian Frank Stagg writes insightfully in Polarities of Man’s Existence in Biblical Perspective about authentic forgiveness:
“Forgiving and forgetting are related, but forgiving precedes forgetting. To forgive, one must first remember the injury, the impact, the injustice done.
“To forget ignores the needs of the offender and injures the offended by driving the sense of being wronged deep into one’s own being where resentment does its slow destructive work. Forgetting is negative, passive; forgiving is positive and creative.
“Before one can forgive and forget, both offender and offended must remember together, recall the wrongdoing together, finish the feelings together, reconstruct the relationship together and then they may forget together. In the remembering, reconstructing, forgiving and forgetting each regains the other.”
To the person who has been wrong, giving forgiveness is very hard. To the person who committed the error, asking for forgiveness is also very hard. But God had given us a living example. The death of His Son in the cross shows how difficult it was for God to forgive, how far God was willing to go to forgive, and how costly it is to forgive. Dorothy Sanders in Masterpieces of Religious Verse describes it:
“Hard it is, very hard, to travel up the slow and stony road to Calvary, to redeem mankind; far better to make but one resplendent miracle. Lean through the cloud, lift the right hand of power and, with a sudden lighting, smite the world perfect. Yet this was not God’s way, who had the power. But set it by, choosing the cross, the thorn, the sorrowful wounds. Something there is, perhaps, that power destroys in passing, something supreme, to whose great value in the eyes of God. That cross, that thorn, and those five wounds bear witness.”
Forgiveness from others is charity; from God, grace; from yourself, wisdom.
For comments, write me at henrytacio@gmail.com
Those words are easier said than done. To those who are wronged, forgiveness is such a hard thing to do. A young man was falsely accused, condemned by classmates and was penalized by his high school principal. A girl was betrayed by the man she loved; he got her pregnant and left her for good. A woman was deserted by her husband; now she’s both father and mother to their two sons.
Like honesty, forgiveness is such a lonely word. Oftentimes, hatred empowers a person who is wronged by someone. But Jesus told us to forgive. “If you forgive other people their failures, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you will not forgive… neither will your Heavenly Father forgive your failures” (Matthew 6:14-15).
Someone once said, “We are most like beasts when we kill. We are most like men when we judge. We are most like God when we forgive.” At one time, General James Oglethorpe and John Wesley met in a party. One of the topics they talked about was forgiveness. “I’ll never forgive,” General Olglethorpe told Wesley. “Then I hope, sir,” Wesley replied, “you never sin!”
“It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own,” Jessamyn West said. Arthur W. Pinero seems to have the same thing in mind when he quipped, “If you have a thing to pardon, pardon it quickly. Slow forgiveness is little better than no forgiveness.”
A Turkish soldier had beaten a Christian prisoner until he was only half-conscious, and while he kicked him he demanded, “What can your Christ do for you now?” The Christian quietly replied, “He can give me strength to forgive you.”
Don’t hold a grudge against a person who has done something wrong to you. Your hatred towards him may or may not hurt him, but it is certain to destroy your own health. Booker T. Washington understood it when he said, “I will not permit any man to narrow and degrade by soul by making me hate him.”
By forgiving someone you are also forgiven by our Almighty for the sins you have done. The words “forgiving” and “forgiven” are inseparable. They go together. They are never separated. At the death of Queen Caroline, Lord Chesterfield said a sad thing: “And unforgiving, unforgiven dies.”
Forgiveness, however, does not happen instantly. It takes time. In The Freedom of Forgiveness, author David Augsburger writes: “Forgiveness is not an act – it is a process. It is not a single transaction – it is a series of steps. Beware of any view of instant, complete, once-for-all forgiveness. Instant solutions tend to be the ways of escape, of avoidance, or of denial, not of forgiveness. Forgiveness takes time – time to be aware of one’s feelings, alert to one’s pain and anger, open to understand the other’s perspective, willing to resolve the pain and reopen the future.”
Once you have forgiven a person, forget the wrongs. “A forgiveness ought to be like a cancelled note, torn in two and burned up, so that it never can be shown against the man,” Henry W. Beecher said. Sydney Harris was even more apt: “There’s no point in burying a hatchet if you’re going to put up a marker on the site.”
If you don’t forgive and forget, the errors done to you by another person will keep coming back. “Forgiving is the only way to heal the wounds of a past we cannot change and cannot forget,” wrote Lewis Smedes, author of The Art of Forgiveness. “Forgiveness changes a bitter memory into a grateful memory, a cowardly memory into a courageous memory, an enslaved memory into a free memory… When we forgive… we open the door to an unseen future that our painful past had shut.”
Forgive and forget, so goes a popular adage. And it takes two person to do so. Theologian Frank Stagg writes insightfully in Polarities of Man’s Existence in Biblical Perspective about authentic forgiveness:
“Forgiving and forgetting are related, but forgiving precedes forgetting. To forgive, one must first remember the injury, the impact, the injustice done.
“To forget ignores the needs of the offender and injures the offended by driving the sense of being wronged deep into one’s own being where resentment does its slow destructive work. Forgetting is negative, passive; forgiving is positive and creative.
“Before one can forgive and forget, both offender and offended must remember together, recall the wrongdoing together, finish the feelings together, reconstruct the relationship together and then they may forget together. In the remembering, reconstructing, forgiving and forgetting each regains the other.”
To the person who has been wrong, giving forgiveness is very hard. To the person who committed the error, asking for forgiveness is also very hard. But God had given us a living example. The death of His Son in the cross shows how difficult it was for God to forgive, how far God was willing to go to forgive, and how costly it is to forgive. Dorothy Sanders in Masterpieces of Religious Verse describes it:
“Hard it is, very hard, to travel up the slow and stony road to Calvary, to redeem mankind; far better to make but one resplendent miracle. Lean through the cloud, lift the right hand of power and, with a sudden lighting, smite the world perfect. Yet this was not God’s way, who had the power. But set it by, choosing the cross, the thorn, the sorrowful wounds. Something there is, perhaps, that power destroys in passing, something supreme, to whose great value in the eyes of God. That cross, that thorn, and those five wounds bear witness.”
Forgiveness from others is charity; from God, grace; from yourself, wisdom.
For comments, write me at henrytacio@gmail.com
