Spiritual Warfare: The Battle for Freedom in Christ
Forgiving the Hard to Forgive
SPEAKER: Michael P. Andrus
Note to reader: These sermons on Ephesians are not my typical verse-by-verse exposition. Most were preached in 1990 in a series on “Spiritual Warfare: The Battle for Freedom in Christ.” I used Ephesians as a springboard for this series but referred to many other passages as well. Some of the sermons in the series are stand-alone messages preached at various times and various places. The early sermons from 30-35 years ago are not well footnoted, as I never expected them to be published.
Introduction: Joseph Parker was one of the greatest preachers of 19th century England. As a young man he used to debate in the mining fields with infidels and atheists. An infidel once shouted at him, “What did Christ do for Stephen when he was stoned to death?” Parker said the answer came to him like an inspiration from heaven, and he responded, “He gave him grace to pray for those who stoned him.” Stephen had the mind of Christ; and hearing him pray for those who did him wrong recalls the prayer of Jesus himself, under like circumstances: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34)
Last Lord’s Day we examined the monumental but rewarding task of learning to forgive those who have hurt us. Ephesians 4:32 commands us, “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.” Because many were out of town for Thanksgiving, a bit of review might be valuable. We began by asking…,
Why should we forgive?
It is required by God. (Eph. 4:32, Matt. 6:9-15)
It is essential for our own spiritual freedom. (2 Cor. 2:5-11)
It is the only way to stop the pain.
Then we asked the question…,
What does it mean to forgive?
It is not forgetting.
It is not excusing.
It is not tolerating.
It is resolving to pay the consequences of the offender’s sin and to never use it against him.
It is allowing God to be the Judge. (1 Cor. 4:4-5; 2 Cor. 5:10) You let the offender off your hook, but not off God’s hook.
Third, we asked…,
What are the steps to forgiveness?
Make a list of all those who have offended you.
Face the hurt, admit the hate. Forgiveness must come from the heart.
Make the choice to accept the burden of their sin.
Take it to the Cross with a prayer like this: “Father, because you have forgiven me, I now choose to forgive (name) for (the offense).”
Be open to reconciliation within the bounds of reality.
Don’t tell the offender that you have forgiven him. Tear up the list.
Recognize that forgiveness may come slowly, a little at a time, with some confusion, with anger left over.
Now that’s a 2-minute synopsis of a 45-minute sermon. If this is an area you struggle with, I encourage you to stop by the tape table and pick up a copy of last Sunday’s message.
I talked to someone this week who had a very good question: “What if there’s no one on my list?” I say, “Praise God. By all means, don’t make up people to hate.” A person who can think of no one they have failed to forgive is a rare person, one undoubtedly reared in a loving, accepting home, where immediate forgiveness was modeled. He or she is a person who has learned who they are in Christ to the point that self-esteem is not threatened by those who offend.
Let me suggest to you that the longer your list of people needing forgiveness, the more likely you are suffering from a distorted and unbiblical self-image. When you don’t feel good about yourself and don’t realize that your significance and security is in Christ, you become overly sensitive, and the normal hurts of life seem more devastating. The solution is to work on both forgiving and finding self-worth in Christ. If you only try to forgive but do nothing about the root problem, the names on your list will just continue to be replaced with new names.
So much for review. Let’s turn our attention now to the subject of
Forgiving those who are unusually hard to forgive.
If you followed the steps suggested last Sunday there is one thing I am sure you discovered, namely that all efforts at forgiveness are not equal. There are some people we seem to be able to forgive with relative ease. There are others whom we find almost impossible to forgive. I say “almost” because I believe God would not ask us to do anything that is impossible. Today I want to talk about some of those who are very hard to forgive. Let’s begin with …
Chronic offenders. It is one thing to forgive a person who hurts us once, even deeply. It is possible, if we try, to rebuild trust and to rekindle love for such a person. But what about the chronic offender, the one who hurts us again and again? I’m not thinking here just of the outrageous case of the spouse who is involved in his or her umpteenth affair, or the teenager who is on his fourth drug rehab program. I’m thinking also about chronic offenses that are more mundane and far more common—the husband who is a couch potato, the wife who is a terrible housekeeper, the child who is rebellious, the in-laws who won’t quit interfering, the colleague at work who drives you nuts, the neighbor who destroys the peace and tranquility you desire at home.
Almost every one of us has at least one “irregular person” in our life, probably several. We try to reason with them, we pray for change, we beg for some relief, but the offense goes on and on and on. Take the coach potato. Suppose his wife is a hard-working, intelligent person who enjoys conversation, culture, and friends, but none of that is possible because as soon as this guy gets home from work, he grabs a six-pack and flops down in front of the boob tube, eventually falling asleep. To make matters worse, when he finally wakes up at 1:00am and drags himself off to bed, he suddenly gets romantic! The frustration for that wife can become monstrous. How does she forgive over, and over, and over again?
It seems to me that Jesus addressed this issue in response to a question from Peter. In Matt. 18:21ff we read, “Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, ‘Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?'” Peter thought he was being extremely magnanimous, for the rabbis said one only needed to forgive three times. “Jesus answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” (some versions read 70 times 7). The principle seems to be that no limits should be set on forgiveness. That does not mean, however (as we saw last Sunday), that tolerance has no limits. Al Anon and related organizations have done some great work helping people who live with chronic offenders to demonstrate tough love, instead of becoming enablers of offensive behavior. Dr. Dobson’s book entitled Tough Love is a valuable asset for those who live with chronic offenders.
Those who hurt our children. I don’t know about you, but the people I have the hardest time forgiving are not those who hurt me, but those who hurt my family, particularly my children. About two months ago a teenage neighbor boy purposely shot at my son Andy with a pellet rifle from his window while Andy was riding his tricycle on the sidewalk. Fortunately, it hit him in the foot instead of the head. The projectile raised a nasty welt, right through the tennis shoes he was wearing. I immediately called the police, who did nothing but tell the boy not to shoot the gun out his window again. (The fact that his father is a judge may have had something to do with the kid-gloves treatment). Ironically, that family is now treating us like the offenders because we called the police. The whole incident makes me very angry, especially since this is not the first time the boy has tried to hurt my son, who is ten years younger than he.
What is it that makes it so hard to forgive those who hurt our children, whether it be the neighborhood bully, or a child at school who makes cruel remarks, or an unfair coach or, God forbid, even a molester? I think it’s because our kids are so vulnerable and we recognize how long the hurts can last. But despite the difficulty of forgiving in this case, it is very important that we do so, because if we don’t model forgiveness for our children, how will they ever learn it themselves? If we hold grudges and show hate to those who have hurt them, how can we expect them to do any differently? It wasn’t until God convicted me through my preparation for this very sermon that I sat down with Andy at bedtime Wednesday night and prayed with him for Franko, the neighbor .boy who shot him.
Now a third category of the hard-to-forgive is …
Invisible people. Think, for example about those who invade our lives, sometimes just briefly, hurt us, and then disappear, leaving us with painful memories. Joseph, you will recall, had to forgive invisible people like this. After his brothers sold him into slavery, decades passed with no contact. He could not have known whether they were dead or alive, whether they had any regrets or rejoiced that he was gone.
Perhaps one of you here today has fallen deeply in love with someone special, made a tremendous emotional investment in that person, and then suddenly that person pulled away. Perhaps you tried to find out what happened, but he or she refused to talk, treating the entire relationship as a bad joke. Your emotions undoubtedly ranged from anger to embarrassment, from hate to deep loneliness.
How do you forgive such a person? Not easily, but I think it helps to try to understand the range of emotions the offender himself is going through. I recall a couple I counselled in Wichita about 10 years ago. They had dated for 3 or 4 years and decided to get married. He had been badly hurt by his first wife, who had left him for another man. We went through several months of premarital counseling, and I thought most of his fears had been dealt with. But on their wedding day she received a note from him saying he couldn’t go through with it. Enclosed was a sizable check to pay for all the expenses she had gone through. He had left town.
She was devastated. In fact, she almost went nuts. She hated him; she talked about revenge; she probably would have considered murder if she could have found him. But over the course of the next week or so I talked to her about the long view. She admitted she still loved him down deep, and so we considered how love should respond to someone who has hurt us so deeply. We talked most about the feelings he must be going through—fear, embarrassment, self-hatred, shame for hurting her, etc. Once she began to understand his pain, she was able to forgive him. The hate vanished and she was prepared to reach out to him. When he finally returned, he was surprised to find her less angry than sympathetic. It paid off. Some nine months later I had the privilege of marrying that couple, and in the past nine years God has given them a delightful marriage and several fine children. It couldn’t have happened had she not found the grace to forgive while he was gone, not knowing if he would ever come back.
Another category of invisible offender is the one who may have hurt us but hid their face behind the mask of a corporation or government bureaucracy, as when a family in our church was forced to abandon their home and everything they owned in Times Beach when dioxin was discovered there. Lewis Smedes writes,
“Organizations have little grace. They can knock you down, drag you across a bed of nails, throw your remains into the street, and just before you hit the pavement, hand you a ten-dollar plaque with your name on it to show the company’s gratitude. Organizations are amoral; they can leave you bleeding in the street with no breathing human being around to accept the blame: it is all company policy.”[i]
Well, how do you forgive an impersonal organization? You can’t. You must find a living, breathing, responsible person in the organization and forgive that person or persons. Confrontation is often helpful in the process. It’s OK to go to the vice-president or personnel manager—the one you think most responsible for the mistreatment—and both ask for an explanation and use the opportunity to be honest about your hurt. When I say “confrontation” I don’t mean “nasty confrontation.” We need to speak the truth in love, recognizing that they’re probably not going to change their mind, nor are they likely to even admit wrong. Still the process should help us focus on someone to forgive. Our confrontation may also help them think twice before doing the same to someone else.
A third category of invisible offender is the one who hurts us and then has the nerve to die before any resolution is achieved, before we gain the freedom to forgive them. King David was called upon to forgive just such an invisible person when his son Absalom staged a coup and then died during the insurrection. I believe the unique pain of trying to forgive someone who has died can be seen in David’s famous lament, “O my son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you–O Absalom, my son, my son!” (2 Samuel 18:33)
One of the most common cases of the invisible offender is the parent who has died. Some of you were abused by your parents—emotionally, verbally, physically, or even sexually. Those memories are bitter, and the anger you have carried has been devastating. Why is it so hard to forgive them once they’re gone? It’s hard because they are so far out of reach. We can’t crawl on their laps and let them love us now the way we needed it then, and they can’t tell us they are sorry, even if they are. Dead parents are hard to forgive also because something in us does not want our departed parents to need forgiving. We would rather blame ourselves than to blame the ones who gave us life. We feel we ought to view our parents as a saintly mother and a noble father, even if they weren’t.
Lewis Smedes offers this advice about forgiving dead parents: (1) Keep in mind that no parent is perfect. Even saintly mothers fail their children at some point. (2) Recognize that your painful feelings are valid. (3) Accept the fact that since reconciliation is impossible, you will have to be satisfied with a healing of memories. And (4) You need to forgive yourself even as you forgive your dead parents. He writes, “The hurt we get from parents almost always makes us feel guilty or ashamed of ourselves; I have never met a person who hated his father or mother who did not also hate himself.”[ii] Especially is this true of women who are sexually molested by their fathers. Most will say the worst part of it is the way it made them hate themselves.
A fourth tough category is …
Those who do not care. Some of us will at some point in our lives come across a person who hurts us intentionally and couldn’t care less. In such a case there is no hope for repentance, which our sense of justice calls out for. In Luke 17:3-5 we have the following dialogue between Jesus and His apostles: “’If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. If he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times comes back to you and says, ‘I repent,’ forgive him.’ The apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!'” The interesting thing to me about this passage is that contrary to the other passages we have seen, it seems to make repentance a pre-requisite for forgiveness. If he repents or even if he says, “I repent,” he should be forgiven. But what if he does neither?
It should help us to understand that there are two aspects to forgiveness—forgiving in our heart and forgiving verbally. The former is always required; the latter is required only when the offender has repented. The person who hurts us and doesn’t care should be forgiven for Christ’s sake and for our own sake—to free us from the pain. But we are not expected to verbalize our forgiveness or to seek reconciliation with such a person.
Ourselves. There is a sense in which the easiest person in the world to forgive is oneself; yet there is another sense in which forgiving oneself is the hardest. We all find it easy to forgive ourselves of minor infractions and little offenses. We excuse, we rationalize, we focus on all the extenuating circumstances that led us to act as we did, we blame our parents, or our poverty, or our personality. Even things that would upset us a great deal in others we tend to overlook in ourselves.
But on the other hand, when we have committed a great offense, we may find ourselves the hardest to forgive. David knew this experience. Following his heinous sins of lust, adultery, and murder he wrote these words in Psalm 32:3-7:
“When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’—and you forgave the guilt of my sin. Therefore, let everyone who is godly pray to you while you may be found; surely when the mighty waters rise, they will not reach him. You are my hiding place; you will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance.”
David’s subsequent experience and his marvelous confession in Psalm 51 demonstrate that he eventually did forgive himself and find freedom from guilt.
I believe the first thing we need in order to forgive ourselves is total honesty. We cannot really forgive ourselves unless we look at the failure in our past and call it by its right name. The second thing we need is courage. Other people, particularly those we have hurt, may not want us to forgive ourselves. They want us to walk forever under a cloud of shame. If we deal with our sin, accept God’s forgiveness and charge ahead with freedom and joy, refusing to grovel in remorse and self-hatred, they often interpret that as a lack of repentance. So, we need courage to forgive ourselves and hold up our heads.
The third thing we need is to be specific. We will always fail at self-forgiving if we refuse to be concrete about what we are forgiving ourselves for. “Many of us try,” Smedes writes, “to forgive ourselves for being the sorts of persons we are. We are ugly, or mean, or petty, or given to spouting off; or, on the other hand, we are too good, a patsy, everybody’s compliant sucker, humble servant to all who want to get something out of us.” [iii] But that doesn’t work. We must be specific, dealing with things like being unfaithful to your spouse last year, or stealing stamps from your company last month, or gossiping about a certain person this morning. But be careful. Forgiving yourself may be illegitimate until you have sought forgiveness and made restitution, if appropriate, to the person you have hurt.
Now does it surprise you to see God on this list of those who are hard to forgive?
God. It should and it shouldn’t. God, of course, cannot be forgiven in the normal sense of the word, because God has not sinned; in fact, He has not even hurt us, except in the sense that a surgeon hurts us when he cuts into us for our own long-term benefit. Yet I find that many believers are angry, even bitter at God for things He has allowed, for things He hasn’t allowed, for dreams that go unfulfilled, for loneliness that goes unabated, for unanswered prayer, for not showing His face. Though they are angry with God, or at least disappointed in Him, they are afraid to say so, out loud.
But in their heart they are saying, “If God could prevent this pain that seems to have no redeeming value, and He chooses not to do so, then why shouldn’t I be angry with him?” Two thoughts: first, key word in that question is “seems.” Pain and suffering that seems to have no redeeming value from our limited, earthly, temporary perspective may have enormous value from the perspective of eternity. Secondly, God can handle your feelings of anger, so don’t be afraid to express it to Him. The Psalmist poured out his disappointment to God on many occasions. So did Habakkuk. Listen to Hab. 1:2-3:
“How long, O Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, “Violence!” but you do not save?
Why do you make me look at injustice?
Why do you tolerate wrong?”
But notice to whom the prophet poured out these accusations—to God. You can always be honest with Him; He would rather have you complain to Him than ignore Him. He loves you despite your anger and disappointment; He cares even when He seems most distant. And even though He does not need to be forgiven, you may need to express your forgiveness toward Him.
Now I recognize that I have only scratched the surface of this matter of disappointment with God. For a detailed and outstanding treatment of it I encourage you to read the book by Philip Yancey entitled, Disappointment with God. Finally, may I ask this question:
Is anyone beyond our forgiveness? Don’t answer too quickly. Consider the devil, for example. Nobody forgives the devil. Why not? It is because he is beyond the struggle between good and evil; he is only pure evil, and therefore we set him outside the possibility of being forgiven. Is it not possible that some human beings are so possessed and controlled by Satan that they too are beyond forgiveness? What about an Adolph Hitler, an Idi Amin, a Pol Pot, a Stalin, an Adolph Eichmann, a Charles Manson?
Before answering, consider that the act of forgiving and the gift of forgiveness are two different issues. I believe some people are so evil that they can never receive the gift of forgiveness. They have removed themselves from the possibility of pardon, from either God or man. But don’t forget what we said last week, namely that the principal focus of forgiving is not on the offender but on the offended. We do not forgive for the sake of the one who hurt us but for our own sake, and for the sake of obedience to God. From that perspective, there is no human being we should not forgive. In fact, if we say that some people are too evil to forgive, we give them a power over us they should never have. They get a stranglehold on us and sentence us to a lifetime of unhealed pain.
I have seen this in the testimonies of countless holocaust victims. I did not go through those death camps, so perhaps I have no right to speak. But when I read of the anger and bitterness of an Elie Wiesenthal and compare it to the love and forgiveness of a Corrie ten Boom, both of whom underwent unspeakable horrors in the Nazi concentration camps, and both of whom lost beloved family members there, I see the incredible superiority of the Christian perspective. We are able to extend forgiveness to the very worst of human beings, even while recognizing that such forgiveness will never touch the offender.
How do you know if you have truly forgiven someone? Perhaps you went through your list this past week but you aren’t sure if it took. I would say that when you have really forgiven, you will be able to think about the person who hurt you without resentment and bitterness. And you will be able to visit the places where those hurts took place without jarring negative emotions.
Conclusion: Friends, in a world where life can be unbearably unfair, the only power we have for making it fairer is love’s power to forgive, to heal our memory of the past, and then to get on with living to the fullest. May God give us the grace to do what He gives us the power to do. Remember, it is while we were sinners, while we were God’s enemies, that He forgave us through the death of His Son on Calvary.
Communion: In preparation for the Lord’s Table, allow me to read the parable of the unmerciful servant, which comes immediately after Christ’s exhortation to forgive 70 times 7 in Matt. 18:21-35:
Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?”
Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.
“Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand bags of gold was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.
“At this the servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’ The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.
“But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred silver coins. He grabbed him and began to choke him. ‘Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded.
“His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it back.’
“But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were outraged and went and told their master everything that had happened.
“Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.
“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
Consider this morning that God has taken pity on you and has offered to cancel your debt by sending Jesus, His Son, to pay the penalty for your sin. We are asked to remember His death by means of a simple meal called the Lord’s Supper. The bread represents His body and the cup, his blood. If you have received Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord, I invite you to participate with us. And as you receive these elements, consider the obligation laid upon us here to forgive others, as we have been forgiven.
DATE: December 2, 1990
Tags:
Forgiveness
Forgiving the hard-to-forgive
Forgiving ourselves
Forgiving God
[i] Lewis B. Smedes, Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve, 60.
[ii] Smedes, 57.
[iii] Smedes, 76.