SERIES: Spiritual Warfare: The Battle for Freedom in Christ
Forgiving the Hard to Forgive
SPEAKER: Michael P. Andrus
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 that was given him was like an inspiration from heaven. “He gave him grace to pray for those who stoned him.” Stephen had the mind of Christ, and his prayer for those who did him wrong at once 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. Because many were out of town for Thanksgiving, I have repeated the outline we used, though most of our attention today will be upon the second page. First, however, a bit of review might be valuable. We began by asking,
Why Should We Forgive?
It is required by God. (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. That is, we must unhook ourselves from those who have hurt us, or they will keep on hurting us.
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. You accept the results without hate and bitterness.
It is allowing God to be the Judge. (I Cor. 4:4; 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.
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.
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. That is a person who has learned who he is in Christ to the point that his self-esteem is not threatened by those who offend him.
Let me suggest that the longer your list of people needing forgiveness, the more likely you are suffering from low self-esteem. 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 and unfairness of life seem to devastate you. The solution is to work on both forgiving and finding your 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 especially hard to forgive.
If you followed the steps suggested last Sunday, there is one thing I can almost guarantee 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 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.
Chronic offenders. It is one thing to forgive a person who hurts us once or twice, even deeply. It is possible, if we try hard, to rebuild trust and to rekindle love. But what about the chronic offender, the one who hurts us repeatedly? I’m thinking of the spouse who is involved in his or her umpteenth affair or the teenager who is on his fourth drug rehab program. But I’m also thinking about chronic offenders whose faults are more mundane–the husband who is a couch potato, the wife who is a terrible housekeeper, the child who is constantly rebellious, the in-laws who won’t quit interfering, the neighbor who destroys the peace and tranquility you deserve at home. Every one of us has such “irregular people” in our life, probably several. We try to reason with them, we pray for change, we beg for 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 this is possible for her because as soon as this guy gets home from work, he grabs a six-pack and flops down in front of his large screen TV, 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 is almost unbearable. How does she forgive, over and over and over again?
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. Early in our years here in St. Louis a teenage neighbor boy purposely shot my 4-year-old son with a pellet rifle. This kid sat in his upstairs window and shot at Andy while he 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 his tennis shoes. I immediately called the police, who did nothing but tell the boy not to shoot the gun out his window anymore. The fact that his father was a well-known judge may have had something to do with the kid-gloves treatment. Ironically, that family began to treat us like the offenders because we called the police.
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 lasting hurts can be. We ache for the loss of innocence. 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 sermon preparation that I sat down with Andy at bedtime Wednesday night and prayed with him for Franko, the boy who shot him.
Invisible people. Think, for example, about those who invade our lives, sometimes very briefly, hurt us, and then disappear, leaving us only with painful memories. Some of you have experienced falling deeply in love with someone, making a tremendous emotional investment in that person, and then suddenly finding that person pulling away. Perhaps you tried to find out what happened, but the other person refused to talk, treating the entire relationship as a bad joke. Your emotions undoubtedly ranged from anger to embarrassment, from deep loneliness to hate. How do you forgive that?
Another kind of invisible offender is the one who hurts us but hides behind the mask of a corporation or government bureaucracy. There was a family in our church here in the early years that was forced to abandon their home and everything they owned in the little town of Times Beach on the Meramec River when it was discovered that a road contractor had poured oil laced with dioxin on the streets. (That was before the days of massive buyouts by the EPA). One of their children had severe medical problems and died because of the dioxin. Tragic!
Some of you have been summarily laid off from work without cause. One writer says,
“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.”
Now obviously that is not the way every company operates. But if you have faced a situation like that, how do you forgive an impersonal, invisible organization? You can’t. You must find yourself a living, breathing, responsible person in the organization and forgive that person or persons. Confrontation is often helpful in that process. I believe in going to the vice-president or personnel manager—the one you think most responsible for mistreating you—and both asking for an explanation and using 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 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 (not likely, but just possibly).
Still another kind of invisible offender is the one who hurts us and then has the nerve to up and 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 d’etat 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).
Some of you were abused–emotionally, verbally, physically—by parents who are now gone. Those memories are bitter, and the anger you have carried has been devastating. Why is it so hard to forgive them even after they’ve passed away? Well, it is hard because they are out of reach. We can’t crawl on their laps and hear them tell you they are sorry, even if they are. Dead parents are hard to forgive because something in us does not want our departed parents to need forgiving. We would rather blame ourselves than 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) 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.” Especially is this true of women who are sexually molested by their fathers. Most will say that the worst part of it is the way it made them hate themselves.
A final category I want to mention is this:
Those who do not care. Most 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 on that person’s part, but our sense of justice calls out for it. 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, ‘We need more faith!'” The interesting thing to me about this passage is that, contrary to some other passages, 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? What if he simply doesn’t care?
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 and asked for forgiveness. 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.
Now the next category may be missing from your list but consider whether it belongs.
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 of all. We all find it easy to forgive ourselves of minor infractions and little offenses. We excuse ourselves easily, we rationalize, we list 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 often 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 demonstrates that he eventually did forgive himself and find freedom from guilt.
I believe to forgive ourselves, we need total honesty. We cannot really forgive ourselves unless we look at the failure in our past and call it by its right name. We also need courage. Other people, particularly those we have hurt and self-righteous bystanders, don’t 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, others often interpret that as a lack of repentance. So, we need courage to forgive ourselves and hold up our heads if we have truly repented and become fully accountable.
The third thing we need is to be specific. We will always fail at self-forgiving when we refuse to be concrete about what we are forgiving ourselves for—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 perhaps even made restitution 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 prayers unanswered, 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 hearts 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, the 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. The Psalmist poured out his disappointment with God on many occasions. So did Habakkuk. Listen:
“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?” (Hab. 1:2-3)
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.
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 some would think 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 can extend forgiveness to the very worst of human beings, 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. I would say that when you have really forgiven, you will be able to think about the person who hurt you without anger and 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 urges us to do.
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, 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
Chronic offenders
Providence
Restoration