Forgiveness - what it is, and what it isn't

I know I've covered a bit about forgiveness before; what it is and isn't. But here, I also want to cover more about why and even more importantly, how we should forgive.

I have mentioned before that forgiveness forgives someone for a past hurt. It does not require you to have that person in your life again. The person does not necessarily even need to know you have forgiven him or her; that's between you and God. It also does not require you to put any future trust in that person.

Here I'd like to cover the motivation for forgiveness. It's simple: we should forgive because God forgave us first. Consider all the sins I've done against heaven; there are countless of those. Because these sins are forgiven via Christ's death on the cross, then surely likewise I should forgive those who have sinned against me.

Indeed, the Lord's Prayer says ..."forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us." The word "as" is key here.

It hurts our relationship with God when we have unforgiveness in our heart against someone. In purely our own interests of keeping our relationship with God intact, we should forgive others.

However, I also realized that if the motivation for forgiveness is primarily spiritual (and it should be!) then the forgiveness should also be done spiritually.

In the past, I'd try to forgive "in the flesh" instead of in the spirit. For example, I'd go along the lines of "I should really forgive the other person because they meant well and they had good intentions and they made a bad choice without thinking...." etc etc. While this sounds nice, it's completely the wrong way to go about it. Have you noticed I didn't even mention God once in the "in the flesh" method above? No wonder it was hard to do it that way! For a major hurt where the other person is unrepentant, it can be almost impossible to do forgive if that's the way we are doing it.

Something I've realized recently is: we shouldn't be doing it like that! Our forgiveness should be done in the spirit, not in the flesh.

To do it in the spirit I find helpful is to say "I forgive this person for this past hurt, because God has forgiven all my sins against heaven first. The reason I am forgiving is not because of any attribute or merit of the other person, but purely and only because of what God and Jesus have done for me. I forgive this person in the name of Jesus, not for any fleshly reason."

In this way, I can truly let go of the past and truly break free of chains of bondage and imprisonment.

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