Genesis 45:15 And he kissed all his brothers and wept over them. Afterward his brothers talked with him.
I love God’s sense of humor. I was asked to speak on marriage – staying married and happy, and they wanted me to write the blurb tonight. I said, in my head, I can’t tonight, at least not until I have written this blog entry. (We won’t talk about why it is so late today.)
Anyway, I flipped the book open to this page – The Fine Art of Forgiveness. The first thing that came to my mind was how important forgiveness is to any relationship. We have a relationship with Jesus Christ because God was willing, even anxious to forgive us, doing all the work even to make that forgiveness possible.
You’d think then, forgiveness would be easy for us, but it sure isn’t….since the fall anyway. Now, we want the offender to suffer before we forgive them…and then we hold that forgiveness like a cloud. The next little problem, even hint of a problem, and we blow the cloud away. Then we put that past offence on the scale along with the new real or imagined offences.
We missed the point. As Smith says, “The secret to tough forgiveness seems to be, first of all, acknowledging our own sins.” If we could somehow see a list of all of our offences, if perhaps they could flash across the ceiling or sky, I wonder if forgiving others would be such a difficult thing to do, if that scale would be so heavy. But, we suffer from selective forgetting, don’t we? Remembering more easily the good things we have done, the sacrifices we have made, much more quickly than the times we failed, the times we were the offender.
Then Smith says we should “allow(ing) some space for the offender to truly repent without being humiliated.” There’s a tough one. We want them to suffer! But as we indulge our own selfish appetite, we stab ourselves and our relationship in the back. We make it nearly impossible for forgiveness, repentance, and restoration to take place. Who could afford the price we demand for forgiveness?
Isn’t it sad how easily we believe the lies the evil one whispers in our ears about forgiveness, and how quickly we believe those lies?
Thinking about forgiveness brings to my mind the story of the unforgiving servant. The servant who was shown grace by his master before turning around and refusing to forgive the man that owed HIM money.
ReplyDeleteHolding a grudge against someone else in light of God showing me such incredible mercy really ought to make me pause.
I loved Smith's quote about why it seems that Joseph made his brothers jump through hoops in the process of forgiveness... "Or perhaps it wasn't about them, but about us - showing us how God's grace fills our sacks with silver even though we have greatly offended him."
ReplyDeleteI often forget that I was God's enemy before His love reached down to me and saved me - all by grace and nothing I did or could ever do. If I struggle with forgiveness in my relationships with people I love and who love me am I just smearing the grace that has been lavishly given to me by my loving heavenly Father?