Jose Maria Narvaez was a Spanish naval officer and soldier during the Mexican war of independence in the early 1800’s. At the end of his life, as he lay on his deathbed, a priest asked him if he had forgiven all of his enemies. Narvaez looked astonished and said, “Father, I have no enemies. I have shot them all.”1
I suppose that is technically one way to get rid of your enemies, but I think Abraham Lincoln pursued an attitude of forgiveness that was much closer to the biblical model. Lincoln was well-known during his life for refusing to hold a grudge against other people. He was once asked why he didn’t pray for his enemies to be defeated, and he responded by saying, “Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?”
That statement truly captures the goal of biblical forgiveness—to restore a friendly relationship with another person. When someone sins against you, you may not think of them as an enemy, but nevertheless their sin does put a strain on your relationship that interrupts the peace. But when forgiveness is offered and received, peace can be restored to your relationship.
Last week, we talked about how to respond after you have sinned against someone else, but how should you respond if the tables are turned? How should you respond when someone sins against you—especially if they have not or will not ask for forgiveness? That is the question we will deal with today.
How should I respond when someone sins against me?
The Bible gives us some very clear instructions for this question, however, they do not make for a pill that is easy to swallow. These instructions may feel like bad medicine, but if we will follow them, they will bring about the healing that we seek for our relationships.
1. Forgive the other person in your heart—Mark 11:25
Let’s read this verse to hear this command from the Lord [READ Mark 11:25]. Here Jesus is talking about a moment in which you are praying, so you are probably by yourself and you’re not with the person who has sinned against you. And since you still have something against the person, you haven’t talked to them yet and you haven’t made the four promises that we talked about a few weeks ago.
Yet Jesus says to forgive the person in that moment, as you are praying, so He must be talking about a forgiveness that takes place in your heart. This would be a setting aside of any anger or bitterness that you may feel, or any desire for revenge. This is a step you can take at any time after someone has sinned against you, and as we read in this verse, it has the effect of clearing away any sinful attitudes in your heart that might hinder your relationship with God.
Its very important to realize, however, that our biblical responsibility does not end with this step. There are other commands that we must follow, and in fact, we could view this first step as simply being a preparation for the second step.
2. Go and speak to the person who has hurt you—Matthew 18:15
This is where the pill really becomes hard to swallow, because we want to stop at the first step and call that good enough. After all—we think—the other person hurt me, so shouldn’t he be the one to come to me? He’s the one who needs to make it right, so why should I go to him?
But as we learn in Matthew 18:15, we have a clear command to go and talk to the person, and we’ll find out why in just a moment. But first, let’s hear what this verse has to say [READ Matt. 18:15]. That last line uses a word picture that could literally be translated, “If he listens to you, you have made a profit of one brother.” Its like investing—you make an investment in the relationship, and if your brother repents of his sin, you have now made a profit by gaining back a friend that you had lost because of sin.
Now we see here that we have a clear command to go and talk to the other person. But how should we approach a conversation like that? That is the question that we will focus on now.
1. Go with the right motives
This should go without saying, but experience tells us that it needs to be said a little more often! Now, I am reading out of the English Standard Version, and in Matthew 18:15 this translation leaves a small Greek word untranslated, and in this particular case I think that’s unfortunate because that little word makes a clear connection between Matthew 18:15 and the verses that come before it. It is these verses that describe the motives with which we should approach the person who has sinned against us.
In verses 12–14, Jesus tells a parable that presents God’s desire for those who have strayed from the right path [READ vv. 12–14]. So Jesus tells this parable about God seeking sinners and then He tells us to go to brothers who have sinned against us. Why? Because it reflects the heart of God! God seeks those who are in sin to deliver them from it! After Adam and Eve sinned and hid themselves in the Garden of Eden, God appeared and called out—“Adam, where are you?” And later, when Israel began to desert God and worship idols, He sent prophets to them to call them back to their Creator and Savior. And when they wouldn’t listen to His prophets, He sent His own Son, Jesus, who said, “The Son of Man has come to seek and to save the lost.”
God is moved by His love and compassion to go to those who have sinned against Him and make a way of reconciliation, so we must follow His example. Ultimately, when we go to someone who has wronged us, we must not go as a prosecutor to convict them of their crimes; we must go as a liberator to proclaim forgiveness and to free them from the misery and bondage of their sin.
2. Assume nothing
We make these situations worse all the time because we act on thoughts that we assume to be true but that we haven’t verified. We can actually end up doing wrong to the other person by making false accusations against them.
Follow this train of thought with me: in Ephesians 4:15, we are told to speak the truth to each other in love, and in the description of love that is given in 1 Corinthians 13:7, it says that love “believes all things.” Now that doesn’t mean that love makes you gullible or naïve—it means that love chooses to believe the best about other people. In other words, a loving attitude moves you to give other people the benefit of the doubt.
Now as I said, when we approach these conversations, we often do so with all kinds of assumptions in our minds that we are treating as absolute facts. We are absolutely sure that the other person knows he has hurt us, and what’s more, we know that he intended to inflict the maximum amount of pain that was possible. And we just know that in the days since he hurt us, that person has been sitting at home laughing and twisting his moustache like some kind of villain in a Saturday morning cartoon!
And so many times we indulge in rampant speculation about the other person’s motives and knowledge of the situation and then we approach them with wild accusations that are completely false! No wonder people get defensive when we take that approach. Instead, we must allow love to move us to give others the benefit of the doubt. So when you go to someone, assume the best possible motives for their actions; assume that they don’t realize they’ve hurt you; verify all of your perceptions with them during the course of the conversation. Root out as many assumptions as you can, acknowledge them to yourself, and then verify them with the other person during your conversation.
3. Lay out the facts as you see them
After we have forgiven the other person in our hearts, and we have assessed our motives and our assumptions, then we are ready to have the conversation that we need to have. When you begin this conversation, don’t start by throwing accusations or even by expressing your feelings—start by laying out the facts as you see them. I say lay them out “as you remember them” because we must always remember that we could have misunderstood something or forgotten something.
So when we combine this thought with what we have just said about assumptions, the beginning of our conversation might sound something like this: “Do you remember the conversation that we had last week? Do you remember making some comments about my weight? I know you may not have realized this, but those comments really hurt me.”
Or, if you had to speak to someone about a broken promise, you might say something like this: “Do you remember the conversation we had when we talked about making this agreement? As I remember it, we agreed on this…does that sound right to you?”
By starting your conversation with questions like this, you are verifying your assumptions; you are moving closer toward the truth by establishing the facts. So, if you do eventually have to tell someone that they have done wrong, you will be standing on solid ground rather than relying on a bunch of unverified assumptions.
Now you probably won’t have to talk long before the other person responds in some way, and when they do…
4. Respond appropriately to the other person’s response
The person you are speaking to will probably respond in one of three ways. First, he may reveal some details which show that you’re misunderstood something. The whole situation may have simply resulted from a big misunderstanding. In that case, no sin has been committed, so there’s no need for repentance and forgiveness, and you can simply express how glad you are to have the misunderstanding cleared up.
Second, the person may realize that he has sinned against you and then he might ask for your forgiveness. In that case, you can gladly forgive him and express to him those four promises of forgiveness that we talked about a few weeks ago. When this response takes place, the conversation becomes a blessing to both parties.
Third, it may be established in your conversation that the person has sinned, but he may not be willing to repent of it and confess it. If that is the case, then you will need to gently correct that person and point out their sin. If the other person is a Christian, you should try to point to specific commands so that you’re not simply pitting your opinion against theirs.
Let’s think about this third scenario in light of the example that I mentioned of someone making hurtful comments about your weight. Oftentimes when we hurt someone with our words and then they tell us that we’ve hurt them, we try to pass the blame off on them. We might say, “You need to stop being so sensitive,” or, “What’s the matter, can’t you take a joke?” In reality, we’re saying, “I have the right to say anything I want, and if you get upset about it, that’s your fault!”
If someone responds to you like that, respond to pointing out how the Bible calls us to speak to each other. You could simply say, “I try not to be too sensitive about the things that people say, because I know that I’ve said hurtful things in the past. But Ephesians 4 says that we’re supposed to speak the truth to each other in love, and 1 Corinthians 13 says that love is not rude. I believe your comments to me were rude because you weren’t taking my feelings into account”—and then you might add a specific statement like “in the way you said them” or “in the place that you said them.”
Its unfortunate when we receive that response from someone, but we all know that it does happen. When it does, we must gently confront the person because we must remember why we came to talk to them in the first place—to set them free from the grips of sin. We came to them out of love and compassion, and love is not satisfied when someone clings to sin.
Think of it like when your doctor tells you that you have to make a change in your lifestyle. Your doctor is not trying to be mean or “judgmental”—he is simply looking out for your own good. He is trying to help you avoid doing harm to yourself, and when we talk to someone about their sin, we are doing the same thing.
Proverbs 27:6 says, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy.” If we are doing something to hurt ourselves, an enemy will tell us all day long that we’re fine because he wants to see us hurt. But a friend is willing to wound our pride in order to tell us that we’re doing wrong.
We must choose to act like a friend to each other, not an enemy. Christians have gone on for far too long without helping each other escape from sin through loving confrontation. When will we put our foot down and say, “Enough! We will not allow the people we love to go on in sin!” We must follow the example of God and go after the very people who sin against us to help them come back to the right path.
Notes: 1. From http://bible.org/illustration/spanish-patriot Accessed August 31, 2011
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