Communication can be a very frustrating process. It seems like it should be easy to express ideas from my brain and make them perfectly understandable to your brain. After all, we all speak the same language; we use the same words and basically the same grammar. Why should communication be so hard?
One major problem that we face in communication is that we rarely stop to clarify or define the words that we use, and we don’t stop to think that the person we’re talking to may have a slightly different understanding of that word than we do. I’ll give you an example that you can appreciate. For most of my life, I have used the word “cow” to refer to any animal that eats grass and moos. But since I have moved to Montezuma, I have discovered that all cows are not cows. Some cows are cows, but some cows are actually heifers, and some cows are bulls who later become steers. This was all very confusing until I realized that I had been using the word “cow” in a very general way, whereas people who work with cattle use the word “cow” in a more specific way and with a slightly different definition.
This little example just shows us that if we’re going to communicate well, we have to give a little thought to the definition behind the words that we use. So today, as we continue to study the subject of forgiving each other, we’re going to spend our time defining forgiveness. We’ll deal with this question:
What does it mean to forgive someone?
The Bible points us to a very specific example to show us what it means for us to forgive each other. In Ephesians 4:32, the Apostle Paul writes, “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” That last phrase gives us both the motivation and the method for forgiving each other. We should be motivated to forgive each other because God has forgiven us, and we should use the method or the example of how God has forgiven us as our example for forgiving each other.
So to forgive someone means that we respond to their sin in the same way that God has responded to our sin. Just how has God responded to our sin? That’s what we will spend the rest of our time looking at this morning. In light of what Jesus did to pay for our sins through His death and resurrection, God has made specific promises to us regarding our sins. These promises show us how we should respond to the sins that other people commit against us.
I’m going to use an outline this morning from a book called The Peacemaker, by an author named Ken Sande. His book has an excellent discussion of God’s promises and how they teach us to forgive others. He boiled this subject down to four basic promises, so that’s how we will outline our discussion this morning.
The Four Basic Promises of Forgiveness
I should note before we continue that these four promises are promises that we make AFTER someone has asked for our forgiveness. If someone has sinned against you but has not yet asked for forgiveness, there are other steps that we should take, and we will talk about that in the coming weeks. But after someone asks for our forgiveness, these four promises summarize the way that we should respond to them.
1. “I will not dwell on this incident.”
When God forgives us, He promises that He will not allow our sin to dominate or define the way He thinks about us. This promise is expressed beautifully in Jeremiah 31. Toward the end of that chapter, the Lord speaks of a day when the people of Israel will repent of their sins and turn to God, and he says at the end of v. 33 [READ Jer. 31:33c–34]. The Lord makes the same promise in Isaiah 43:35 when He says, “I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” We can also see this promise come through in the definition of love that is given in 1 Corinthians 13. 1 John 4:8 says that God is love, and 1 Cor. 13:5 literally says in Greek that love “does not count up wrongdoing.” God does obsess over our sins to keep a running total of our failures.
Now notice that the statements we read from God in the Old Testament were promises, which means that they expressed a deliberate choice that God was making. Since God knows everything, He can’t actually forget that something happened, but rather He makes a deliberate choice not to let our sins define the way that He thinks about us. This means that when we forgive someone else, we too must make a deliberate choice not to let that person’s sins stand out in our mind when we think about them.
Think of it like putting a mental name tag on someone. Let’s say that I lie to Carmen about something, but later I repent of that sin, confess it to her, and she forgives me. Now since she has forgiven me, that means that her mental name tag for me should not read “The Liar.” If it does, then she is dwelling on my sin; she is allowing my sin to define the way that she thinks about me. Instead, her mental name tag for me should read “My Husband.” That doesn’t change the fact that I did lie to her, but she is choosing not to think about me in those terms, and that’s going to change the way that she acts toward me.
So this is a promise that we need to make when we forgive others because its precisely the promise that God makes to us. When God thinks about you, He doesn’t think, “There’s the Adulterer.” He thinks, “There’s my son; there’s my daughter; there’s the one that my Son died for.” Making the deliberate choice to extend this promise to someone else will change the way that you act toward them down the road and it will pave the way for the relationship to be repaired.
2. “I will not bring up this incident again and use it against you.”
Years ago, Garth Brooks recorded a song called “We Bury the Hatchet” in which he talks about the way that he and his wife forgave each other. The last line of the chorus was, “We bury the hatchet, but leave the handle sticking out.” His point was that they would go through the motions of forgiving each other, but when another fight came up, they would take hold of each other’s past sins and use them like weapons against each other.
That is a far cry from the way that God forgives us. According to the Bible, after God forgives us, our sins are long gone. Psalm 103:12 says, “as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.” Micah 7:19 says, “He will again have compassion on us; he will tread our iniquities underfoot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.
This promise was also portrayed powerfully during Old Testament times on the yearly holiday called the Day of Atonement. On that day, the priests offered special sacrifices to cover all of the unconfessed sins of the people. The high priest would take a goat, known as the scapegoat, and he would put both of his hands on its head and confess all of the sins of the nation over it. This act symbolically placed the sins of the nation on the goat. Then, the goat would be taken and sent away from the people out into the wilderness, which symbolized that their sins had been taken away from them.
So God doesn’t treat our sins like an arsenal of weapons to use against us. He promises that our sins are long gone—He doesn’t keep them close at hand to use against us. Thus, we must make the same promise to others when we forgive them. Sometimes we don’t want to make this promise to others because we gain a sense of power over people when they ask for our forgiveness. They clearly want to make things right, but we gain some leverage over them by holding on to their sin.
But if we are going to forgive as God forgives, we must make this commitment and say, “I will not use this to manipulate you, I will not use this to blackmail you, and I will not bring this up down the road to harm you.”
3. “I will not talk to others about this incident.”
This third promise really flows out of the second one—it simply highlights a very common way that we use the sins of others against them. When other people sin against us, we face strong temptations to slander them to other people, to gossip about them, or to bring up their sins in an effort to get sympathy from other people. These sins of speech are very tempting because we don’t feel like we’re directly attacking the person who sinned against us. After all, we’ve all heard that what someone doesn’t know won’t hurt them, right?
But in reality, we can hurt someone by hurting their reputation with other people. We can hurt their relationships with others by spreading the news about what they did to us, and that is an attack that is just as real as anything that we might say to a person’s face.
Now this promise comes only indirectly from God’s example of forgiveness. God, of course, has no equals and no true peers, and so He does not talk to others about our sins. But His Word clearly tells us not to engage in sins like gossip and slander. Ephesians 4:31 says, “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.” Psalm 15:3 says that the one who can be close to God is the one “who does not slander with his tongue and does no evil to his neighbor, nor takes up a reproach against his friend.”
One exception to this idea of not speaking to others would be if you and the person who sinned against you are seeking help to overcome an ongoing pattern of sin. If you talk to a counselor about the matter, then you’re not trying to hurt the person by discussing their sin, you are truly trying to help them. But we must be very careful in other situations to make sure that we avoid gossip and slander.
4. “I will not let this incident stand between us or hinder our personal relationship.”
Our culture has a very poor substitute for forgiveness in which we say the words “I forgive you” to another person, but then we end our relationship with them and have nothing more to do with them. Someone once said that this behavior is a twist on phrase “forgive and forget”—I “forgive” you, and then I forget all about you and kick you out of my life.
Sometimes we justify this kind of behavior by saying, “It’s really for the best because at least we’re not fighting anymore.” In reality, you’re still not at peace with that person—your relationship has simply shifted into a cold war. Our country may not have nuked Russia during the Cold War, but we certainly weren’t at peace with them!
This kind of behavior cannot be called “forgiveness” because it doesn’t line up with God’s example. God’s example is to reconcile with those who have sinned against Him. He literally took great pains upon Himself to make a way for us to have friendly relations with Him again. And when we as God’s children sin against Him, He doesn’t end His relationship with us; He doesn’t kick us out of His family!
Turn with me to Jeremiah 31:37. In this chapter, God makes some powerful promises to the people of Israel. He states that He will forgive them of their sins and put His law in their hearts, and just so that they know He’s serious, He makes this promise in v. 37 [READ Jer. 31:37]. God acknowledges that they’ve sinned against Him, but He promises that He will never cast them away from Him.
Then turn to 1 John 2:1, and be prepared to be blown away by God’s grace [READ 1 John 2:1]. When we sin against God, Jesus actually takes up our case like a defense attorney. And its not that God the Father actually becomes hostile to us, because Romans 8 says that He has already decided that our case is closed. We’ve been forgiven, we’re His children, and that’s it!
So since God does not end His relationship with His children after we sin against Him, we should follow His example and maintain our relationships with those who ask for our forgiveness. Now it may take some time for that relationship to be all that it used to be, but the promise should be there from day one when we forgive someone.
So friends, what we should see above all else from today is that forgiveness is a decision. It is a promise, a commitment that you make to the person who has asked for your forgiveness. And like any commitment, this commitment will be challenged by temptations. When you decide to go on a diet, your commitment will be challenged when you drive past Dairy Queen in Dodge City, but that doesn’t mean you never made the original commitment—it simply means that you’re commitment is being challenged by temptation.
I want you to keep that idea in mind, because its very easy to heap guilt on ourselves and feel like we haven’t truly forgiven someone when our promises to them are challenged down the road by temptations. When we’re tempted to dwell on their sin, or we’re tempted to feel resentful, we can feel defeated and tell ourselves that we’ve never truly forgiven that other person, which will then make us feel like we’ve been disobedient to God. But just remember that forgiveness is a commitment, and if you’re commitment is challenged, it doesn’t mean you never made the commitment—it simply means that we need to look to God, who has forgiven us, and ask Him for the strength to keep our promises.
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