The task of coaching has been described as getting someone to do what they don’t want to do so they can be what they want to be. A good coach knows that if his athletes are going to achieve their dreams, he will have to push them harder than they would naturally push themselves.
In some ways, a pastor is like a spiritual coach. Every week, I stand at this pulpit and encourage you to be what God wants you to be. But God’s desires for us go against the natural desires that flow out our sinful natures. So if we are going to obey God, we have to push beyond our natural desires.
This is very obvious when we think about the subject of forgiveness. The whole idea cuts against the grain of our sinful natures. We don’t want to forgive people after they have hurt us, nor do we want to ask for forgiveness because we don’t like to admit that we’re wrong. So as we talk about this subject, my desire as a spiritual coach is to push all of us past our natural desires.
A good coach also knows that he must make the fundamentals the main focus for his athletes. It is said that Vince Lombardi used to open training camp with the Green Bay Packers every year by huddling his team around a football and saying, “Gentlemen, this is a football.” Then, during camp, they would talk about the fundamentals of football over and over and over.
Today we are going to start talking about arriving at forgiveness. The things we’re about to discuss may seem rather basic, but as is true in any sport, we will fail to meet our goals if we forget about the fundamentals. So today we’ll answer this question:
How should I ask for forgiveness?
First let’s turn to Matthew 5:21–24 to read a command from Jesus on this matter [READ Matt. 5:21–24]. According to Jesus, it is more important to make peace with someone that you have sinned against than it is to offer acts of worship to God. Obviously, its important to offer acts of worship to God, but it is even more important to ask a person to forgive you after you have sinned against them.
But how should we do that? What should we plan to say in a conversation when we need to ask someone for forgiveness? I believe the biblical concepts can be expressed in just a few basic steps.
1. Repent of your sin
Luke 17:4 uses the phrase “I repent” as the basic statement from a person who is asking for forgiveness, so this concept should make up part of our request for forgiveness. The Greek word for repentance is metanoeō, which consists of the prefix meta-, which means “after,” and the verb noeō, which means “to think or consider.” So the idea of repentance is that of reconsidering an action after you have done it and coming to a different conclusion about it.
When we sin against other people, we were either not thinking about our actions, or we were thinking that a sinful behavior was in fact okay. But when we repent, we change our mind about the way we acted. We come to believe that our actions were in fact sinful and thus wrong.
Repentance will actually take place in our hearts before we ask someone for forgiveness, but its very helpful to express our change of mind when we’re talking to the person that we have wronged. This will help them understand that we’re not trying to make a superficial apology, but instead we are talking to them because we have truly come to realize that we sinned against them.
2. Confess your sin
We talked about the word “confess” a couple of weeks ago, but it will be helpful to review it here. The Greek word for confess is homologeō, which consists of the prefix homo-, which means “the same,” and the verb logeō, which means “to say or speak.” Thus, the idea of confession is saying the same thing about your sin that the other person says about it, or agreeing with them about the sinfulness of your actions. Confession is really the expression of your repentance, because by repenting you have changed your mind about your actions and you have come into agreement with the other person who feels that you have sinned.
So when you’re talking to the person that you have wronged, you should call your sin what it is, just as God and the other person have already. If you’re asking another Christian to forgive you, it can be helpful to point out a specific command from the Bible that you have broken. That could also be beneficial if you’re asking an unbeliever for forgiveness. It may not be very meaningful for them, but it could be a good testimony to them to show them that you’re willing to acknowledge that you’re not perfect and you don’t always obey God as you desire to.
3. Offer to make restitution
“Restitution” is just a fancy word that means making things right. It’s the idea of restoring things to the way they used to be. So if your sin caused property damage, then making restitution would mean that you pay for the cost of the repairs. Or if your sin damaged the other person’s reputation, making restitution would mean that you do what you can to restore their good name.
Now at first, the idea of making restitution may not seem to fit with forgiveness. After all, the Bible compares forgiveness to the idea of forgiving a debt, and if a debt is forgiven that means you don’t have to repay it. But if you think about, even when you are forgiven of a debt, the debt is still paid—its simply paid by the person who forgave the debt; or in other words, they just absorb the loss of the debt that they forgave you.
In reality, ALL forgiveness is based on restitution—even the forgiveness that we enjoy from God. We don’t have to pay the debt of our sins because Jesus paid it for us. He made restitution, and we receive the forgiveness. But note this—God didn’t leave our sin debt unsettled. He simply chose to pay it Himself so that we wouldn’t have to, but nevertheless, restitution was made.
Jesus even praised the idea of restitution as an expression of a genuine change of heart. You may remember the story of His encounter with Zacchaeus in Luke 19. Why don’t you turn there with me? Now Zacchaeus was a wee little man, and a wee little man was he, so when Jesus was traveling through his town and Zacchaeus couldn’t see over the crowds, he climbed up in a tree to get a glimpse of Jesus. Jesus saw him in the tree and told him to come down because He planned to stay at his house. Now during the course of that visit, Zacchaeus became a believer in Jesus, and he demonstrated that by his statement in Luke 19:8–9 [READ Luke 19:8–9]. Now Jesus was saying that it was obvious Zacchaeus had been saved because his offer to make restitution revealed his change of heart.
So when we ask for someone’s forgiveness, we should offer to make restitution. This offer is really just an act of love toward the person that we have harmed through our sin. It is an expression of our repentance—an expression of the change of mind that we have had. Previously, we had thought about our behavior in a way that lead to the other person’s harm, but now, we are thinking about our behavior in a way that leads us to desire their good.
Now the other person may say that restitution is unnecessary, and that’s fine. That’s up to them; they can choose to absorb the cost of your sin if they want. But on your part, you should offer to make restitution however you can, and tell the other person how you plan to do it. Offering to make things right will normally melt even the coldest heart, and it will unlock the door to the forgiveness that you are seeking.
4. Ask for forgiveness
After you have stated your repentance and confession and you have offered to make restitution, all that’s left is to ask the other person to forgive you. When you make that request, you are asking the other person to make the four promises of forgiveness that we discussed last week:
• I will not dwell on this incident
• I will not bring up this incident again and use it against you
• I will not talk to others about this incident
• I will not let this incident stand between us or hinder our personal relationship.
Now of course, the person that you are talking to may not understand forgiveness in quite the same way that we are learning to understand it in this series, so it might be helpful to subtly mention these promises—not by sitting the other person down and saying, “Okay here’s what I expect from you,” but simply by mentioning these ideas when you ask for forgiveness. After you have offered to make restitution, you could simply say, “I hope my sin won’t dominate the way you think about me, and I hope it won’t hinder our relationship from now on. Will you forgive me?” I didn’t explicitly mention all four of the promises, but a simple statement like that will give the other person an idea of what you’re hoping for when they say, “I forgive you.”
Now, we’ve gone through these four steps, but how would this actually sound in a real conversation? Let’s think about two scenarios, and I’ll describe how it might actually sound to ask for forgiveness with these biblical concepts in mind.
First, let’s think about a scenario in which I have damaged someone’s property. Let’s say that I’m backing out of my driveway one day, and I didn’t notice my neighbor’s car parked in the street. I accidentally back into her car, but instead of taking responsibility for it, I drive away and hope that no one saw me. Now, my carelessness and dishonesty have left her with a damaged car and a repair bill.
But now let’s say that just a day or so later, my conscience convicts me and I go to my neighbor’s house to ask for her forgiveness. Based on these biblical concepts, my confession might sound like this: “Ma’am, I’m sure you’ve noticed that someone damaged your car the other day, and I wanted to tell you that it was me. I accidentally backed into it, and instead of owning up to it, I drove off and didn’t tell you. I realize now how wrong it was to do that and how much that must have upset you. That’s not how God wants me to act, and that’s no way for me to treat my neighbor. I’d like to pay for the damage that I caused, and I just hope this won’t change the way you think about me or hurt our relationship in the future. Will you forgive me?”
Now of course, that’s just an example, and in a real conversation you may not be able to say all that at once because the other person may jump in and speak. But by the time you’ve finished the conversation, you want to make sure that you’ve expressed those four ideas.
Now let’s think about a scenario in which I have damaged someone’s reputation. Let’s say that out of jealousy toward someone, a spread a lie about them. That person then finds out that a lie has been told about them, but they don’t know who started it. Finally, my conscience convicts me, so I approach that person and say something like this: “John, I know you’ve heard some gossip that’s been going around about you, and I want to confess that I started it. I was jealous of you, and so I made up this lie about you and started to spread it. I realize how wrong it was for me to do that, and my actions must have caused you a lot of pain. You and I both know that God commands us to love each other, but I disobeyed Him and I’ve hurt you, and I’m sorry for that. I want you to know that I plan to talk to every person that I know of who has heard my lie, and I plan to tell them that I started this gossip and that its not true. I hope my actions won’t define the way you think about me, and I hope that my sins won’t hurt our relationship in the future. Will you forgive me for what I’ve done?”
A confession like that sounds sincere, doesn’t it? And if you were the one whose car had been damaged, or the one who was the victim of gossip, wouldn’t a confession like that make it just a bit easier for you to say “I forgive you” and really mean it? You see, when we base our request for forgiveness on a biblical model, it paves the way for us to truly put sins behind us and restore our relationships. We can help the other person start to trust us again by revealing the sincerity of our motives and intentions. At some point, we will all need to ask someone to forgive us of a sin, so let’s ask God to help us do it according to the pattern of His Word.
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