Creating a Secure CHURCH
PART 4 : When Things Go Wrong
Chapter 17 : Thinking about Forgiveness
17.5 Helpful Factors
There are a number of factors that might enable us to receive the grace of God to cope well with the situation:
1. Realisation of Justice
Many people struggle with the question of forgiveness, and counsellors sometimes don’t help because they do not follow the Scriptural pattern, because they are being asked to ignore injustice, and so the offended person says, “But she/he did me wrong!” and the correct answer is, “Yes, it was very wrong and God wants them to come to a place of repentance but in the meantime the important thing is for you to receive God’s grace to heal up all you are feeling about what happened.”
We may subsequently go on to also suggest that they are to become God’s means of bringing that other person to the good, and when that happens they can then pronounce forgiveness, but not until then. The focus of the counsel then moves to receiving grace for today without the need to ignore justice.
[You may be saying, but I didn't get justice when God forgave me. Oh yes you did, You repented and God forgave you on the basis that His Son had stepped in and taken the punishment for the Sin(s) you've just confessed. His work on the Cross only becomes operative in respect of clear, known sin, when there is repentance.]
2. Our own unworthiness
The truth is that we have no room to point fingers at other people. If an angel blew a horn from heaven every time we had less than a perfect thought or less than a perfect word or less than a perfect action, there would be a tired and exhausted angel in heaven! We have been forgiven by God despite what we were like. The parable of the unmerciful servant (Mt 18:21 -35) is a strong warning.
Again and again in Scripture we are encouraged to act in a particular way because that is how God or Christ has acted towards us, e.g. in our Colossian verse it finishes, “Forgive as the Lord forgave you”. These sort of verses remind us that we are what we are by the mercy and grace of God and so we are to extend that same mercy and grace to others.
3. The condition of the other person
Sometimes when we’ve been counselling someone we’ve come up against the stumbling block of pain or anger which seems impossible to surmount. However what the Lord did was to show them the state of the person who offended them. One girl who had a major (and genuine) grievance against her father from her childhood days, found as she prayed that the Lord allowed her to see the state her father had been in at that time. Instead of anger against him, she wept with compassion and found it easy to release him to God (he had already died). Awareness of the state of that person as seen through the eyes of Christ enables grace to come much more freely.
4. The will of God in His command
The Scripture allows us no excuses. Too many times it commands us to forgive and indeed makes it a condition of receiving forgiveness (e.g. Mt 6:15). But it’s not just a question of Law, for the Law is there to drive us into the arms of the Father. In that amazing Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says a number of things that are humanly impossible to do. So why does he say them? To drive us into the Father’s arms where we acknowledge our own weakness and our own need, and receive through our relationship with Him the grace to do those things.
Grace in the face of hurt is one of those things, and if that wasn’t bad enough, love for our enemies is another as we noted previously (Mt 5:44), so if you consider someone has abused or offended you and has become your enemy, the command is there: love them, pray for them, and you’ll only do that with God’s grace, but it isn’t an option!
A Summing Up Verse
In Book One we noted Peter’s security in Jesus’ presence by reference to Mt 18:21 when Peter asks how many times he shall forgive his brother, but in Luke’s teaching in Lk 17:3,4 we find Jesus saying, “If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. If he sins against you seven times in a day and seven times comes back to you and says, ‘I repent’, forgive him.”
There it is all very clearly laid out – he sins, you rebuke him, he repents, and you forgive him. Those are all the ingredients. When Peter spoke about it in Matthew’s Gospel, his emphasis was simply on how many times he needs to forgive. When Jesus spells it out, he gives all the ingredients for it to be true Scriptural forgiveness – and yet it has to keep on happening if the forgiveness-repentance cycle is repeated.
