Hurry Girls; get your stuff, uncle Jim is waiting. Beth was gathering her two girls together, dad was out of town on a business trip, and they were escaping, because her husband had become very violent.  He was a very angry man. I talked to this battered mother a few months ago. She was reflecting upon the time when she had had to escape, out of the state, to her parents place, how it had happened so suddenly, and all the things that had transpired. She thought back about the time they had gotten married and how much hope they had, he had promised so much, the courtship had been great. Things just seemed like they were destined to be “happiness ever after.” But, it hadn't turned out that way. She actually feared for her life. And now she was thinking back on all this. She was angry. How could he let her down? How could he treat her so badly after he had been so nice to her during the time he was trying to win her? How could he abandon their children, to such a way of anger and physical violence? She feared for her life, and now she was full of anger. And she said, I really can’t forgive him; I don’t see how I could ever forgive him. I don’t see how I could ever come to let him off the hook. So many bad things happened, so many fears, so many worries.

Forgiveness, What is it all about?  Why is it so important?

Research has shown that forgiveness significantly improves mental health outcomes such as reduced anxiety, depression and major psychiatric disorders, as well as physical health symptoms and lower mortality rates. Stress is the chief factor connecting forgiveness and well-being. Forgiveness helps you to let go of the chronic interpersonal stressors that cause stress and toxic anger. When unforgiving anger is deep and long lasting it can lead to mental and physical infirmities.  When you forgive and get rid of anger, your muscles relax, you're less anxious, you have more energy, your immune system can strengthen, you enjoy better physical and mental health.

I want to cover three aspects of forgiveness; first of all, God’s forgiveness of us; and then, our forgiving ourselves; and then, our forgiveness of others.

But before we talk about forgiveness, maybe we need to understand how bad the stuff is for which we have to be forgiven. Wouldn’t that be important?

“In his sinless state, man held joyful communion with Him ‘in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.’[i] But after his sin, he could no longer find joy in holiness, and he sought to hide from the presence of God. Such is still the condition of the unrenewed heart. It is not in harmony with God, and finds no joy in communion with Him.”[ii]

What is communion? Isn’t that friendship? Talking, sharing, chatting, caring for one another? Adam could no longer be friends with God. Oh Boy!

“Sin not only shuts us away from God, but destroys in the human soul both the desire and the capacity for knowing Him.”[iii]

Isn’t that interesting? It’s kind of like blindness, isn’t it? You no longer can see; you no longer can understand what’s around you by sight; you loose the capacity.  How does that happen? How do we loose the desire and the capacity for knowing God?

Selfishness is that way—selfishness doesn’t want to get to know other people. Selfishness just wants other people to get to know self. It kind of brings a sense of guilt though, when we live for self. Guilt is what makes us so that we don’t have a desire to get to know God. We fear Him. Guilt and self-condemnation turn to shame and we turn away from God.

So let’s think a little bit about God’s forgiveness, because that would be important to bring us back from this undesirable condition.

I met an older lady in church. Every time we brought up the topic of forgiveness she would say, “I don’t see how God could ever forgive me. I just don’t feel forgiven by God.” And nothing we could say in the way of bring up Bible texts, or any discussion of it, seemed to convince her that God would forgive her. She could not see how God could forgive her.

Where did the idea come from that God could not forgive? That’s a strange idea. Back when Satan rebelled we are told that, “He (Satan) told them that himself and they also had now gone too far to go back, and he would brave the consequences, for to bow in servile worship to the Son of God he never would; that God would not forgive,”[iv] So the idea that God is not forgiving has an origin in the chief liar of our universe.

If God were not forgiving, what would He be? I asked my mom that this morning. She said, “Well, He’d be a tyrant!” Is God a tyrant? What’s the opposite of forgiveness? Un-forgiveness? Condemnation? Has God ever been condemnation? Remember the woman caught in adultery? Where are now thine accusers? She looks around; they’re all gone. The accusers are gone. And Jesus looks at her and says, “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.”[v]
 Jesus did not come to this world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.[vi] Condemnation is not a part of God’s character. He brought life and light into the world, and the condemnation is that the world loved darkness rather than light. But that condemnation does not come from Him, it comes from something else. Sin leads to an overwhelming sense of condemnation and rejection. We tend to reject somebody we feel is rejecting us. And since Satan made us think God is rejecting us, we direct our sense of condemnation and rejection back toward God. Thus we are led, by Satan, to reject God’s love and His mercy. We rebel against Him. And if we rebel against Him we loose the desire and capacity for knowing Him.

First Samuel 15:23 Says, “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.” This was said to Saul. You see, witchcraft comes from the Devil, but so does rebellion. And so, that’s why, rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft. Both of them separate us from God due to our  miscomprehending Him.

 So, as we think about this thing for which we must be forgiven, let’s thank a little bit about God’s suffering in this thing too. You see, He’s in this thing with us. “Few give thought to the suffering that sin has caused our Creator. All heaven suffered in Christ’s agony; but that suffering did not begin or end with His manifestation in humanity. The cross is a revelation to our dull senses of the pain that, from its very inception, sin has brought to the heart of God.”[vii]

God Suffers with this too. He’s not the source of the suffering. God feels our condemnation when we feel condemned. He feels our shame when we feel shame. He feels our guilt, He showed us that on the cross, didn’t He?

“Through long ages God has borne the anguish of beholding the work of evil, He has given the infinite Gift of Calvary, rather than leave any to be deceived by the misrepresentations of the wicked one;”[viii]

I had a patient in my office, he is a fourteen year old, he is a rodeo participant, that has actually won quite a few trophies. He had fallen down off of a bull and broken his forearm and it was crooked. His mom was there and his mom was a nurse. I took the arm and injected it with some pain killer and let is set up so that is was no longer painful and then I started pushing on it and straightening it out, and it went “crunch”. All of a sudden mom started looking real pale, she went over and sat down in a chair, and if my nurse hadn’t been right there, she would have slumped right onto the floor--she went out cold. Just as soon as she started waking up she said, I don’t understand it, I see this stuff all the time, because I am a nurse, but here it happens to my own child and wow, I go woozy. You see, when it’s your own child, it makes a big difference. It makes a world of difference. That’s like, if you hear that some child down the street is on drugs, you may think, well, yes, their on drugs. But when you hear that you child is on drugs, or you have to pick up your child at the police station because they were guilty of public intoxication; when you find out that is was your child that is in it, it’s a much, much different story. 

You see, when He was upon the cross, “The guilt of every descendant of Adam was pressing upon His heart”, because every child of Adam was His child, “The withdrawal of the divine countenance from the Saviour in this hour of supreme anguish pierced His heart with a sorrow that can never be fully understood by man. So great was this agony that His physical pain was hardly felt.”[ix] He died of a broken heart. “His heart was broken by mental anguish. He was slain by the sin of the world.”[x]

This mental anguish is that same anguish which every sinner that is not saved will feel in the end when he dies. “Christ felt the anguish which the sinner will feel when mercy shall no longer plead for the guilty race.”[xi] You see, this suffering that Christ went through on the cross is the suffering of sin. The self condemnation, the mental anguish, the guilt, the shame, the pain, it’s a great pressure on the mind, it’s a destroying anguish that will lead the people in the very end, who don’t learn about Christ and His Character, to ask for the rocks and the mountains to fall on them to hid them from the face of Him who died to save them. They no longer have the desire or the capacity to understand or to know God, or to know His forgiving grace. You see, Christ came to seek and to save that which was lost, but they are afraid of Him, because Satan has convinced them of his lies about our loving heavenly Father.

So, let me summarize this. What is the terrible thing we need to be forgiven for? It’s an interesting concept, it isn’t necessarily what we’ve done so much, as the way we feel. It is the enormity of guilt that leads us to choose to separate from our life giving God and that brings unbearable mental anguish, self condemnation, and sinks us in hopelessness, and even destroys in us both the desire and the capacity for reconciling, or friendship with God.  We don’t want to be friends with Him any more. It’s the loss of a friendship for which we will never yearn. We never want it back. We turn our back on God and walk away.

There is a disease out there that I think best represents this, and that is multiple sclerosis (MS). I have had two or three patients come to my office, and we have diagnosed them with MS, and I tell them, well, I think you have multiple sclerosis, and they are unmoved.  So I ask, have you ever heard of multiple sclerosis? Oh, Yah, I knew someone who had it and died, they may say. It’s going to kill them, just like cancer over time, but they never seem to even care. I’ve had several come to my office, who were diagnosed with it and I may say that I’ve heard of someone who has had success to cured some people with multiple sclerosis. And their response is, where are they? And when I tell them where they are, they just seem uninterested. It is like a disease that destroys their ability or desire to get better. It’s really frightening. That’s what sin’s like; it destroys our desire to get back to God! That is the thing from which we need freedom. It’s what forgiveness is leading us away from. We need to be forgiven and reclaimed from our ambivalence concerning our deadly condition and the friendship we’ve lost with our gracious, loving heavenly Father.

Well, what then is forgiveness? We need to talk about what forgiveness is. Let’s get to the bottom of it.

What would David say forgiveness is? Remember he had sinned? Nathan came to him and said, I have a story to tell you, and he told him the story about the sheep, and the rich man that came and stole the poor man’s sheep. And David was angry, and Nathan said, You’re the man! You stole Uriah’s wife. And David’s response comes out in Psalms 51. How was he trying to get forgiveness, what was his response. “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit.”[xii] Don’t forsake me, keep me in your presence, let’s be friends, let’s restore this friendship, let’s get back together again, let’s take away the things that are separating us, I have a desire and capacity to know you and to get to know you better, let’s not forsake that. Oh God, don’t separate from me.

What does God say about forgiveness? Let’s read Jeremiah 31:33-34. I think it has a very important concept on forgiveness. Because forgiveness comes at the very end of the passage, as a consequence of everything that precedes it. And this is the way it reads. “But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law (Law is character, right?) in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts, and will be their God, and they shall be my people.” Their mine! Those are my people! “And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother saying, know the Lord, for they shall know me, from the least of them until the greatest, saith the Lord.” Then what happens? He says, “For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” When we have a new heart, we realize we’re His children. You will know you are mine, and that I am your God. We are each other’s. We belong to one another. Who do you say, “You are mine”, to? You don’t say it to the clerk at the store. You don’t say it to the tax man. You say it to your family, don’t you!? We become God’s family, as we learn to understand Him. It’s a new heart—a new understanding of God. The reason you felt unforgiven was that you misunderstood Me. You did not really know Me. You were deceived by Satan’s misrepresentations of me. God’s forgiveness comes as a result of the new heart—the new understanding of God. It’s a realization that He’s never been condemnation.

How do we get a new heart, a new mind? How do we get this new heart? How do we get this law in our heart? The new mind? John 12:32 says, “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.”
Why did Adam and Eve run from God in the garden? Because they did not have Christ lifted up in their hearts—they did not understand Him, they did not understand God. He had been lifted up before them by Satan’s misrepresentation of Him. They were afraid of the picture Satan had put in their minds. “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”[xiii]
You see, if they had known God, they never would have run from Him.  But they didn’t know Him. How do we get a new heart? By beholding. By beholding we become changed. Isn’t that what we want, a change of heart?

“Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.”[xiv]

So, let me ask you a question, was God not forgiving before we got a new heart? God has always been forgiveness, hasn’t He? The new heart merely restores in us the desire and capacity for knowing Him. It’s kind of like the unpardonable sin we talk about, the only thing that makes the unpardonable sin unpardonable is that we loose the desire and capacity for knowing God to the point that we don’t care. At that point we would never ask for forgiveness because we don’t think it’s a big deal.

So here’s the sentence that sums up this concept, “Forgiveness is the process by which love and trust are re-established in relationships.”

Today’s English Version interpretation on 2 Corinthians 5:18-19 helps us understand this more fully. Talking about Jesus it says, “All this is done by God, who through Christ changed us from enemies into his friends and gave us the task of making others his friends also. Our message is that God was making all human beings his friends through Christ. God did not keep an account of their sins, and he has given us the message which tells how he makes them his friends.”

Christ was like a salesman; coming down to earth and saying, hey guys, I’ve got to tell you about something really great up there, God is a good guy! He’s a wonderful person. We have often gotten our eyes off of Him, and have gotten mixed up about what He is really all about.

“Simon, I have somewhat to say to thee.” The proud Pharisee’s heart turned, fear ceased him. He looked startled. He was thinking, If Christ knew what kind of woman this was at His feet, washing His feet with her hair and putting ointment on Him, He would be turning away from her. You see, Simon really didn’t understand God. And Jesus turns to him and says, who loves more, Simon, he that is forgiven most, or he that is forgiven least? And Simon said, he that is forgiven most, right? But who was the greater sinner, Simon or Mary? Simon! Simon was Mary’s uncle who had led her into sin. And yet he was the one that felt the least amount of forgiveness. We know that he did not feel forgiven because he was condemning others. We’ll get to that a little bit later. You see, the more we are forgiven, the more we are in relationship with God. Mary was in great relationship with Jesus. Simon was not.

Forgiveness is realizing that all the condemnation we feel about sin and selfishness is not coming from God, but is coming from a misunderstanding of God. It’s coming from the sin itself and it is coming from Satan—the accuser of the brethren. It also can come from our own heart. Forgiveness is realizing that God accepts and loves me, that He is really my biggest and best friend, and that He is trying with all His heart to deliver me from the destroying lies and selfishness of Satan. We can join God on common ground—He’s our ally, our comrade, our friend. Doesn’t it say, “For we are labourers together with God”? It’s not a battle between us and God, it’s God working with us, to will and to do according to His good pleasure. “Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God.”[xv]
There it is, it’s our heart that condemns us, and that’s what keeps us from having confidence before God. We have to clear that misconception of God.

Remember the prodigal son? Running away from home with half of the inheritance from his father. It was like winning a lottery, except he got it from his dad. He goes out and has a riotous time. And then he’s looking at the pigs food, when he’s all broke, and all his friends are gone, and he’s saying, maybe I should eat what ever the pigs eat. And he gets to thinking, you know, employment is much better with my dad back home. Servants at my dad’s place have better food than this, I think I’ll go look for a job there. And he thinks in his mind about what he’s going to say when he gets there. “I have sinned against heaven and before thee and am no longer worthy to be called thy son, make me as one of thy hired servants.” Did he know his father? He didn’t know dad, did he? He was probably viewing dad from some of the things his older brother had told him. And as he comes back home, let’s ask a question, when was the prodigal son forgiven? He was never condemned was he!? Dad never held resentment against him. There was never a time when he was not forgiven. When did he actually experience, accept, and feel forgiveness? Not till he came back and he tested his father’s forgiveness. Father, make me as one of your hired servants. Dad would have none of that. Go prepare a feast, that which is lost is found, that which was gone—which was dead is alive. This comes back to the test in John 5:24, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.” You see, when we know God, as it is our privilege to know Him, the sense of condemnation starts to go away, we realize that the condemnation is not coming from Him. “He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation.”

Sometimes though, it is not God’s forgiveness, or perceived lack thereof, that presents a problem for our minds, but our own mental block against forgiving ourselves. “All I can remember”, said one of my teachers, “is the sight of this young man coming into my headlights as I came over the hill, and his head and face against my windshield as he went flying into the ditch. I killed a fourteen year old and I don’t know how I can forgive myself.” This teacher of mine, from high school, was know to be a bit of a fast driver anyway, a bit aggressive, but somehow, in the middle of the night, he had been driving along, and a young boy was herding cattle, and the cattle had gone across the road, and the boy came right across the road in front of the car, and was now dead. How can I ever forgive myself? Is what he asked. “How can I ever forgive myself?”

What is forgiving myself really all about? I asked that question to somebody not long ago.  “You know, sometimes we feel we can’t forgive ourselves,” I said, and they immediately said, well, but maybe God is forgiving. And I said, that’s interesting, I was talking about forgiving yourself, and you are talking about forgiveness from God. Isn’t that where it really comes to though? Doesn’t our problem with forgiving ourselves usually come from our problem understanding whether God forgives us or not?

God’s forgiveness comes to the soul when we experience His love and acceptance. Forgiveness of self comes as I get to know myself more fully and am able to turn everything in my life over to God that blocks my reception of His forgiveness. In other words, there are things in my life, that God knows are in my life, that keep me from understanding that He is forgiving of me. Things that may come from my past, things that may come from my sense of guilt, that Satan may be pushing on me. “The expulsion of sin is the act of the soul itself.”[xvi] “We must know our real condition, or we shall not feel our need of Christ’s help. We must understand our danger, or we shall not flee to the refuge. We must feel the pain of our wounds, or we should not desire healing.”[xvii] Sometimes we have to look at our condition, sometimes we have to understand our danger, sometimes we have to understand the source and nature of our wounds. You see, its all a process of sanctification, sanctification is the process of growing our relationship—our friendship—with God. It’s the process of becoming closer and closer friends with God. Enoch walked with God and he walked right into heaven, he became a closer and closer friend of God.

I’m going to go back to 1 John 3 again. “And hereby we know that we are of the truth, and shall assure our hearts before him. For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things. Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God.”[xviii] We want assurance before God, don’t we?!  That’s the whole goal of forgiveness. Assuring ourselves that He really is as loving and accepting as we thought He was. Paul says, “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus,”[xix] I used to think that meant, now that Christ showed up, we can get out from under God’s condemnation. But no, those who are in Christ Jesus, who know God, as it is there privilege to know Him, realize there is no condemnation for them from God, never was, never will be. If they die it will be their own choice, and God will sadly give then up. God is forgiveness personified, and we can forgive ourselves when we realize that there is no condemnation for us, only love.

Experiencing God’s forgiveness comes as I believe His love and acceptance of me personally. Forgiveness of self involves processing the rubbish piled up by the damage of sin and Satan, so that I can experience the acceptance and restoring love of God in every area of my life.

How do I bring forgiveness then to others? Notice I asked, “How do I bring forgiveness to others?” Not, “how do I forgive them?” or “How do I get them to be forgiven?” Because it involves both me forgiving them, but also bringing them to God’s forgiveness.

I had a child in my class, when I was a teacher, whose name was Billy. I watched Billy very closely, because when Billy walked in the classroom, he was likely to pick, push, or say something to somebody in order to get their attention. When he’d go and sit down, I’d watch him to make sure his attention was on our class, because, if his attention waned, pretty soon he’d be throwing paper airplanes across the room. I watched Billy very closely when we went out on a fieldtrip because Billy was likely to get into trouble. Billy had my attention, Billy didn’t necessarily have my love so much as my watchfulness. I was worried Billy was going to get into something and I was usually right. But did I cause it by my weary watching of him? You know, if we watch people, we often cause what we fear they will do. You see, Billy didn’t feel love and acceptance, he came from a home that was broken, his dad was out of the picture, and from what I heard, he lived in a little shack, down in Arkansas. He was a rather sad, rejected little boy. He needed attention from others just to feel alive—just to feel like he was there. He did not have a good sense of himself and I was not being forgiving of him. Forgiveness would say, every time you show up in the morning, you’ve got a clean slate, I’m going to treat you like I treat the good children in the class. I’m going to project to you a positive image that you will love to live up to. I want you to feel good about yourself. But no, my sense of a lack of forgiveness… Remember we said, forgiveness is the process by which we bring love and acceptance to relationships? I was not bringing love and acceptance to my relationship with him. I was bringing fear and rejection. And I was always making him live up to a negative self-fulfilling prophecy.

Thinking again about the prodigal son, we asked, when did he get forgiven? Well, he finally realized forgiveness when he come back home. How do you think the attitude of the older brother affected his feelings of acceptance and forgiveness. It didn’t help did it? You know, often times we are the older brother. We hold people to an unrealistic standard, and make that the deciding factor whether or not we will forgive them. That’s a very dangerous position. Because, remember, in Romans it says, it is the goodness of God that leadeth thee to repentance.[xx] And repentance leads to forgiveness. If we are good to other people, as God is good to us, it’s part of leading them to repentance and forgiveness. If we are the older brother, we are chasing them away. Isn’t that a part of, “whatsoever ye bind on earth, I will bind in heaven. And whatsoever ye loose on earth I will loose in heaven”? Because sometimes we have power to destroy peoples sense of forgiveness, or on the other hand we serve to help them experience it. We become missionaries by extending to them the same forgiveness we feel.

A misunderstanding of God’s forgiving nature is all that prevents us from experiencing His love and forgiveness. Sin and its damage is what prevents us from experiencing peace and forgiveness in our own lives. Others struggle with these same issues, we can help them experience forgiveness too. First of all by telling them of God’s loving character of forgiveness. Second of all, by telling them how we, in our own experience, have come to understand and experience God’s forgiveness. And third of all by helping them remove the damage out of their lives that keeps them from seeing God as a forgiving God. What can that damage be? Things like having a father who was never forgiving, and so we don’t think God is forgiving.

What is the greatest evidence that we have not experienced forgiveness in our lives? That we are not forgiving to the offender. Often times we have no peace, no closeness with God, and we don’t feel God has forgiven us. It goes both ways. If we don’t feel God has forgiven us, we are a lot less forgiving of others. Remember, forgiveness is the process by which love and trust are re-established in relationships. If we find that we don’t have love and trust in relationships, maybe we need to look at our sense of forgiveness with God. “And when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have ought against any: that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses. But if ye do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive your trespasses.”[xxi]

The magnitude of our capacity to forgive others is in proportion to the depth of the forgiveness we have experienced from God.

“And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you.”[xxii]

Romans 2 says that when we don’t forgive, we come to believe that God doesn’t forgive us. If we don’t forgive others, we start to believe that God doesn’t forgive us. It works both ways. “A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.” It goes to every part of our life. Forgiveness of others is merely a reflection of our own sense of forgiveness before God. Self-condemnation is really a gauge of our own receptivity of God’s forgiveness. So, if we feel condemned, we tend to condemn others. If we find ourselves condemning others, if we find ourselves gossiping about others, maybe we haven’t experienced God’s love and forgiveness in our own lives.

So in summary, three points,

1.     I can feel forgiven, when I realize how really forgiving God is, and that the sense of condemnation is not coming from Him, but from myself, my sin and the accuser of the brethren.

2.     If I can let myself be forgiven, I won’t be weighed down with a sense of self-condemnation and anguish—the anguish that killed Christ on the cross.

3.     Forgiveness is the process by which love and trust are re-established in relationships. Forgiveness of one another paves the way for oneness with God and others. Forgiveness is the process of returning to a friendship with God.

We all want to be friends with God, don’t we?! We all need forgiveness, and forgiveness is something we need to extend to one another.

Often times Satan forces on us a sense of guilt and shame, that keeps us from feeling God’s forgiving love and mercy. May God open up our minds to His love and mercy in all things that we will be willing and ready to receive from Him all the friendship He is willing to give us. God wants to be one with us, let’s not let anything stand between us and Him, so that we will be connected to the vine—to His life giving love and mercy.