Unforgiveness and the Power of Pardon

Scriptures: 1 Chronicles 28:9, 1 John 3:20, Hebrews 4:13

What’s Done Is Done

Everyone has an irrevocable past that has been written on the parchment of time and memory. What’s done is done. We can’t change our past actions—or the actions of the people around us—but we can change our relationship to those actions. And that happens through forgiveness.

All relationships require forgiveness, even those with other Christians. It’s not just unbelievers who can hurt us; in fact, it’s often God’s kids who hurt us the most. And I’ll be the first to say that forgiveness is neither natural nor easy. Rather, it’s a learned response that is based on God’s forgiveness toward us.

Forgiveness is the Lord’s specialty. He knows all there is to know about us, as David reminds us: “The Lord searches all hearts and understands all the intent of the thoughts” (1 Chronicles 28:9). Yet He loves us despite everything and has chosen to forgive us. Through Jesus Christ’s substitutionary death on the cross, it was as if God charged into the theater of life, took the incriminating film of our past, present, and future sins, and destroyed it—along with the punishment we truly deserve for those sins.

Having experienced that kind of forgiveness, our own willingness to forgive those who have wronged us should be forever changed. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”

We forgive because we have been forgiven. We forgive because it is right, not because it feels right. In the curriculum of spiritual life, forgiveness is a required course. But how do you forgive when you’ve been hurt deeply and can’t seem to loosen the grip of unforgiveness in your heart? And just how many times should you forgive someone who has wronged you? We’re going to uncover the answers over the next several days.

Scriptures: Matthew 18:21, Romans 12:19, James 1:19-20

Forgiveness vs. “Sweet Revenge”

We rarely feel like forgiving those who have wronged us. We usually feel more like evening the score by striking back or even retaliating far beyond the original offense. If someone knocks out our tooth, we want to see the offender outfitted in a whole set of dentures. This is why God established the Old Testament lex talionis, which says, “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot” (Exodus 21:24). Rather than giving us permission to get even, this scriptural law was meant to rein in man’s tendency for vengeance.

Peter’s question to Jesus in Matthew 18 reveals this natural desire to dispense punishment rather than mercy: “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” (v. 21). This honest question is one we’d all like answered. When do I get to stop forgiving and start fighting back?

But notice something: Peter could have asked Jesus, “How often shall my brother forgive me when I sin against him?” Instead, he was quick to assume his brother would require repeated forgiveness and seemed to forget he would need his brother’s mercy as well. This stingy, self-centered view of forgiveness is our default setting. We often notice another’s offense while remaining blind to our own faults. When an acquaintance says something that hurts our feelings, we brand him as cruel and thoughtless. Yet when we speak a painful word against someone, we’re misunderstood.

It’s tough to forgive, which makes it only seem right to set a reasonable limit on our gracious behavior. But the problem behind that reasoning is pride. And whenever you arrogantly refuse to forgive someone who has wronged you or you forget your own need to be forgiven, you are building a wall of bitterness between you and others—and even between you and God.

“Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive,” C.S. Lewis wrote. I think Peter would have agreed. He knew pontificating about forgiveness was a whole lot easier than practicing it. It’s the doing that gets tough. But it’s the doing that should characterize the child of God. To return evil for good is devilish, and to return good for good is human. But to return good for evil is Godlike.

Scriptures: Matthew 18:22, 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, Luke 17:3-4

Forgiveness, Jesus-Style

By human standards, Peter was gracious in his approach to forgiveness. By suggesting that forgiveness be extended to someone seven times instead of the Pharisees’ customary three times, he probably thought he was exceeding the bounds of generosity and was right in sync with Jesus. But Jesus was quick to give him a perspective adjustment: “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (Matthew 18:22).

I can imagine the mouths of the twelve disciples falling wide open when Jesus gave that answer. Forgive someone 490 times? Who could count that many misdeeds? But that was the point: you can’t keep track of that many offenses. And even if you could—and did—Jesus wasn’t saying you should count to 490 and say, “Okay, man, that’s it. You’re done.”

What Jesus did was take Peter’s humanly generous yet finite suggestion and raise it to an infinite, Godly level. It’s this level of forgiveness and love that the apostle Paul later wrote about in 1 Corinthians 13: “Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance” (vv. 4-7, NLT).

Real love doesn’t keep score or count wrongs. And just like real love, real forgiveness has no limitations. Elsewhere, Jesus told His disciples, “If [your brother] sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times in a day returns to you, saying, ‘I repent,’ you shall forgive him” (Luke 17:4). The idea is that you keep forgiving for as many times as someone sins against you and asks for your forgiveness.

Why are we instructed to repeatedly forgive, especially when it doesn’t come naturally to us? Because that’s how God forgives, and if we are to reflect His character, we must do the same. A faithful Christian won’t allow their forgiveness to be surpassed by a brother or sister’s sin.

Scriptures: Matthew 18:23-27, Matthew 5:3

Vertical Forgiveness 

Forgiveness is, first and foremost, vertical in nature. That’s because all our offenses are ultimately committed against God, which means every one of us needs to receive His pardon for our sins and failures.

In Matthew 18, Jesus told His disciples a parable to help them understand the concept of vertical forgiveness. A master had a servant who owed him 10,000 talents—millions of dollars in today’s world. The servant would have never been able to pay off such a huge debt, but even so, he begged for his master’s patience, promising to pay it all back. The master could have imprisoned the servant or require that he labor endlessly to repay part of the debt, but instead, he felt compassion for his helpless condition and forgave him the entire debt.

This parable illustrates the depth of our need and the height of God’s forgiveness. The application is simple: God is the master, and we are all His debtors when it comes to sin. Like the servant, our debt is beyond our ability to ever repay. You might promise God that you’re going to get your act together and pay that debt yourself, but the truth is that you are utterly bankrupt before the Lord.

Only by recognizing your spiritual poverty before God can you receive the forgiveness He offers you. As Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3). You need to acknowledge your helpless condition caused by your sin and realize the impossibility of your own efforts to save yourself, then humbly turn to the Savior and ask for His pardon.

The moment you do that, your mountain of debt to God is paid in full forever—because He paid it. God saw us in our misery, unable to work our way out of our debt, and sent His Son to die for our sins, thereby releasing us from the penalty and power of sin and wiping our slate clean. That’s salvation.

Only after experiencing the compassionate outpouring of God’s grace and forgiveness in our lives are we then able to extend it to those who have wronged us. This is the first step you must take. Have you personally experienced this vertical forgiveness? All you have to do is ask for it. 

Scriptures: Matthew 18:28-33, Matthew 6:14-15, Ephesians 4:31-32

Horizontal Forgiveness

After describing God’s forgiveness toward us, Jesus also explained why we must extend forgiveness to those who have wronged us. This is horizontal forgiveness.

Continuing His parable in Matthew 18, Jesus described how the forgiven servant went and violently demanded repayment from a fellow servant who owed him a mere pittance. The man’s plea—”Have patience with me, and I will pay you all”—should have been a sword in the servant’s heart; they were the very words he had uttered at his master’s feet. Instead, he had his debtor thrown in jail, not showing even a fraction of the compassion his master showed him.

When the master heard about it, he was angry. While the forgiven servant had the legal right to throw his fellow man into prison, the right response would have been to eclipse legal action with loving action. By refusing to forgive, the servant was essentially placing himself above his master.

How often have there been people in our lives for whom we felt a legitimate right to withhold forgiveness? It could have been an abusive parent, a business associate who swindled us out of a large sum of money, a spouse who broke the marriage vow, or a drunk driver who took away one of our loved ones. Certainly, the offense occurred, and our anger is justified. But being forgiven by the Lord carries with it both the privilege and the responsibility to pass on the blessing.

You may feel this is impossible to do, and even if you could somehow forgive, you’re certain you could never forget. Christian missionary and author Amy Carmichael spoke about God’s ability to accomplish this miracle in our lives: “If I say ‘Yes, I forgive,’ but I cannot forget, as though the God, who twice a day washes all the sands on all the shores of all the world, could not wash away such memories from my mind, then I know nothing of Calvary love.”

That’s a lofty thought. Calvary love is the kind of love that is unexpected and out of the ordinary. Calvary love is a grace that dismantles grudges. And Calvary love is evidenced by forgiving those who don’t deserve it.

To refuse to forgive someone who has wronged you is the height of hypocrisy, because you have been forgiven the ultimate debt that you could never repay. There should be no room in your heart for a bitter, unforgiving attitude toward anyone, otherwise what would make you any different than an unbeliever? If you have truly been redeemed, then you ought to extend to others the love and generosity God Himself has graciously extended to you. Tomorrow we’ll take a look at how you can do that practically.

Scriptures: Genesis 45:1-8, Genesis 50:15-21, 1 Peter 4:8, Romans 8:28

What Horizontal Forgiveness Looks Like

Joseph in the Old Testament gave us a vivid picture of what true horizontal forgiveness looks like. For one, it means not wanting to parade the sin of the one who offended you. Joseph extended forgiveness to his brothers who had treated him horribly, but he did so in private. If you genuinely forgive somebody, you won’t feel compelled to tell others what that person did to you, for “love will cover a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8).

Real forgiveness also means wanting to set the person who has wronged you at ease. Sometimes we’ll say we have forgiven someone, but we still want to make them feel like a creep when they’re in our presence. Joseph, on the other hand, assured his brothers that he didn’t harbor any vengeance or bitterness against them.

When it came down to it, Joseph was able to forgive his brothers because he saw life with a vertical perspective. “As for you, you meant evil against me,” he told them, “but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive” (Genesis 50:20). He recognized that behind their sin, God was sovereignly working all things together for good, as Romans 8:28 tells us.

I don’t know what pain or suffering you have gone through or are going through because of others. But I do know God is able to take everything in your life—the good things as well as the poisonous, toxic things—and bring divine synergism to it all so the ultimate result is a supreme good as He defines it.

In the meantime, even if we never see that divine synergism on this side of Heaven, we are still called to forgive as Christ has forgiven us. And if Joseph shows us anything, it’s that true forgiveness is a choice. If you base forgiveness on your feelings, you may never go through with it. “Well, I would forgive them if only they would” fill in the blank. That might never happen. So just forgive. It’s possible only in Christ. You probably won’t feel like it, but you can still do it. It can be divorced from how you feel.

As Corrie ten Boom wrote, “Forgiveness is not an emotion…. Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.” 

Scriptures: Matthew 6:12, Matthew 18:34-35, Matthew 5:7, James 2:13

Releasing the Prisoner: You

Forgiveness is not optional; it’s essential. Vertical and horizontal forgiveness are inseparable—two sides of the same coin. As Jesus taught us to pray, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” (Matthew 6:12).

In the parable of the unforgiving servant, Jesus described what would happen should we choose not to forgive: “[The servant’s] master was angry, and delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him” (Matthew 18:34).

The word torture carries with it the idea of extreme mental anguish. There is no worse prison than a heart that refuses to extend forgiveness to others. Your thoughts eat away at you. Your life is filled with stress and anxiety. You’ve been handed over to the torturers and become enslaved to your own unforgiveness. But forgiveness sets you free.

Perhaps the best real-life example of this comes from Corrie ten Boom. A couple years after World War II ended, she met a man who had been a guard at the very concentration camp she was imprisoned in for hiding Jews in her home. He had since repented of what he had done and stood before her seeking forgiveness. She wrote:

I stood there with the coldness clutching my heart…. “Jesus, help me!” I prayed silently. “I can lift my hand. I can do that much. You supply the feeling.” And so woodenly, mechanically, I thrust my hand into the one stretched out to me. And as I did, an incredible thing took place. The current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm, sprang into our joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes. “I forgive you, brother!” I cried. “With all my heart!” For a long moment we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then.

As Lewis B. Smedes wrote, “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” God loves you so much; He wants to spare you the prison of unforgiveness. By choosing to forgive from your heart in the same manner you have been forgiven, you can experience the freedom, peace, and joy that comes only by letting go of the offenses of others.

So I pray you would begin dismantling the walls of unforgiveness around you, one brick at a time. Make the choice today to lean into the Lord, reach out to others, and get involved in Heaven’s business of forgiveness.

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