Many years ago, a close friend announced to our whole youth group something about me that I certainly did not want brought to their attention. Everyone laughed. I am sure that she had no idea how much her statement hurt me. Needless to say, our friendship soon dissolved. Young and inexperienced, I should have handled the situation differently. I have since forgiven her, realizing that I have probably unknowingly done similar things and realizing that God has forgiven me for much. However, whenever I think of her, what I remember is that incident. Sometimes, forgiveness is difficult.
Franklin Graham addresses that issue in his book, All for Jesus. He gives three reasons why we tend to struggle with forgiveness:
- We focus on what hurt us instead of focusing on the person who hurt us.
- We overlook our own failures.
- We believe we have the ability to judge the motives of others.
When Jesus taught us to pray in Matthew 6:9-15, we are told to pray that God would forgive us as we forgive others. To the degree that we forgive others, we will be forgiven of the earthly effects of our sin. With that in mind, we should be able to forgive seventy times seven times. In our flesh, we choose the extent of our judgment by how much we judge others.
We don’t know how to forgive until we have been forgiven by God Himself. God provided a way for us to have complete forgiveness of our soul and spirit through Jesus’ sacrifice for us on the cross. Have you received the gift of God’s forgiveness personally? Our perfect God forgives our imperfections. Surely, we can forgive the imperfections in others, realizing that we are all sinfully imperfect.
Satan will bring to our minds the wrongs that have been committed against us. If we dwell on those, we can find ourselves becoming unforgiving. Each time he reminds us, we need to renew our forgiveness and not dwell on the wrong. The most blessed aspect of God’s forgiveness is that He chooses to forget and erase our sin from His records. When we mention our past forgiven sins to Him, He responds, “I don’t know what you are talking about.”
Ponder that!
