Understanding Forgiveness and Forgiving 3

Keep in mind what we've learned so far about forgiveness:

1. We are commanded to forgive
2. Forgiveness is a choice, a decision; not a feeling
3. There are conditions attached to forgiveness,

• only those who are saved can be truly forgiven, because it is through the blood of Christ that we are forgiven
• only those who repent of their sin can be forgiven; without repentance, there is no forgiveness

4. We are to forgive other believers the way God forgives us, by "not remembering" their sin anymore. Meaning that we promise not to bring it up again to ourselves, them, or anyone else.
5. when a believer sins against us we are to go to them and rebuke them. The rule is: The one with the sore toes goes because he’s the one who always knows.
6. If they continue to sin against us, but also continue to repent, we are to continue to forgive them.
7. The goal of forgiveness is to restore the relationship between you and the person who sinned against you; as well as restoring each persons relationship with the Lord.

I would like to say something about that last one really quickly here. We are commanded to forgive for a reason. I'm sure you have noticed too that in the NT love and unity between believers is stressed a great deal. 1 John especially talks about this. Because we each are saved and have a personal relationship with the Lord, it's our relationship with Him and our love for Him that unites us as we obey His command to love each other. Today the idea of that "unity" between believers has been twisted to mean things that God never intended it to mean. I'll go over this more later, because our fellowship with each other is of utmost importance to Jesus and should be to us as well.

We will be going over much more about the "rebuking" part later. I'm sure you want to hear about "unbelievers" so I'm going to cover that first and then go back to our responsibilities concerning believers. We will also cover what to do when we are the ones who have sinned against someone else, as well as a number of other common things about forgiveness.

 

I want to talk about our feelings as they regard forgiving others for a moment, as we so often think we can't forgive someone if we don't feel it or don't really want to. Let's really look at that for a moment. Do we do that with other situations in our life? I remember when I was working and the alarm clock would go off in the morning, I did NOT want to get out of bed What I felt like doing was rolling over and going back to sleep! I don't ever recall laying there and trying to decide if I "could" get up since I didn't "feel like it". No, instead, every morning, in spite of how I felt, I'd get up, get dressed and off to work I went. Nor did I feel like a hypocrite for doing so and I seriously doubt if anyone would have said I was - if only because they probably felt the same way every morning.

The kind of job I had was taking care of disabled and or elderly adults. That meant I had to do some things that are just plain unpleasant to put it mildly. Most of us have changed a dirty diaper on a baby, but i had to change dirty diapers on adults, and had to clean them up after they had had an accident in the bathroom. I remember one time in particularly when that had happened and the person was so embarrassed and humiliated by it that they'd tried to clean it up themselves, but because of their disability and all, what they actually did was spread it all over everything including themselves. It was quite literally all over the floor, walls, toilet, sink and all over them. It was the worst mess I've ever seen, and I had to clean it and them all up and do so in such a way that they wouldn't be embarrassed even more. I most certainly did NOT "feel like" doing that! But, I did it anyway assuring the person there was nothing to be embarrassed or humiliated about.

Even now that I no longer work, there are many things I do each and every day that I don't feel like doing and things that I just plain hate doing even - but I do them anyway because they have to be done. I'm sure you do as well.

You can see then that we regularly and normally do things we don't feel like doing. When we think of those things, we usually simply see it as being responsible. In fact, when we sometimes hear about someone that does choose to go with their feelings and not do the thing that needs doing, we'll say that they're irresponsible.

It's no different with forgiving someone, regardless of what they've done or said. We may not feel like forgiving them, but we do it anyway. We do it because God commands it and we love Him, and when we do, we're simply doing our job and being responsible.

So what would be hypocritical? It would be hypocritical if I'd led other people to believe that I loved cleaning up that mess, or getting up in the morning and never thought about throwing the alarm clock through the window. It would be hypocritical to tell someone that I loved someone and enjoyed being with them, if I didn't. It would be hypocritical to lead someone to believe that I felt like forgiving them (or someone else) when I didn't feel that way. As long as we don't lie about how we feel though, we're not being hypocritical

We can forgive others even when we don't feel like it and we can make a promise when we don't feel like it. We can even keep a promise when we don't feel like it. I don't know how many times I made promises to my children to do things, like to take them swimming or to their baseball game or boy scouts or something like that, after work later in the week. Then, when that day came, I'd take them regardless of how I felt. In fact, I never felt like taking them to their baseball games because I hate baseball lol and I hate bugs and there's always tons of those tiny biting flies we call "no see ems" during that time of year. But I took them twice a week, every week during the season and I stayed and watched them play. It didn't matter how tired I was, or if I was sick or if I'd much rather be doing something....anything else lol, I took them to their game. Like I said, I'm sure you've all done similar things and still do. It's the responsible thing to do.

So never allow yourself to be fooled into thinking that you can't forgive someone because you don't feel like it; or that you haven't really forgiven them because you don't feel like you have. Our feelings about things like this, really don't matter.