Forgiveness – Part 2

Now that it is firmly established how important forgiveness is, here comes a section on how to forgive biblically. I am posting the whole story first for you to read. Then I will repost different sections and highlight what we can take from the example to apply to our own process of forgiving.

Matthew 18:21-35

Later Peter approached Jesus and said, “How many times do I have to forgive my fellow believer who keeps offending me? Seven times?”

Jesus answered, “Not seven times, Peter, but seventy times seven times!

The lessons of forgiveness in heaven’s kingdom realm can be illustrated like this: “There once was a king who had servants who had borrowed money from the royal treasury. He decided to settle accounts with each of them. As he began the process, it came to his attention that one of his servants owed him one billion dollars. So he summoned the servant before him and said to him, ‘Pay me what you owe me.’

When his servant was unable to repay his debt, the king ordered that he be sold as a slave along with his wife and children and every possession they owned as payment toward his debt. The servant threw himself facedown at his master’s feet and begged for mercy.

‘Please be patient with me. Just give me more time and I will repay you all that I owe.’

Upon hearing his pleas, the king had compassion on his servant, and released him, and forgave his entire debt.

“No sooner had the servant left when he met one of his fellow servants, who owed him twenty thousand dollars. He seized him by the throat and began to choke him, saying, ‘You’d better pay me right now everything you owe me!’

His fellow servant threw himself facedown at his feet and begged, ‘Please be patient with me. If you’ll just give me time, I will repay you all that is owed.’

But the one who had his debt forgiven stubbornly refused to forgive what was owed him. He had his fellow servant thrown into prison and demanded he remain there until he repaid the debt in full.

“When his associates saw what was going on, they were outraged and went to the king and told him the whole story.

The king said to him, ‘You scoundrel! Is this the way you respond to my mercy? Because you begged me, I forgave you the massive debt that you owed me. Why didn’t you show the same mercy to your fellow servant that I showed to you?’

In a fury of anger, the king turned him over to the prison guards to be tortured until all his debt was repaid.

Steps of Forgiveness – The Accounting Method

The lessons of forgiveness in heaven’s kingdom realm can be illustrated like this: “There once was a king who had servants who had borrowed money from the royal treasury. He decided to settle accounts with each of them. As he began the process, it came to his attention that one of his servants owed him one billion dollars. So he summoned the servant before him and said to him, ‘Pay me what you owe me.’

Here is the first step in the process. We need to take an account. The king looked at what was actually owed him. He checked his accounts. We need to do the same. What is actually owed me? What has it cost me? Some costs are ongoing and will impact us for decades. Others have held us back for years, and it will take us more time and effort to overcome what we finally became aware of before we can be fully free from the damage. An example of taking careful account, I imagine, is our history with our dad. I am not by any means letting off the moms, but dads are usually the ones who are instrumental in what picture we create in our belief system of what God is like. Let’s say a fairly common issue is that of the dad not being really present. We may not believe God is distant in our minds when we grow up, but subconsciously our prover will continue showing us examples of us experiencing God as distant. This can rob years of intimacy from our relationship with God. When we begin validating what a person has truly done to us, and the damage it has caused, it is therefore important not just to list what they did, but also how it made us feel and how it damaged us short and long term. That is the real cost analysis. If we don’t validate properly, or don’t even acknowledge a debt is owed, then there is nothing to forgive, or we only forgive in part. It does happen, that we forgive someone for a bunch of things, and later we remember more, and those will need to be accounted and forgiven as well. We don’t do it wrong if we don’t do it all in one go. The only wrong way to do it is to not do it.

When his servant was unable to repay his debt, the king ordered that he be sold as a slave along with his wife and children and every possession they owned as payment toward his debt. The servant threw himself facedown at his master’s feet and begged for mercy.

‘Please be patient with me. Just give me more time and I will repay you all that I owe.’

Upon hearing his pleas, the king had compassion on his servant, and released him, and forgave his entire debt.

In this part of the story the king began seeing the person for who he is apart from the debt he had incurred. I find it interesting that he didn’t give him a lecture on ‘what were you thinking racking up such a bill, how irresponsible of you’. Nothing like this is mentioned. Instead it says the king had compassion. In order to have compassion, I need to put myself into the other person’s shoes. I can’t stay removed from him and have compassion.

I would find it devastating to know the servant’s whole family would end up paying for his mistake and lack of stewardship. If I couldn’t have compassion on the guy, I could have compassion on the family. I could also imagine what suffering that servant would continue to experience, knowing what he put his family through. I often label someone a villain if they hurt me. I end up agreeing with shame by making them be the bad person even though they are a person created in God’s image, a person he died for, who did a bad thing. It’s like the phrase most of us have probably heard, to love the sinner but hate the sin. That is what we strive to achieve in this step. Seeing the perpetrator as a person rather than a villain. The person is more than what they have done to you and owe you.

“No sooner had the servant left when he met one of his fellow servants, who owed him twenty thousand dollars. He seized him by the throat and began to choke him, saying, ‘You’d better pay me right now everything you owe me!’

His fellow servant threw himself facedown at his feet and begged, ‘Please be patient with me. If you’ll just give me time, I will repay you all that is owed.’

But the one who had his debt forgiven stubbornly refused to forgive what was owed him. He had his fellow servant thrown into prison and demanded he remain there until he repaid the debt in full.

Step number three is to be aware of the debt we ourselves have been forgiven. I don’t think any one of us can be good at forgiving, if we hold the idea that we somehow managed to live in such a way as to not rack up debt before God. I believe it is very important to remember where we ourselves have come from before we were fully forgiven by God. If I can’t remember, it’s enough to read a chapter or two from the beginning of Romans. That should remind me I have been forgiven way more than anyone could ever do to me, and way more than I could ever repay no matter how successful I am.

The servant acts like he did not believe that he deserved to be forgiven all this debt, or he was operating in a poverty mindset, thinking he does not have enough. It is even possible he was embarrassed of the humbling experience he has just gone through and wanted to change that as soon as he could. If he had recognized how much he had just been forgiven, he would have seen it as a gift of immense proportion rather than a debt cancelled and would have felt rich and wanted to share the wealth.

I haven’t been around people who group sins in different categories of bad in a long time. The people I hang out with understand that one sin is not more damning than another. When I was a kid, though, there were clear sins that were considered less acceptable than others. The phrase itself should ring an alarm bell. Sin should never be acceptable. The sins can have very different and varying levels of severity in consequences, but all sins are equal in that they make us law breakers and therefore hopelessly indebted to God.

For the one who attempts to keep all of the law of Moses but fails in just one point has become guilty of breaking the law in every respect!

James 2:10

“When his associates saw what was going on, they were outraged and went to the king and told him the whole story.

The king said to him, ‘You scoundrel! Is this the way you respond to my mercy? Because you begged me, I forgave you the massive debt that you owed me. Why didn’t you show the same mercy to your fellow servant that I showed to you?’

In a fury of anger, the king turned him over to the prison guards to be tortured until all his debt was repaid.

Step four then is to be aware  that we have the power to prevent or end torment. The servant would never have been tormented in prison, had he chosen to pay it forward. What we don’t realize sometimes, until we do forgive, is how tormented we are while living in unforgiveness. But the torment is not something we are helplessly exposed to. We can simply take account, have compassion, remember our own history and forgive.

Forgiveness does not mean we have to invalidate what was done to us. That is why step number one is so important. We do need to take a good look at what it has cost us. And the debt does not go away when we forgive, we just don’t hold someone accountable to pay it, who will never in their life be able to repay it. We’re not saying what they did was ok simply because we forgive it. Therefore it is also a myth that you have to be over the pain and event if you forgive. It also does not mean that you can never revisit the pain.

Hopefully this step by step summary will help solidify this process for you.

1. Take account. Ask “what is owed me?” Find out all the ways damage has been done to you by this one person or event.
2. Break the lie that they can ever pay back the debt that they owe. When we get wronged, it is normal to want to be paid back. But even if they did the best they could, there are always damages that are beyond their ability to repay. I think a lot of people sue for damages of emotional nature because they realize more has been taken than just the physical damage to them or their belongings. We also need to realize that an apology won’t pay it back either. Apologies are nice, but they don’t carry in them the ability to undo all the damage.
3. Ask if what Jesus did on the cross is enough to pay the debt. There are many verses to answer this question with a resounding yes. I’ll just mention 1 John 2:2 He is the one who atones for our sins, and not only our sins but the sins of the whole world.
4. Believe that Jesus can pay you back, and can redeem the loss. I remember when a family came over for play and one of their kids broke one dear toy of one of my kids. They just said they were sorry, but didn’t offer to make it right. I remember taking the stance of Jesus and went and paid for the broken toy for my child. I remember it now and think, that was a nice way to model what God does for us, except my kids don’t remember it… There is a beautiful promise in Joel 2:25 The Lord says, “I will give you back what you lost to the swarming locusts, the hopping locusts, the stripping locusts, and the cutting locusts. We don’t get assurances of how much of our loss we get restored this side of heaven. One way we know he redeems what happened is when he brings people into our paths we can help because of what we learned from wrongs done against us. This earns us gems in our eternal crowns, so it is a definite double blessing, seeing it now and getting the joy of helping someone else, and the additional blessing of getting rewarded for our good works in heaven. Even if we never get to help anyone who is going through something we have gone through, just the fact that we can heal and live in freedom rather than in bitterness and bondage to unforgiveness is a huge gift of redemption.
5. Lastly, I cancel the debt. This may look like writing a list of all the wrongs, and destroying the list after we have walked through the steps of forgiveness. What this means is we won’t look to the offender anymore for repayment. If they ever come around and apologize, it’s a nice bonus, but it is not what we need to forgive and be free. We remember that we aren’t stuck and kept hostage to whether or not people will repay us, we can go to God and ask him. We also invite God to come heal what damages we caused someone, because it goes both ways. It is a beautiful and freeing experience to confess a wrong we remember having done, and asking God to make it better. We can cancel the debt and know either here or in heaven or in both places, God will redeem and make up for all the losses.

While it is beautiful when the forgiveness journey can be completed together like Justin and his mom (on the podcast episodes) we can walk through the journey alone when others aren’t ready to face things, or if they have since died. We don’t need the participation of the other person. We don’t need the other person to come ask for forgiveness. We are not stuck. We can do this. We can practice trusting God, his faithfulness, and stay connected to him by loving and forgiving as a lifestyle.

There are a couple more ways we can work our way through forgiveness. One of them is to take the posture Jesus took on the cross. He knew they had no idea what they were really doing. Even the devil didn’t know what he was doing, or he would never have driven the people to do it. I have come to the conclusion quite frequently over the years as I work through forgiving an offense, that the offender is clueless, had no idea that they were even causing pain and damage. I have had to work through the offense of people just not being sensitive, but truth be told, I unwittingly do it too and will never know unless someone comes to me and shares what I did to hurt them. This obviously does not always apply. But it has applied plenty of times in my life so far.

The other way to gain compassion to forgive is to imagine the person as a little child, with the intent to understand what caused them to become the way they are now. In many cases, I will find that what they are doing, is coming from a survival mechanism they had to adopt, in order to survive their own painful childhood experiences. It becomes the little child showing me something about them and not really the grown-up person showing me about myself. As we gain compassion for them, we also begin to see that they don’t even know what they are doing, they are just trying to survive. We can forgive them just as Jesus forgave on the cross. I can see this applying especially when we inadvertently hook and trigger them of something they have not processed and healed from. It helps us see that it’s the little kid inside them driving the car, and it’s not even really about you.

We can also imagine or view the sinner as being infected with the disease of sin. That they are sick with a virus for instance. It is not them doing this, it is sin doing this. I feel this is certainly appropriate with people who hurt us who aren’t saved, because they literally are slaves to sin and more often than not choose to obey the slave master despite their God given conscience. But it doesn’t just excuse them and say the illness made them do it. They certainly hold some form of responsibility for their action. But seeing that if the virus had cleared, they would not be doing this, helps separate the sin from the person.

Forgiveness can be a progressive thing. I know I have experienced that. I think I have forgiven someone. Then I get more self-aware and I notice a way that person’s sin against me has damaged me and affected me that I hadn’t seen before. This doesn’t mean all the previous forgiveness is not valid. It just means I have to take account of this new cost that has emerged and walk through the process for that particular thing concerning that particular person. I am pretty sure you have heard healing likened to an onion with layers. That healing takes place in layers and you can’t get deeper until the previous layer is removed. I imagine it is similar with forgiveness as we heal. Because as we heal, we may become aware of more damages and need to do more forgiving and hold fast to what we have already forgiven. The cost is high. Validating the cost is necessary. The healing is worth it.