Ephesians 4:32 – Challenges of Forgiveness
"Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you."
Ephesians 4:32 (ESV)
Forgiveness is difficult by nature. But it isn't optional.
Forgiveness isn’t something I’ve had the misfortune of struggling with for most of my life. There’s only a handful of people that have done anything to me that I really struggled to forgive, long term. The wounds that I’ve taken from those people are real though, no doubt. Some are more difficult to remember, but they're still proof of my humanity. They leave a scar to remind me how much I’ve changed over the years, like stretch marks that hold memories of the growing pains that God allowed me to feel. Some are more fresh, and I still wrestle with forgiveness to this day. They can be pretty haunting, like the enemy knows that they strike deep into my weakest points – because he does.
There are a lot of different definitions of what forgiveness is, especially if you go from just a psychological perspective to a Christian one, but even then it's tricky to put into words. So I'll start by defining what I think forgiveness isn't. I don't think that forgiveness heals wounds – if that were true, it wouldn't take much effort. I don't think that it even forgets them – at that point, it wouldn't be a decision, as much as it would be a natural process of life. I don't think that forgiveness is something that happens once – in that case, time wouldn't really be a factor, and we wouldn't experience struggle.
I can explain the steps I take in my mind to define it another time, but I'd define forgiveness as the constant decision and effort to no longer hold someone's sin against them. Holding sin against someone in this case means anything you say, do, or think, in order to treat someone differently (in a negative way) than you would have before they sinned. So I mean, I think that covers the entire process of forgiving someone, but it doesn't really make it easier. The last part requires a lot from us, because our emotions are gonna without a doubt conflict with that. Forgiveness requires that we remember what we're forgiving. How can you decide to actively look past something if you forgot what it was? And when we remember something that created an unhealed wound, pain comes with that. Navigating that pain is where the effort starts.
But there's more that comes after that. Because I think when we inevitably start to let that pain influence us to hold sin against people, we dehumanize them. We treat them as the sin, because we're only believing what we can see. It's the same issue that we're dealing with when we struggle with any kind of judgementalism – we can't see what's in someone's heart. For that same reason, we can never see the intentions of someone else when they sin against us, and that drives some people crazy (I'm very much some people). Now, looking from the outside, it's easy to see the truth, which is that it doesn't matter what someone's intentions are. Intentions might affect the way you protect yourself from that person in the future, but it has no bearing on whether you should forgive someone or not. But that is, I think, something that makes forgiveness so difficult. Even after you've mapped out all your emotions.
Now, forgiveness is not an option – need to make that perfectly clear. If we're deciding whether we should forgive someone, we're already starting in the wrong place. Forgiveness might be instant. It might take me a few days. It could take me years to forgive someone. But I've been commanded to labor in forgiveness. That means I state forgiveness externally now, so that I can develop forgiveness internally from now on. I don't want to – forgiveness can feel like twisting the knife that someone else apathetically stuck into me. But it's the only choice that I've been given. Any other path leads to death. It's that simple, so I won't complicate it more than that. However long it takes – forgiveness is the only route.
Something else that makes it difficult for us to forgive is the fact that the perfect forgiveness we've already become indebted from (that's referenced in God's command to forgive) is impossible to imitate completely. Most verses on forgiveness in the New Testament include the same theme: forgive as God forgave. I used the passage from Ephesians about putting on the new self and escaping the old one, but I could have used several other places in the New Testament for the same post. Colossians 3, Matthew 6, Matthew 18, 1 John 1, Mark 11 – every one of these commands us to forgive because we've been forgiven. Ephesians paints the picture of the goals we have as Christ-followers, and it is quite literally impossible. That's kind of, you know, the whole point. Like I'll tell you right now – read Ephesians 4:17-32. You're never living out that passage without fail. And that's okay. Like every other quality of the goal to live like Christ, the point of forgiveness isn't to make a one-time decision that you never struggle with from that point on. In every way, through the lens of our limitations, Christ is impossible. Forgiveness is so important because it can feel impossible. The times when forgiveness is character-changing and genuine is when it looks ugly. It might mean future screw-ups and apologies. It might mean bad days that are filled with rage towards that person. It might mean putting yourself in a position where you look totally weak, just so that you can fulfill your only instruction that is extending grace, and leaving everything else in God's hands.
We can't live with the expectation that our forgiveness needs to look exactly like Christ's forgiveness – not because that forgiveness isn't righteous, but because it isn't possible. We can't let that be an excuse to withhold forgiveness. After all, we're not forgiving just so that God will forgive us in the future. We're forgiving because we've already been forgiven. And no person that will ever exist is capable of committing against us something at the same level of what we've been forgiven for. Forgiveness is just one part of the same command that we will struggle with for as long as we live.
Pursue perfection, and point to God once you fall short of it.
"Give my heart the goal of authentic forgiveness, regardless of what it looks like."