Habits of Forgiveness

There isn’t a person on earth who hasn’t been hurt–personally and deeply wounded by the injustices of persons, groups, or situations.

So how do we deal with all this unfair hurt?

Think about how much harm has been brought into the world by people with a sense of wounded national pride, or a sense of wounded religious pride, or a sense of wounded family pride, or a sense of wounded personal pride.

It is often the victims of imagined or real injustices who give themselves permission to do the worst things to others.   And they feel totally justified in doing them.  Then the “bad guys” they wound, in turn, see the avengers as “bad guys” and give themselves permission to do horrible things in return.    Feuds are born this way.  So are wars.

The alternative is to lay down the role of victim, to humble our wounded pride instead of indulging it, and break the cycle by handing over the injustice to God and letting it go.    That’s the essence of forgiveness.

But forgiveness is hard work.   It is quite fragile, and is easily abandoned for fresh resentments.    In fact, it is humanly impossible to forgive without divine intervention and apart from first experiencing God’s forgiveness of ourselves as sinners.    We are terminally resentful and yet are blind to how greatly, genuinely guilty we are of many hurtful injustices towards God and others.

But let’s suppose that you have already experienced God’s forgiveness as an admitted sinner, and have realized how much Christ suffered on the cross to set you free.   You are grateful.  You love Him and owe Him everything.  You want to do the right thing.   You want to see resentments broken and forgiveness given to any and all fellow sinners who’ve hurt you.

If that’s what we want to do, there are certain commitments we can make that will guard our heart against resentment and maintain a posture of forgiveness towards others:

1) I will be slow to anger,  slow to take offense, and slow to condemn. “Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger.”  (James 1:19)  “Do not speak evil of one another, brethren.   He who speaks evil of a brother and judges his brother, speaks evil of the law and judges the law.  But if you are a judge of the law, you are not a doer of it but a judge.” (James 4:11)

2) I will assume the best about them, and assume I don’t understand them if there’s a disagreement. “The first to plead his case seems right, until another comes an examines him.” (Prov. 18:17)  “He who gives an answer before he hears, it is folly and shame for him (Prov. 18:13).

3) I will not dwell on this incident. “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think about such things” (Phil. 4:8)

4) I will not bring up this incident to use against them. “He who cover over an offence promotes love, but whoever repeats the matter separates close friends.” (Prov. 17:9)

5) I will talk to them and not to others about this incident. “Without wood a fire goes out; without gossip a quarrel dies down.”  (Prov. 26:20)  “If your brother sins, go to your brother in private” (Matt. 18:15)

6) I will not allow this incident to come between us or hinder our personal relationship. “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who cures you, pray for those who ill-treat you.” (Luke 6:27-28)  “Yet do not regard him as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother” (2 Thess. 3:15)

One of the most famous passages in all the Bible sums up today’s entry:   “You shall not go about as a tale-bearer among your people; nor shall you act against the life of your neighbor:  I am the Lord.  You shall not hate your brother in your heart.  You may surely rebuke your neighbor, but shall not incur guilt on account of him.  You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  (Lev. 19:16-18)

Much pain between people can and will be prevented if we practice these things.   And a path out of resentment can always be found if these habits are real in our lives.    They are the habits of forgiveness.

Healing Forgiveness

Resentment is a natural state of mind for human beings.

We have this built-in tendency to expect a certain amount of justice and a level of goodness out of other people, and it seldom happens.   The gap between what we think we deserve and what we actually get is always there.

Resentment accumulates like hard water deposits in the pipelines of our hearts–clogging them and blocking the flow of God’s grace.

So how do we keep the pipeline clear?

In a word, forgiveness.

Forgiveness acknowledges the great pain and admits, “I’ve been hurt”. It doesn’t paper over injustices that hurt, or sweep them under the rug.     It brings the pain before God and transfers ownership of it to the Lord.  Then we are free.   I believe that  trying to by-pass or bury the pain is one of the reasons why our attempts to forgive others fall so flat.

Forgiveness then submits to God’s examination and admits that we, too, very badly need to be forgiven. We admit bad attitudes and vengeful fantasies, and we admit condemning judgments and rejecting behaviors.  In other words, we confess that our resentments are wrong and ask the Lord to forgive us for our many, many sins.

Then we experience His forgiveness of us–a free, full, and final pardon we don’t deserve.   He releases us and treats us as if it never happened.   He never brings the matter up again–and all of our sins are cast into the depths of the sea where they will never be dredged up again.    We truly are free.

Then, and only then, as pain surrendered and freshly forgiven people, are we ready to forgiven.

Now we come to God and let the offender off of our hook. We place them on God’s hook and allow the Lord to settle the outstanding debts.   The other person’s wrongs are now God’s problem.   The handcuffs locking us to the offender are taken off.   We are free.

We no longer need to be the witness who testifies against them.   We no longer need to be the prosecutor who brings charges and labors to secure a conviction.    We no longer need to be the judge who finds them guilty.    We no longer  need to be the executioner that exacts vengeance.

The Lord takes over all of this burden.    And the Lord either settled the debt at His cross or will settle it at the lake of fire–all injustices are fully and fearfully paid at terrible cost.

Refusing to forgive, cherishing resentment, is indeed a great sin.  Towards the saved it is tantamount to saying to Christ, “You didn’t pay enough for this child of God–You need to suffer more than You did!”   Towards the lost soul it is tantamount to saying, “Not even an eternity in Hell is enough–I want them to suffer even more than that!”

Having surrendered our pain, having admitted our own guilt and received forgiveness, and having released them to God, there is one final stage of forgiveness.    It is all about living with the consequences of another’s evil.

Nobody has the choice about whether or not we will live with ongoing consequences of another’s evil.   The only choice we have is either to resent the consequences or to willingly accept them under God.

So the final step of forgiveness is the Joseph principle. Like this great Old Testament man, we can confidently say about any offender, “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.”   God has the final say-so over the consequences of our lives, and He specializes in redeeming outcomes.

So we expect ongoing consequences, and we surrender them over to God for Him to redeem.  Instead of playing the victim, and wallowing in resentful self-pity, we are in His hands and only in His hands, not theirs.   Their power to hurt us is limited, but His power to redeem is unlimited.   So we don’t need to control anything or make anything happen.  We are free.

Forgiveness is a healing, freeing response to injustices that hurt.   Resentment, on the other hand, is a terrible prison from which few escape.   And we always have the choice between these two responses.

Metanoia–The Way Out

Repentance is unpopular.   It always has been.

We live in a society that is convinced that it can spend, organize, and legislate its way out of problems.    And if the first time doesn’t succeed, it’s because we didn’t have enough funding, didn’t have the best program, and didn’t pass the right laws.   So we try harder and harder, and get less and less results.

It can’t be us that the problem.  That’s ruled out.   That’s not allowed.  That’s not a nice thing to say.   That makes people uncomfortable.

And no wonder.  The word repentance conjures up images of angry street preachers screaming epithets into a bullhorn, or some slick televangelist appealing for money, or some end-of-the-world wacko group.

But repentance comes from the Greek word, metanoia.   It means  “after-minded”.    It means we are the problem.

We do something wrong, experience negative consequences, have a realization, and change our mind about the rightness of what we did and the person who authorized it.   We are now after-minded.    We think or see it differently.   In fact, we now have the opposite opinion.    What we once thought was OK, we realize isn’t OK.

Metanoia is the opposite of defending, justifying, or giving ourselves permission to keep doing the same thing over and over again.    We no longer defend it, excuse it, justify it, or pretend it’s OK.   We’ve changed our mind about this sin, and about ourselves.

Our eyes are open.  Our love affair with this evil is broken off.   It’s the morning after, and the sin we’ve bedded has left a heavy hangover and deep regrets.

So metanoia isn’t just remorse where we feel bad because we feel bad.    It isn’t telling ourselves soothing lies while planning on doing the same sin again.   It isn’t temporary, external compliance where we may be following the rule but haven’t really changed our minds.   It is not acquiescence.  It isn’t pointing out the faults of others, and blindly justifying our own.

Metanoia is not just admitting the behavior is wrong, it’s saying, “Something’s wrong with me–I need a lasting change and only God can do the job.”  It’s therefore a loss of control and an acceptance of outside intervention.  It’s adopting God’s opinion of us and what we’ve done–we stop trying to be our own authority.

Metanoia is very personal, but it also can be a group exercise.   Not only people, but groups can repent as well.   Groups can change their minds about old sins and name as wrong what we used to justify.    Families can repent.   Churches can repent.  Communities can repent.  Nations can repent.

Rather than doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results, or looking everywhere but in the mirror for the reason, we can become after-minded.     We can repent.  And that’s great news!

Love for Orphaned Souls

Twice yesterday, I heard stories about scared children finding protection in a Heavenly Father.

Three ladies visited an orphanage in Uganda several months ago.   They shared their story with us of how they went there to love orphans, and were surprised by how much God used these same orphans to help them experience the depths of His love.

Later that morning, a visiting artist shared her story of being afraid of the dark as a little girl, praying to Jesus, and finding peace in His protection.   Christ became her haven, her place of refuge from the darkness.    Another story of being put a hard place by God, and finding His love in that spot.

I found myself vicariously experiencing in their lives of these witnesses, and in the lives of the children who received and gave back love, the love God has for us in the broken, unfathered, orphaned places in our souls.

C.S. Lewis refers to a place of  “inconsolable longing” inside of us, a place that aches for the restoration of our lost fellowship with God, one another, and the created world.    Author Larry Crabb touches on this same idea when, weeping over his brother’s plane crash and death, he sobs, “we’re outside the Garden”.

Beyond the pain of our personal failures and sins, beyond the pain of life’s traumas and injustices, a deeper pain exists in our souls.   Much like the little Ugandan girl, abandoned by her family to die on the street, we, too, were born in a world of much abandonment and great loss.

And, like her, we long for someone to scoop us up and carry us on strong shoulders to a place of safety and love.  And then to love us and love us and love us until we live happily ever after and the bad times never come back.

It begins with admission.   We admit we’re outside the Garden looking in.   We admit we were born broken and entered this world with a spiritual death-wound in our deepest soul.   We cry for home.  We cry for a Father.   We cry for a love beyond all reason, a grace beyond all failure.

Then we seek Him.    We give up trying to meet this need ourselves.   So we come into His presence with all of our brokenness and filthiness and sinfulness.   And we park there.   And we wait.  And we wait.  And we wait.  Until we realize He’s been waiting for us.    Until we hear His voice of love, a love that sent Christ to bring us home.  Until He is gracious to us.

Then one more orphan finds his or her way home, and we become the beloved child of a wildly loving King.   His love changes us.  Our heart melts, our will softens, our controls are dropped.  Even if the storms outside are raging, we stay with Him in His house and are loved no matter what.

“Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”  (Ps. 23)

On the Other Side of Powerlessness

Perhaps nothing is more frightening than powerlessness.

To be powerless is to be vulnerable.   To be powerless is to be at the mercy of everything and everyone, or at least it feels that way.   To be powerless is, for most of us, to be hurt and hurt often and hurt deeply.

One feels for the little boy who has no way to protect himself from a drunk, abusive father.   Or the little girl who is molested by an uncle and told to be quiet or else.   Or the undersized pre-teen who is terrorized and bullied after school every day.   Or the junior high girl with braces and few social skills.

Powerlessness is the place we therefore most wish to avoid.   And powerfulness is the place we’d most like to live, for there we are safe and all is well.   And yet our power agenda is constantly thwarted–all of our efforts to be powerful go up in smoke and we are dragged back to the one place we’d swore we’d never go: powerlessness.

Interestingly, this descent is also true of addiction.   As long as we pretend to be powerful, as long as we keep telling ourselves, “I can stop at any time”, we’ll keep right on using and abusing.   We’ll cycle lower and lower.   We’ll destroy more and more areas of our lives until we have nothing left.

It’s not a coincidence that the first of the Twelve Steps says, “We admitted we were powerless.”

And this descent is true of the spiritual life as well.  The Prodigal son lived a high life of cashing out and spending all his inheritance.  Then the money ran out, and the famine began and he “began to be in need” (i.e. – starve).   He finds himself abandoned and feeding pigs and envying them their food.    He had hit bottom.  He was powerless.   His illusion of sufficiency had finally crumbled.

Only then do his thoughts return to the home he’d left behind.  Only then do his feet find their way back to his father.  Only then does he hear his father’s voice of grace, feel his embrace, and know all is right again.

I find that powerlessness is the playground of God.    His power is perfected in weakness.    His goal is to be our one and only power, our one and only resource, our one and only source of sufficiency.    To do that He allows all other powers in our life to fail us.

When we can no longer pretend to be our own father, He becomes our Father. When we can no longer pretend to be our own savior, He becomes our Savior. When we can no longer pretend to be our own lord, He becomes our Lord.

Instead of trying to be powerful on our own, and sliding further downward, we come powerless.   And God meets us there.  And God empowers us there.  The powerless status that used to frighten us now becomes a holy, even sought out place of forgiveness and healing and joy.

We learn to live there.  And we learn real life begins on the other side of powerlessness.

Significant Insignificance

Our culture is a celebrity culture.   Who’s in the camera’s eye?  Who’s got the biggest name and the prettiest face?   Who’s voice is the loudest?  Who’s the hottest star in the biggest grossing movies?   Who’s the most powerful and telegenic?

To which, I answer, “Who cares?”

The opposite of celebrity is obscurity.   The opposite of fame is anonymity.  To be an unknown nobody is not what most people want to be.     To have one’s labors unsung, one’s efforts unnoticed, one’s impact hidden is not what thrills our ego.

Yet, if I read my Bible rightly, it is precisely the unknown nobodies that God selects for His greatest works.    Why else would Jesus chose a mostly Galilean group of fishermen to be His Twelve Disciples?    Why else does the burning bush appear to an exiled Egyptian named Moses?  Or why do we find the youngest brother, the guy lowest on the family pecking order, selected as king as David was?

There’s self-earned greatness.   But here we find conferred greatness–the greatness of God bestowed on an undeserving, unlikely little person.   He first chops the ego down to size, deflates our grandiosity, dashes our plans to the ground, and brings us to nothing.    We go from monarch of our own universe to puny sinner in His universe.   Few things hurt worse.

Then, in the “nothing zone”, He visits us with undeserved grace and bestows undeserved missions on us–including us in His glorious plans.    In the economy of God, insignificance is the gateway to unexpected inclusion in plans and purposes far above and beyond us.

But there’s a protest against this way of doing things.   Small people are forgotten.   Small people are ignored.   Small people are trampled by big people.   Small people are vulnerable and at risk.    So we find our security in being big and important somewhere.  Then we’re safe.

So when Christ comes along, and asks us to lay down our bigness and self-importance and significance, we shudder.   We evade and avoid.  We put it off.  We change the subject.  We may even protest and resist and fight it tooth and nail.   We may think it’s people and events being against us when it’s really Him.

Eventually we tire.  Our grandiose schemes fail us.  The significant role or position or distinction is lost and we have nothing.    It’s really like a death, the death of our ego-dreams and inflated estimation of ourselves.  Many get stuck here and despair.

Then He comes to us with arms outstretched.   We give Him our nothingness and, in return, He gives us His everything.   We exchange our self-earned, hard-to-gain, easy-to-lose significance for something far better:  conferred significance from God.

He’s the big Somebody, and we’re just His.  And that’s enough.

The Joy of Smallness

Strong wind gusts and heavy rain are buffeting the windows, and our recreational plans for today are in doubt.   Snow is accumulating on the passes, and our travel plans are in doubt as well.     I am reminded of my smallness.

Americans like to be big shots and we like to live large.   We enjoy high-altitude lives of leisure and achievements, and also enjoy supervising the affairs of the whole world via the news.    From this 24 hours-a-day, God-like vantage point of being above it all, it’s easy to feed the illusion that the world ought to run as we think it should.  And then events and people do the opposite, and our egotism is slapped in the face by reality.

There’s a dark side of our inflated ego, our high altitude lives.   And that is the crashes and the clashes.    The greater our ambitions, the greater our disappointments.   The greater our expectations, the greater the depression on the other side of them.   An ordinary life isn’t enough.  We simply must be great and important and successful and big and large.     And it almost never happens.   So what then?

Why are we three times as wealthy as our great-grandparents, and less than half as happily contented as they were at our age?    Why do our grandparents have so many fond memories of life as kids in the Great Depression, and our kids, on the other hand, try so hard to overcome soul misery in a sea of abundance?    Why are believers in abject poverty in the Third World able to worship so joyfully, and we look like we need an antacid at church?

I think the answer lies in how we view ourselves.    The kings of Israel, when they were “small in their own eyes” enjoyed the favor of God and saw much good happen under their reign.   Then, almost inevitably, they became proud later in their reign and gave themselves permission to neglect God and indulge in evils.    Their ego got inflated, and things took a sharp downturn.

There is a joy in being small, in not having the run the universe or in not being under pressure to succeed.   As the ego shrinks, the role and activity of God on our behalf expands.   We come to realized we truly are loved and are going to be well-taken care of by Christ.   He’s going to manage everything, and we just do the little things He puts before us.    We relinquish control and we find joy in being loved as little people.

Ironically, this is when God does His greatest works in and through our lives–as small, ordinary, regular, garden-variety sinners who are redeemed and humbly thankful and entirely available to Him.    He can safely use us in such a way because our ego is in check.   We know it’s not because we’re so great or know so much or have so much talent.   It’s because of His grace that we get to be a part of such things.

And this place is when we are most truly ourselves.   Under ego inflation, we are distorted, grotesque caricature of ourselves and get into all kinds of needless trouble to defend our prickly, pampered egos.    But under the regime of humility, we have nothing to lose and nothing to prove and are free to be the broken, God and others needing people we really are.    We relax and begin to have fun and are contented to be small but loved.

Tired of trying to be the big kahuna?   Tired of all the pressure and the relentless ego-drivenness to succeed and never fail?    Ready to admit you need a huge dose of love where you least deserve it and can never earn it?    Try being small again.

The Dark Night Remembered

Today is April Fool’s Day.   Today is also Maundy Thursday.  And that’s no joke.

This is the day where Christians commemorate “the night in which Jesus was betrayed”.    The horror and the sufferings and the sin-bearing of Christ began on this night.   So did the promise of redemption for unworthy people.

It was a night of human failure. A night when people, even the best people, were at their sinful worst.  Every single disciple failed Jesus!   One betrayed Him.  Three of them couldn’t even stay awake with Him for an hour. Ten of them ran away when He was arrested to save their own skins.  One of them denied knowing Him three times.  Cowardice.  Pettiness.  Selfishness. Weakness.

It was a night of tender “in spite of ” love. Jesus is described as “having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end.” (John 13:1)   In spite of our sin, He broke the bread and passed the cup of communion.   In spite of our failures, He went to great lengths to divulge His deepest heart to them after Judas left.    In spite of our follies, He prayed a prayer for us that still echoes throughout heaven.

It was a night of redemptive, self-sacrificing love. A night of sweating drops of blood under the pressure of killing grief.   A night surrendering to His Father’s will to die in our place and bear the full brunt of God’s sin-judgments against us.   A night of submitting to a Judas-kiss, to a crowd of thugs who beat Him, to a series of sham trials designed to find a legal excuse to kill Him.

So many people see only their failures.   They even give their sins the power to define them and even to self-disqualify them from God’s love.   They indulge in self-condemnation and self-punishment and self-hatred, wallowing in the heritage of rejection they have learned from their sick families or their false friends.

They cannot fathom why God would bother to love them, why He would waste His time on them.     Their brand of unbelief affirms the creed, “If people can’t love me, neither can God.”

Maundy Thursday interrupts this cycle of doubt.    It shouts, “Yes, He can love you!  In fact, He’s ALREADY loved you in spite of your numerous and deep failures.    Human rejection, even self-rejection, is not greater than His love!   That is why He took up your rejection, the rejection-deservedness of sin, on His cross.   That is why He experienced for you the Father’s rejection of your sins in His own Person.    It’s all gone.  And grace is in its place.

And that is why He still passed the bread and the cup to His eleven remaining disciples, even knowing in advance how terribly they were about to fail Him.

In other words, it didn’t shock Him we needed a sin-bearing Savior, and He volunteered for that job.    He’s delighted to accept us by grace.   He loves to be generous in the face of human failure and sin.

It strikes us as strange.    Like some sort of joke.   We keep expecting Him to say, “April Fools!” as soon as we fall for His offer to redeem us in love.  But He doesn’t.   And He never will!  You can stake your life on it.