Today we are concerned about the matter of forgiveness, God''s forgiveness of us and our forgiveness of others. According to the Bible, the two go together and can never really be separated.
James Knight is a Professor of Psychiatry, an Associate Dean of the Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans. Lately, he has been speaking and writing about some of the horrendous and overwhelming social and emotional problems people face today. He speaks from his own experience when he says, "I confess that the hospital and the clinic have furnished me the most revealing setting for understanding sin and the operation of the moral order." He says, "The abuse of one''s body or one''s sense of values results in physical and emotional illness. When one challenges or violates the principles of his own value system or the laws of the universe, he does not succeed in breaking these, he only breaks himself against them."
And then Dr. Knight offers some examples of patients whose lives exemplify that truth that we do not break moral laws, but we succeed in breaking ourselves against them. The first concerns a patient who had come to his doctor for stomach trouble. After testing the patient and treating him for a while, the doctor called the patient''s pastor and said something like this: "I have been treating this patient for a stomach condition and I''ve done all that I can do for him. I need to tell you that his need is beyond the field of medicine. He has cheated his sister out of her inheritance. When he comes to grips with that and when he reaches a proper solution, his stomach trouble will disappear."
Dr. Knight describes another example of this problem with these words: "I saw a beautiful red-headed girl in the hospital with a bleeding peptic ulcer. It became active every time she was unfaithful to her husband and ran around with other men. The ulcer healed when she came to terms with the fact that her interpretation of right and wrong would not allow her to do this sin. When she came to terms with that and developed a proper solution, her ulcer was healed."
He says, "I also saw a teenage girl whose body was wasting away there in the hospital. She vomited continually, and she had no appetite. Her anorexia began when she was first unfaithful to the dictates of God, when she first had sex with her boyfriend. She could not bear the thought of having lost her purity, her innocence, and, in her thinking, everything else. Her wasting away was her atonement. She became well after she solved her moral problems." (1)
These are just a few of countless incidents of persons who needed to experience the forgiveness of God for sin in their lives, and when they experienced that forgiveness, they were able to come to healing and wholeness of mind and body.
When we violate the laws of God, we suffer greatly. We experience guilt in our hearts, and we bring harm to ourselves physically and emotionally. Our seeking to be God, our ignoring him, our shunning of his rules and his principles, our retreat away from his purposes and direction for life--these the Bible calls sin. Unless our sin is forgiven through repentance and faith in Christ, we remain sinners before God, and our sinfulness produces guilt feelings.
Now we may try to rationalize away these feelings. We may find all kinds of ways to justify our sinful behavior, but we know the guilt is there. And that guilt starts a vicious cycle, lowering our self-esteem and creating in us negative attitudes which ruin our relationships with others and with God. We may project our bad feelings onto others by having a critical and mean spirit, always looking for the fault and flaws in others. Or we become depressed, or we may try to legalistically conform our lives to those religious traditions we know in hopes that somehow we''ll escape the weight of that guilt that bears down upon our hearts and our minds. But our guilt remains, and it tells on us, and we must eventually receive the forgiveness of God in order to have a sense of peace and harmony in our souls.
So forgiveness is the great restoring power in our relationships, the relationship between us and God and the relationship between us and everyone else.
When we get down to it, sin at its very root, at its very base, is a messed-up relationship. Because of pride and sinfulness in us, we are messed up in our relationship with God and with others. And out of that messed-up relationship comes all those things we know as sins. But forgiveness puts life together again. It releases a creative energy for good, for healing, for wholeness in our souls.
I think in former days people were more willing to acknowledge the fact that they were sinners. They were willing to go to God in confession of sin and get their lives straightened out. We live in a time today when nobody takes blame for anything, nobody accepts responsibility for anything. We live in a time when we''re always looking for some person, some group, some experience to blame for the troubles we have.
Now, Jesus did not teach us to pray in this model prayer, this beautiful prayer: "Take revenge on those we think are guilty, oh Lord." No, he did not teach us that. Instead, he taught us to pray: "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."
What does it mean to say, "Forgive us our trespasses?" What does it mean? Well, it means that although God takes our sinfulness for granted, we need to take our sinfulness seriously. We need to deal with it. There is no equivocation in the Bible. The Bible speaks the same word all the way through, from Genesis to Revelation, when it talks about our sinfulness, our need of God''s forgiveness and cleansing from sin and its guilt.
Paul, in Ephesians 2, tells us what we are like before we become Christians, before we come to that forgiveness state in Jesus Christ. He says we are dead in our trespasses and sins. We follow the prince of the power of the air--Satan. He is managing director. He is really the God in our lives. Paul goes on to say that we live in the passions of the flesh, following the desires ofmind and of body, and so we are by nature children of wrath, like the rest of creation. According to Paul, we are in a hopeless state, we''re under the condemnation, the absolute condemnation of God. We are doomed and we are damned, and we have no hope, until we enter into that state of forgiveness in Jesus Christ.
Both the Old Testament and the New Testament speak about sin''s destructive effects on us--how it separates us from the Father; how it separates us from one another; and how it spoils life. There are many references in the Bible to God''s judgment and his offer to forgive our sins. Now why would those references be there if God did not take this matter seriously, if we did not need his forgiveness, his cleansing and his renewal?
The major theme of the Bible is that God created this world to be a beautiful place in the beginning, a place without any sin, with perfect harmony between humans and God and between humans and each other. But people became proud and decided to take the place of God, and spoiled everything for everybody. The story goes on to say that God loved his creation so much that he would not allow that situation to continue.
Throughout the Old Testament God continues to reach out to people, trying to call them unto His saving grace. And then He sends Jesus Christ, His supreme salvation, so that by putting our faith and trust in him we can have that forgiveness, that cleansing from guilt and sin and be made whole in him.
The New Testament uses five major words for sin. One means to miss the goal or to miss the mark. It simply means that we do not live up to God''s ideal for us; we do not become what God intended for us to be. Why? Because we shut God out of life. We do not allow him to recreate us and help us to become all that he wants us to be.
Another word for sin means to step across the barrier that separates good from evil. It''s simply dishonesty in any form.
A third word for sin means to slide across, or to slide off a slippery road. This is a description of our yielding to temptations, our giving in to the impulses of mind and body, of the flesh, as the Bible calls it, and sinning against God.
The fourth word is just plain lawlessness. It is that hard-hearted, self-centered, deliberate and steady desire and effort to do wrong. It is that high-handed sin the Bible talks about in the Old Testament. God talks about people committing high-handed sin, deliberate and mean-spirited, with a hard-hearted attitude that proclaims, "I''m going to do what I want when I want it, and nobody can stop me."
Then there''s that fifth word for sin which means a debt or a duty which we owe to God or to others. Sin again at its very root is our puny self trying to take the place of God, pushing God to the side, ignoring His instructions and His purposes for our lives.
No one likes to be called a sinner. We like to think better of ourselves than that. But a society like ours that thinks that sin is just an old religious holdover from the dark ages, or that sin is a tool that preachers and churches use to take all the fun out of life for people, or that it''s just a psychological maladjustment, or that it''s just a product of bad environment; a society like that and people who live in that kind of society do not have any clue as to what makes them so miserable, and what makes the world such a rotten world. If we do not acknowledge the fact of sin, we cannot understand ourselves; we cannot understand the condition of the world; we cannot understand the word and the will of God.
We tend to blame others for our miseries. We see all the terrible things going on in the world and blame others for them. But what we do not understand is that what''s going on out there is what''s coming from in here, out of our individual hearts. Jesus said, "For from within the heart of man come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All of these evil things come from within." What is in your heart, and in my heart, is what we see out in the world.
When we pray this prayer Jesus taught us, "Forgive us our trespasses," we are not only lifting up our sins before God and saying, "God forgive me," but we are lifting up all the sins of this soiled and tainted world and saying, "God forgive all the sins of the world." How desperately we need to do that through our Lord Jesus Christ.
We can never pay the debt we owe to God; we can''t cancel out yesterday''s disloyalty or disobedience or meanness or their effects on us or God or others. We can''t remove the stain of our wrong doings from our memories, we can''t remove that sense of guilt. That''s the way God has made us. The knowledge of sin makes mischief in our minds and in our bodies and corrupts our relationships. We lose control and only God can help us.
That''s why the second truth we find in this beautiful phrase, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us," means so very much. It tells us that our only hope is through Jesus Christ, what he''s done on the cross and through the resurrection, to forgive those sins, to cleanse that guilt, to make us whole and to reconcile us to himself. He alone can cancel the debt. We are guilty before God, we are transgressors of his law, transgressors of that beautiful relationship he wants to have with us. Jesus alone can remove our guilty feelings, and take the stain away from our minds and from our consciences.
Sin separates us from God. We know that. But the guilt of that sin causes us to shun God, to run and hide from God as Adam and Eve did in the garden. Sin and guilt create a great chasm, a great distance between us and God. Jesus paid the penalty we owe, so that we might not be in that state of guilt before God, but so that God can look upon us now as guiltless. But Christ does something else. He forges a bridge between God and us, a bridge that can lead to reconciliation, a bridge that can lead to a sense of peace and harmony between us and God. When we put our trust in Christ, when we''re willing to cast ourselves utterly upon the mercy of God, then we enter into that reconciliation. The objective state of guilt has been taken away by his death on the cross, the subjective feelings of guilt are now removed as we enter into personal communion and fellowship with him, as he comes to dwell in our hearts through faith, as he comes through his Holy Spirit to recreate us and renew us and cleanse our hearts and our minds from those guilty feelings. What a joy it is to sense that forgiveness from sin and that cleansing! What a lightness, what a freedom it brings!
The psalmist testified to that glorious feeling of freedom when he said: "How happy is the man whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sin is covered, in whose heart is no guilt." Remember, Jesus said at the Last Supper, "This is the cup of the new agreement, the new covenant in my blood which is shed for many for the forgiveness of sins." That shed blood covers sin. That shed blood is the means by which guilt is removed and we''re set free in our souls. It''s by his pure love and mercy and grace that forgiveness is offered, and when we accept that forgiveness, then the guilty feelings are taken away.
That great old hymn that we've sung through the years reminds us of his cleansing power, cleansing us from sin and its guilt. You know the words:
There is a fountain filled with blood,
Drawn from Emmanuel''s veins,
And sinners plunged beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains.
Lose all their guilty stains.
All their guilty stains;
And sinners plunged beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains.
The dying thief rejoiced to see
That fountain in his day,
And there may I though vile as he,
Wash all my sins away.
What a beautiful, beautiful message. What a grand word from God: sins forgiven, cleansing accomplished through the saving blood of Jesus Christ. We''re now a Christian, we've entered into a new relationship with the Lord, hopefully one of joy and great freedom. But does it mean that we no longer sin? No. As long as we''re in the flesh we do sin, but there is a difference now. No longer are we standing in a state of objective sin before God. Our sin has been removed, our guilty state in his eyes is removed forever. The guilty feelings may come again, but the guilty state that meant we lived under his damnation and his doom, under his eternal condemnation, has been taken away forever. And then we can really understand what the Bible means when it says that when we do sin as a Christian we can confess to God and he will take away that sense of estrangement that sin brings between us and God.
When we do sin and we do have a guilty feeling, that guilt does not have the same meaning for us as it did before we became a Christian. Before we became a Christian we stood in abject terror of God because we had no hope and knew no salvation. We experienced the kind of guilt that produces a sense of punishment and condemnation toward ourselves and others.
But as Christians we experience something the Bible calls Godly sorrow. Godly sorrow occurs when those who are in relationship with God do wrong and they are touched to the heart. They''re cut to the quick and their hearts are broken because they know they have sinned against the love of a God who loves them so much that he sent his son Jesus Christ to die for them. That Godly sorrow causes them to want to do all they can to show their love for the Lord, to be changed and to be more appealing and more acceptable to him, and to prove the love that they now have for the Lord.
The old guilt is the kind that is hopeless. It''s accusing of self, accusing of others. The Godly sorrow is the kind that seeks to change in order to please the Master. John spoke about this difference when he said, "See what love the father has for us, in that we should be called the children of God, and so we are." He goes on to say, "We know that we are of the truth and reassure our hearts whenever our hearts condemn us, for God is greater than our hearts and he knows everything."
So God takes our sinfulness for granted. It is part of our nature as unredeemed human beings and we should take it seriously. Christ is the only hope we have for forgiveness of our sins. He''s the only hope for removing from our hearts the subjective sense of guilt, those guilty feelings.
The prayer Jesus taught us says, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." Jesus died and he was raised again from the grave to give us the power to forgive others. And God offers that experiential forgiveness whereby we know that we are in a right relationship with him, we do not live under his condemnation; we have his freedom, and we have the joy of his salvation within us. That freedom and joy is absolutely necessary for us to be able to forgive others as Jesus calls us to do.
Forgiveness is costly. Christ had to give his utmost that we might know forgiveness and make it possible for us to forgive others.
Dr. E. Stanley Jones was a great Methodist missionary for some 50 years in India. He tells about an official he knew who worked for the railroad in India. This man''s job took him away from his home and from his wife for lengthy periods of time. On one of those trips he gave in to sexual temptation, and he took a mistress. Over time his guilt over this relationship grew and grew in his heart until finally it became unbearable.
One day while he was home he called his wife into the room where he was and he began to pour out the sordid story of his transgression against her and their marriage vows and against the love that they had for one another. His wife turned as pale as death. He said she staggered back and leaned against the wall and then great tears just trickled down her face. As he continued to tell the story, she began to look as if she had been beaten by a whip.
This man who was a nominal Christian at that time became a firm believer in Jesus Christ out of the experience that he shared with his wife. He said: "In that moment, seeing her there in that state, I saw the meaning of the cross. I saw love crucified by a sin, my sin. I could see Christ on the cross crucified by my sin, even as I was crucifying my wife." But he said, "When it was over she said that she loved me still and that she would not leave me, and she said that she would help me to a new life."
As I hear something like that, I think about Christ hanging on that cross, his life''s blood ebbing away. He lifts his head to Heaven and he says, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do."
To forgive others you must be willing to pay a price. When Paul said, "I am crucified with Christ," he meant that we must let go of all those things to which we cling. We say yes, I will serve the Lord but only so far. We say yes, I will surrender to him but just so much. These things I''m going to hang onto, this selfish pride, this spirit of vindictiveness, this unforgiving spirit, I''m going to hang onto these things. We must crucify that pride, if we are truly going to be able to forgive. We must be willing to bear in our own spirit and our own body the pain that others inflict upon us. We must bear it without retribution even as Christ bore our transgressions, our sin, our bitterness, our hatred without retribution on the cross.
Forgiveness isn't just putting up with wrong; it isn''t that flippant remark, "Well it doesn't matter." No, it is identifying with another person in her selfishness and guilt, in her vindictiveness and all the mean-spiritedness that she has, identifying with her while realizing that those things are there in your heart as well. It is reaching out to another person with the Good News that God through Jesus Christ forgives him.Forgiveness is outgoing, it is positive, it is creative. It builds bridges of love and understanding toward others rather than creating barriers of hatred and of rejection.
It is only as we acknowledge that precious gift that Christ has given to us that we can find his grace and his power to forgive the heart-wrenching wrongs and the trivial little insults that people bring into life. Our eternal forgiveness does not depend on our prior forgiveness of others. But our forgiveness of others is a testimony to the fact that we have already been forgiven by God. Until we have experienced that forgiveness within us we do not have the power or the desire to reach out and forgive others. But when that experience of freedom and joy and right relationship with God is brought home to our hearts, then we can forgive others.
Jesus told the story of a king whose servant had a great debt against him. This king intended to put the servant in jail, sell everything he had, even his wife and children, and make them slaves that he might pay the debt. The servant beseeched him not to do so and the king forgave all of the debt.
No sooner had the servant turned around than he grabbed another fellow servant and said, "Pay me that trivial debt you owe me." He couldn't do it so he slapped him in jail. The word came back to the king. He was angry and said, "You scoundrel, you scoundrel, I forgave you everything you owed me and yet you would not forgive your fellow servant." He took him and he threw him into jail and he said, "You''ll have to pay to the very last penny." What he owed was beyond many king''s ransoms. There was no way in his lifetime he could ever pay what he owed. Jesus is saying that that''s our state before God. There''s no way we can pay everything we owe. But Christ has done it for us.
Our human nature tries to find a scapegoat, someone or something to blame for the guilt and wrong that we experience in our marriages, in our squabbles with co-workers, with our neighbors and in our relationships with our fellow church members. But we have a choice as Christians. We can follow the ways of this world, we can echo the injustice, the vindictive spirit, the meanness all about us, or we can seek the grace and the love of Christ, his forgiving, merciful and creative love. This alone will give new beginnings to our lives.
Forgiveness is not easy. The cross testifies ever to the fact that it is the most difficult thing in all the world. But the power of the cross in your life, my friends, will bring the reality of forgiveness, glorious forgiveness to you, and the power of the risen Christ in your life will help you to forgive others even as Christ has forgiven you.
You may be holding on to a grudge against another person right now. His cruelty seems beyond forgiveness, but let me show you today that you need to seek to forgive him from your heart, for until you do, it will be a burden to you. You will not know the freedom God wants you to have. God promises the power to forgive others. You do not have control over their response, but you do have control in your response to God. He''ll give you the power to release your burdens, to let them go.
If you''ve never experienced the joy of God''s forgiveness deep in your heart, let me tell you that Jesus stands ready today to give you that forgiveness. He stands ready to come into your heart if you simply humble yourself before him and ask him to come in and give you that joy and assurance of forgiveness that you need to feel free again. Amen.
1. James A. Knight, Conscience and Guilt (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969), pp. 87-88.