In order to understand how forgiveness sets us free, We must recognize the trap that we are in.  Forgiving another is not a rigid expectation of anger management; it is a divine healing.

When someone sins against you, the primary response, the first emotion, is not anger, it is pain or fear, or some combination of the two.  Anger is always a secondary emotion, like a scab that grows over our pain.  Think about pain and fear for a moment.  When you strike your thumb with a hammer (pain) or someone jumps from behind a door to startle you (fear)  your response is not to melt in the agony of the moment but to immediately respond with anger.  The words that come from our mouth after the hammer blow are not about pain, they are expletives expressing the immediate and secondary emotion of anger.

Our anger comes without thought or intentional choice, it is an instinctive response.  This is one of many examples of how our instincts do not always tell us the truth. Our instinct quickly convinces us that anger will do for us two things that anger was never designed to achieve.

We believe anger will bring justice to the life of the one who offended us, and healing to the pain this offender caused.    While the Bible makes it clear in James chapter one (v.20) that the anger of man cannot achieve the righteousness of God, our instincts have yet to be enlightened. Because of this we allow our anger to operate, hoping it will balance the scale of justice and relieve us from the pain we bear, or the fear we carry.

When that well-meaning counselor tells us to forgive, we try to deal with the anger but not with the roots of the anger, our primary experience of pain and fear.

Now that we have a sense of the trap we are in when another person sins against us, let us examine how true forgiveness, the work of God through us, restores our soul and frees us at the roots of our anger.  Tomorrow’s post will tell you the two parts of forgiveness and how to find relief in the cross from the painful experiences inflicted on us.

I wish Jesus would have been more careful with some of His words.  The irony is, I think He knew exactly what He was doing.  Sometimes His language makes us wrestle with our picture of God. Listen to this.

For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.  But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.
Matthew 6:14-15

Makes God seem kind of small and snippy doesn’t it?  “If you don’t I’m not going to either!”

If we do not expand our understanding, our perspective will bring God down to our level, making Him seem small minded and argumentative.  Not only will this be deceiving, it is very bad for our experience.

Here are two things we must understand to maintain an accurate picture of God in the face of this, and several other verses.

First, forgiveness is an act of God which we enter into when we choose to forgive.  You will see as these posts continue, forgiveness was accomplished by God, through Jesus on the cross.  We access the power of His act, when we use our will to forgive.

Second, Forgiveness came at a great price. We lose sight of this reality when we choose to not forgive.  The parable in Matthew 18 where the servant chooses not to forgive a little after being forgiven a great deal illustrates this.  Jesus even states that God will turn us over for torment when we don’t forgive.

God designed reality in such a way that when we choose not to allow His nature to work in us, it will be difficult, even painful for us.   This is not punishment, this is assistance.

Tomorrow we will begin to describe the healing choice of forgiveness.

So it happens.  The fallen-ness of our world does it’s work, and someone, somewhere hurts you. The assault begins to try to prevent you from allowing the Nature of your Creator and Redeemer to flow through you.  Then you go to a pastor or christian counselor and they say the dreaded words.  “You have to forgive…”

So we either begin to resist, or try to comply.  Resistance comes from a variety of misunderstandings, and if compliance comes without understanding we may try to forgive and wonder why we still start to twitch when we see “that woman” at the grocery store.

I would like to give a clear description and process to help you receive and enjoy the gift of forgiveness. But before I do that, I need to address a few misconceptions.  Below are five things that forgiveness is not.

Forgiveness is not:

Denial: Denial is the demonstration of this most unusual human trait: We can lie to ourselves and actually believe it. Denial is not just minimizing a thing, it is when people actually believe their own deception. I heard one radio guest say that denial is an acronym. Dont Even No I Am Lyin’  Forgiveness is not lying to ourself about the offense or the intensity of the pain we feel.

Repression: Repression is when we swallow our outward responses and bury them deeper in our soul or body.  We take the pain we feel outwardly and push it down out of sight, and out of mind.  All we have done is taken pain from our emotions and pressed it into our physiology.  The most common issue we find when we pray for those with physical ailments is that they have harbored ongoing resentment, and often true forgiveness allows them to let go of the roots of anger and ultimately receive healing for a number of conditions. Forgiveness is not when we press down our pain because we think God doesn’t want us to show anger.

Letting the Offender off the Hook: One of the greatest obstacles to people making the difficult choice to forgive is the fear that the offender will simply get away with their offense if we forgive.  When we forgive we do not give up on justice, we give over the working of justice to God Himself.  Though it is true that when we forgive, we turn the offender over to God for His version of Justice, this should not be our motive for for forgiving.  When we forgive someone SO THAT God will bring justice to them, this s not forgiveness, we just hired a hit man.  Forgiveness does not let the offender off the hook, it places them on God’s hook.  Justice is not an eye for and eye or a tooth for a tooth, that just leads to a lot of blind toothless people. Justice is when wrong things are made right.

Forgetting: Forgiveness is not forgetting or pretending that the offense never happened.  It is not the willingness to approach again the person who has wronged us.  We may need to set boundaries and maintain safe distance.  Wisdom demands that we acknowledge truth and danger. Forgiveness simply says we relate to the person out of love not out of resentment. Boundaries are a legitimate form of love.

Being a Doormat: Confrontation is also a legitimate form of love.  We reguarly see God in the Old Testament, and Jesus in the New Testament have confrontations in order to right things that are wrong.  Forgiveness is not simply allowing unrighteousness to persist, it is the assurance that our confrontations can issue forth from love not rage.

Once we understand what forgiveness is not, we will hopefully find it easier to enter into what forgiveness is.  Stay tuned.

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God’s job description is to cover the entire creation with His nature.  His chosen strategy is you and I.  By placing His nature in us and allowing us to re-present Him in the geography we inhabit, God is fulfilling His mission, and expressing His love to us simultaneously.

I start here with every stronghold I address because we must know that our freedom is first about the Kingdom of God, and second, about us.  We benefit from God being committed to His job description, in the same way we benefit from the sun being at the center of the Solar System.  Our freedom is an outgrowth of God’s absolute commitment to His mission. If He actually put us first, the whole system would implode.  Putting us second is the most loving and generous thing God can do for us.  His first priority is Being Himself, the only thing that could ever actually allow us to be ourselves.

Having set this foundation in place, it is important then to recognize that the God whose nature we carry does not love conditionally, and His emotions are not subject to anyone else’s behavior.  If they were, He would cease to be God.  No one can make God cease being Love. In the face of evil, injustice and pain, God stays absolutely true to His nature.

Forgiveness, our forgiveness of those who have wronged us, is not some requirement we face in order to fulfill a mandate to be good christians.  Forgiveness is God’s gift to us to allow us to be fully ourselves (repositories of His Nature) in the face of evil, injustice and pain. Forgiveness is a gift that God gives us so that we might be able to be free, right now, in the middle of this still fallen world.  It is a gift that allows us to continue to love and not have our well-being be subject to anyone else’s behavior.

The greatest obstacles to our receiving and using this gift are our misperceptions about forgiveness; what it is and what it is not.  Over the next several posts, I want to help us all tap into one of the greatest gifts that God has given us.  I hope you want this too.