Forgiveness and Spiritual Health

Recently I told a church in the beginning stages of seeking a new pastor becoming a healthy family of faith depended upon their ability to ask for forgiveness from and give forgiveness to each other. There could be no spiritual health in the congregation until everyone was willing to admit their own sins and be ready to forgive the faults in others.

This is not a significantly troubled church to my knowledge. They have no reason to suspect an uprising or a split over a particular issue. They have strong leadership among their membership, and there is a sense of unity in the congregation. They have no church fight from which to repent.

The big picture of the church’s health was not my focus. It was the heart of each individual member. This was my focus and has to be the focus of those members if they are to be spiritually prepared for their new pastor. They needed to be able to look at each other on a Sunday morning during a time of worship and say, “You are my brother and sister. I am not perfect. You are not perfect. Let us celebrate God’s forgiveness so freely given.”

Holding grudges destroys families, friendships, and churches. Nursing emotional wounds prevents them from healing and builds barriers against restored relationships. In the end the only person who loses is the one who refuses to forgive.

Jesus took the concept of forgiveness beyond human relationships. He pointed to its impact upon our relationship with God and our eternal destiny.

Mat 6:14-15 For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

How we maintain our relationships with others has a direct bearing upon our relationship with God. As surely as we cannot separate our love of God from our love for our neighbors (Matthew 22:34-40), so we cannot separate our willingness to forgive our neighbor from our desire to be forgiven by God.

If I forgive you, then I am saying I choose to see you through a different set of eyes than if I refused to forgive you. In forgiveness I remove all thought of personal debt. I wipe the slate clean of emotional or physical payment. I see a common basis for our relationship. What I felt had been a wrong against me becomes a memory that no longer can impact our relationship.

The forgiveness can stem directly from a love which says no matter what you do, I love you too much to remember the wrong you did to me or the pain you caused me. Compared to my love for you, anything you do is inconsequential. Even your repentance is not necessary for me to forgive you and seek to restore what we had lost. You are too important to me to allow anything you do to keep me from forgiving you.

That forgiveness only has meaning if it is received. Jesus hung on the cross and spoke words meant for us all.

Luk 23:34 And Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

He offered a forgiveness to all, but it only had effect on recipients as it was accepted. To be forgiven means nothing if we refuse to acknowledge it and receive it. When we refuse to forgive others we are saying we are good enough to receive God’s forgiveness, but someone else is not good enough to receive forgiveness from us. That automatically builds a wall between God’s forgiveness and us.

When walls go up, relationships are strained or broken. A church cannot be healthy where such tension exists. Forgiveness must be offered and it must be received. Grudges and a right to revenge must be rejected. Only as we forgive and willingly receive forgiveness do we move toward spiritual health in a church and in our own lives.

Evil Is Real

I plead ignorance, thankfully, as to the history of evil among mankind. The story of the first man and woman deciding to disobey God (Genesis 3) is good enough for me to speak of when evil came into our midst. Since then we are left with the simple statement occurring at the end of the book of Judges (Judges 21:25) to explain why things have turned out the way they have. Choosing what is right and wrong has been in the hands of the individual from the beginning.

All the blogs, all the news articles and commentaries, and all the psychological profiles created in the last few days will not remove the grief, the agony, the emptiness, the anger, and the desire for revenge felt by the families of Newtown, Connecticut. All of our analyzing and hypothesizing will not bring one single innocent life back to the loving arms of its family. This terrible tragedy becomes another statistic in the history of evil’s destructive power.

Most of us remember all too well the Virginia Tech Massacre. I had never heard of the Bath School Disaster in the Bath Township of Michigan before now. Yet it remains the worst act of school violence in American history when 38 school children and four adults were killed by a man filled with rage against his community. Evil knows no bounds.

In the early American West, laws were established to stop horse and cattle rustling. The penalty was often death by hanging. Yet people continued to steal horses and cattle. Today 33 states have the death penalty (deathpenaltyinfo.org). Nine out of the top ten cities recording the highest rate of violent crimes in our country exist in those states (Forbes Magazine). The threat of violence rarely prevents violence.

Passing more laws may create a climate in which a more violent and authoritarian response to crime is permitted by the citizenry, but more laws rarely reduce evil in a society. In our Judea-Christian history beginning with the start of human relationships, God’s forbiddance to touch the Tree of Knowledge did not keep the first man and woman from choosing to follow their own desires. The Ten Commandments and accompanying clarifications (Exodus-Deuteronomy) did not stop the Israelites from following another system of morality.

As I grew up in rural Kentucky, our school recited the pledge to the American flag, read the Bible, and had a prayer each day. That did not eliminate the need for our principal to sit on the front steps of the school each Halloween with a shotgun in his hand to prevent local “citizens” from coming by and breaking out the windows with rocks and guns. The façade of school morality does not stop school violence.

The Old Testament reveals a progression of God’s efforts to bring his wayward people into an understanding of his nature and will. The Ten Commandments are recorded on tablets of stone (Exodus 20, 32, 34). In Jeremiah 31 the prophet tells the people the law would no longer be external, but it would be written on their hearts as the original commandments were carved in stone. The prophet Ezekiel says God will remove the stony heart and replace it with a heart of flesh made alive by his Spirit (Ezekiel 36).

This thought is reemphasized in the New Testament in the Person of Jesus Christ, Emmanuel-God with us, as he tells his disciples just before his death (John 14) he would not leave them alone. In the Person of the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, he would live within them. He would guide them as they sought to fulfill the greatest law of all, the law of love.

Laws, an armed citizenry, prayer and Bible reading in schools will not stop evil. Evil is sin. We are all guilty of sin (Romans 3:23). The only answer is the power of Jesus Christ within us (Romans 6:23) and our willingness to forgive those who sin against us. Perhaps the final answer to evil in our world is contained in one of those last statements of Christ from the cross, “Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they are doing.” Luke 23:34