The Forgiveness Ladder (Forgiveness IX)

Forgiveness is a steep climb. There is a ladder in the work of forgiveness: forgiveness of others, forgiveness of self, and forgiveness of God. Each level has its own challenge and trial. 

Forgiveness of others is the bulk of the work, as outlined above. Life stings, and we all have people and pains that we need to address and to forgive.

On the next rung, however, we all discover that to come fully into our adoption in God, we need to forgive ourselves. I hesitate to say “forgive yourself,” because the Scripture never talks about forgiving our own selves. But it does talk about refusing to judge ourselves, and this is quite close to what I mean by forgiving ourselves.[1] We must refuse to hold our weakness, our limitations, our humanity, our wounds, and even our failures in contempt. Not because we like them but because we are committed to letting God receive us. Letting God receive us is perhaps the core principle of spiritual life in Jesus. You cannot fully come to God if you are holding yourself in self-hatred and self-contempt. So there is a movement and posture in prayer that sounds like this: “I rejoice in my weakness; how can You be so good as to receive me when I’m so unsorted?”

But you may also discover that it’s not just someone else you need to forgive, or your own self, but something bigger. There may be disappointments that have so rocked your life that the only thing to blame is reality itself. The universe. And behind that, God. The Scripture makes one thing abundantly clear: God can take it.[2]

When I was younger, I worked for a summer in the mountains of North Carolina. It was a stunningly beautiful place in which to be miserably depressed. And I was. One night, I took a walk deep into the woods. I was so frustrated with how down I was and so angry beneath the depression, and my anger finally erupted. I grabbed a huge stick and started hitting an oak tree with it, as hard as I could. If I could watch a video of it now, no doubt it would be almost comical, but at the time it wasn’t funny at all. I was raging, and I blamed God. Then I cursed him. Literally.

The anger coming out was a good thing; anger needs to find its way out. So does lament, as the Scripture repeatedly makes clear. But the cursing? Maybe not so much. Yet God did not smite me. In fact, two months later, a friend was praying for me and got a quizzical look on her face. I could tell she felt embarrassed, but she asked me, “Brandon… did you curse God?”[3] “Yes, I did,” I said, taken aback. Another wonderfully bizarre example of God’s Spirit leading me back onto the path. She led me through a prayer of repentance, not for the anger but for hanging it on God and cursing Him. 

I learned something then: not only wasn’t God not to blame, but He can take all of the good, bad, and ugly that lives within me. He can take my lament and my sorrow. In fact, He is with me in it. That is what we will discover when we forgive: that God the All-Vulnerable has already been suffering with us. He is not a distant deity watching indifferently from afar. He has been in the dirt with you, suffering with you the whole time.[4]

If we only relate to God as the All-Powerful, we are going to be very confused by life, and probably very angry. It’s only when you discover that God is also the All-Vulnerable that the spiritual journey goes from black-and-white into color. In many ways, the entire goal of spiritual life is to discover that God is not just transcendent (out there) but immanent (right here). We can overemphasize either reality and get out of balance, but in this Both-And—God All-Powerful, God All- Vulnerable—we find a posture of both awestruck wonder and heartfelt intimacy before God, bound together by worship and love. When we come to know God the immanent, the All-Vulnerable, we discover that God was crucified long before Jesus hung on a tree. God has made Himself vulnerable to suffer with us, to be with us, long before we knew it. Until we see and experience this reality, we continually hit roadblocks in our own hearts, unable to deeply connect with the Divine. On the other hand, when life strips us (as it inevitably will), we can, like Jesus, experience the consolation that comes from being comforted by God—what Paul called “the fellowship of his suffering.”[5] Forgiveness, too, will lead us into this fellowship. It is a stripping away of outer self so that our inmost and truest self can be held by God. 

For all of these readings in one place, order my book 'Learning to Live and Love Like Jesus.'

[1] See I Corinthians 4:3. “Refusing to judge ourselves” has nothing to do with excusing or ignoring bad behavior. Obviously, as we discussed in ‘Chapter 6: Confession and Repentance,’ there is no freedom for us if we don’t take responsibility for our actions and label good “good” and bad “bad.” Rather, refusing to judge is about a posture of remaining open and not declaring “case closed,” because God Himself remains open. We must remain open to the endless possibilities available in God. Further, the Scripture invites us out of thinking that we are powerful enough to transform our own selves on our own terms, apart from God, which belief often leads to an exacting self-contempt and self-hatred. Refusing to judge ourselves simply means doing our best while embracing our limits, confessing that we aren’t God and that we can’t get everything right, learning to laugh at ourselves, and, when we miss it, going again with proper remorse but without undue lament (another both-and), knowing that it’s God who maintains our relationships with Him and not the other way around. 

[2] Remember that a large portion of Scripture is people wrestling with God’s seeming absence or with their own confusion about God. Spend some time in the Psalms, in Job, in Lamentations, for starters. Think of Jesus’ own prayer in Matthew 27:46: “God, why have you abandoned me?” The Scripture commissions us to honestly voice and grieve our pain, because this—rather than withholding it—is actually a sign of trusting God and moving toward Him. There is nothing spiritual about refusing to lament and grieve. 

[3] A clear example of what the Scripture calls “a word of knowledge.” See 1 Corinthians 12:8.

[4] A reality the Prophet Isaiah points us to: “In all [His people’s] suffering He, too, suffered.” (Isaiah 63:9)

[5] Philippians 3:10.

The Practice of Forgiveness (Forgiveness VIII)

How, then, do we practice forgiveness? Practice may be the perfect word, because we may have to “remove our hands” time and again, until it becomes a habit in our souls. It’s rare and perhaps miraculous when forgiveness is one-and-done, especially if the betrayal cut deeply. More often, forgiveness is a dedicated practice of repetition as we continually submit our mind and emotions to our spirit, making a choice to forgive.[1] It’s no accident that in the Lord’s Prayer—Jesus’ template for daily prayer—the focal point of our petitions is, “Lord, forgive my sins, just as I forgive others.”[2]

I make the Lord’s Prayer a daily practice of prayer. After a time of quiet breathing, sitting in the place beyond words where I seek to empty myself before God, I begin to engage language and prayer through the prayer Jesus gave us.[3] I pause with each phrase, savoring the thought and seeking to follow the Spirit’s leading—asking should I stay here for a bit? If so, I add my own words to, “Let your will be done” or “Deliver me from evil,” or whatever phrase gives me pause. Sometimes each of the phrases does. And when I come to “forgive my sins as I forgive others,” I think through whom I need to forgive and what offense I need to release. I simply say, “I forgive…” and name them by name. Sometimes the same name (or names) comes up for a week or month at a time. Sometimes it comes up for longer. Sometimes, thank God, I find I no longer need to release forgiveness over a specific person, for something has become complete in my soul. There is no formula in following the Spirit, there is only a willingness to be open, to explore, and to respond. By choosing to forgive each day, we create space for the Holy Spirit within us. And if we create that space, He will transform us.

There is a flip side to forgiving, too, which is a willingness to confess our own faults, failures, and weaknesses.[4] So not only do I spend time identifying, by name, the people I need to forgive, I also bring to mind all the ways I need to be forgiven by others, and how I need to be forgiven and made whole by God. I give thanks for the mercy of God, who includes me when I am still unsorted. And I search and examine my conscience to see if there’s anyone to whom I need to go and ask forgiveness, remembering that faith is an action, not a concept. Faith always takes steps for the sake of love. If I find something that burns in my conscience, I commit to seek reconciliation as soon as possible. 

Indeed, the flip side of choosing to forgive is choosing to confess. We are called to be quick to forgive (or at least, quick to choose to forgive, no matter how long the process takes), and also quick to confess. We are also called to be quick to acknowledge our failures and to ask for forgiveness. This, too, is humbling, and it can be difficult. Asking forgiveness is quite different than saying “I’m sorry” or “I apologize.” The literal definition of “an apology” is “a defense.” Asking forgiveness, rather, is about dropping our defenses. “Will you forgive me?” shifts the focus from me and my sorrow and onto you and your pain, which is the shift that love always makes. And just as Jesus makes the work of forgiving others urgent and critical, so he makes the work of seeking forgiveness an imperative. He says, for example, that if we become aware of someone we have offended, we should leave even our most pious acts of worship and instead go to that person right away.[5]When was the last time you left a church service because you realized you had wronged someone and needed to make it right? 

All of this is challenging, which is why following Jesus is not for the faint of heart. But forgiving others (and seeking forgiveness) is part of how we allow ourselves to be stripped, so that we can be comforted by God. If we are not willing to be emptied, we cannot be filled. There is a death in the letting go that forgiveness demands. There is always death, of a sort, in surrender. No one likes to lose the mental and emotional narrative that they’ve been telling. When we’ve been wronged, it’s oddly comforting to hold onto the offense because it allows us to focus on ourselves. To forgive can feel like some precious part of us is being ripped away. We can feel a bit like Gollum dropping the One Ring, feeling the loss of something that has come to feel like a piece of ourselves. But Jesus calls us into this suffering, which is the only way out of our old, tired narratives and into God’s bigger story of wholeness and redemption. Spiritual practices allow us to enter preemptively into suffering rather than just letting suffering blindside us in life. Forgiveness is a special sort of “denying ourselves” and “picking up our cross,” but it’s a suffering that can lead us into the life of God.[6]

For all of these readings in one place, order my book 'Learning to Live and Love Like Jesus.'

[1] Again, see Romans 8 where Paul discusses the choice to live by the Spirit of God rather than by “the flesh.”

[2] Matthew 6:9-15. Notice that the prayer ends in verse 13 and then Jesus, in v 14-15, immediately returns to the matter of forgiveness. 

[3] See “A Practical Order for Daily Prayer” in ‘Chapter 12, The Grounded Life: Prayer.’

[4] See ‘Chapter 6: Confession and Repentance.’

[5] Matthew 5:23-24.

[6] Luke 9:23.

Free Water (Forgiveness VII)

The stakes around forgiveness are high, as Jesus makes clear time and again. Our very souls hang in the balance. One of Jesus’ hardest sayings about forgiveness comes in Matthew 6:15: “…if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins.”[1]

How on earth do we make sense of such a statement? We know God is good and loving and that He wants our freedom. He certainly wants to forgive our sins and bring us into wholeness. So is our own forgiveness and right relationship before God dependent on something that we do, or that we refuse to do? How does that square with our understanding that it’s by God’s grace alone that we are brought into right relationship? 

Perhaps an image will help us: picture a water hose, filled with water. The water is the mercy and life of God, already given to us. There’s nothing we can do to earn it; God pours His life over us because He loves us. But at the end of the hose, there’s a release valve holding the water back. We have a choice to make. We can open the valve to release the water, or we can leave it closed. Jesus’ teaching on forgiveness is that by forgiving, we open the valve. And by refusing to forgive, we close the valve and ensure that the grass all around us will wither. Jesus speaks in sobering and provocative terms in order to get our attention. If we don’t forgive, we won’t experience the abundance of God.

We experience God's abundance as the sweetness of our adoption and as the joy of living in touch with our true selves. It’s always our false selves, our sinful self-obsessions (what Paul calls our “flesh”), that refuse to forgive and that remain mired in offense and bitterness. Our true selves are very difficult to offend, because when you are aware of being held by God, it’s the most natural thing in the world to forgive. When there’s plenty of water, it’s not hard to be generous with it. Indeed, in the process of forgiveness, the waters of God knock away the mud that covers our true selves, which have been adopted by Jesus, and we discover the endless fountains of “living water” in God.[2]

This has nothing to do with earning the grace of God. However, we do participate with Him in bringing about His Reign, even in our own selves. We are responsible for posturing ourselves to receive the freely-given water. 

For all of these readings in one place, order my book 'Learning to Live and Love Like Jesus.'

[1] Cf. Mark 11:26 and Luke 6:37. 

[2] John 7:37-39. See also John 4:1-42.