This is a repeat-and-modify of an old devotion because I felt prompted to pick up this thought again.
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"This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart." Matthew18:35
Jesus told a parable about a slave who was pardoned from a huge debt he owed his master. Having been forgiven he went and prosecuted a fellow slave who owed him a small debt. Their friends were appalled at his behaviour and told the master who immediately had the hard-hearted servant thrown into prison. Our verse is Jesus' summation of the story.
Forgiveness is a very difficult relational skill. We talk about "forgive and forget" and this is where the trouble comes in! To make me forget a hurtful thing that someone has done, you would have to hit me on the head with a hammer to give me amnesia!
People think that forgiving is a once-off process and that we will then magically forget and life will go on. The reality about forgiveness is that it is a _process_. We keep choosing to forgive until we can remember without pain.
When someone we love and trust hurts us, we struggle to come to terms with that. Sometimes they know that they have hurt us and sometimes they don't. Sometimes they are sorry for what they have done, sometimes they are not.
Choosing to forgive is choosing to let go of the feelings of pain, disappointment and betrayal that someone's actions have caused us. Every time someone's failure comes up like bile in my throat I choose to forgive. I can't forget, but I can choose to let go, again and again and again until those failures don't have power over me anymore. I keep choosing to pardon someone because I have been pardoned and I know what it is like to have been set free by God!
The interesting thing about unforgiveness is that it mostly bites the one who won't forgive, and not the one who isn't forgiven. Very often the people we are angry with don't even know it!
The Reality is that people fail. You can go through life picking at the scabs that people's failures have caused you and infection, sepsis and big horrible scars will be the result, or you can choose to dress those wounds with daily applications of the ointment of forgiveness until the wounds are healed and only small scars remain.
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Theo Groeneveld theo@emmanuel.org.za
You can see past EmmDevs at http://emmdev.blogspot.com/
