Our Need To Forgive

It is very easy with conflict in relationships to grow bitter in heart.  And it is easy to see how our hearts can be changed by it.  Some of us have grown up in families where there was deep conflict.  Unresolved conflict will always change us into the very people we don’t want to be.  Instead of happiness and joy, conflict can shape us into people who become bitter.     

When we enter life as children, we don’t start that way.  We start out in life with youthful enthusiasm and a heart that is not weighed down by the worries of this world.  As children, we are quick to forgive and accept things as they are.   But slowly, as conflict and difficulty enter, the heart can become wounded by all the nonsense life throws at us…   

God’s way forward is that we first go to Him for forgiveness.  That is one of the first reasons Jesus came to earth, to go to the cross, and shed His blood so that you and I may be forgiven before God when we put our faith in Him.  But it doesn’t stop there.   God wants to do a new work in our lives and help us to grow in humility and grace and loving relationships with others.  But there are things that can get in the way of how God wants to change us.  One of the greatest sins that can get in the way to our growth in the Lord is bitterness and grudges against others.    

Listen to how the book of Colossians exhorts us when it comes to forgiveness and reconciliation…  Colossians 3:12-15, “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones… compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.”

When Jesus taught us how to pray He gave us the Our Father.  Most of us have it memorized by heart.  In the middle of that prayer we are invited by God to pray this way, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  (Matt 6:12)    When the Apostle Paul asked Jesus how many times we ought to forgive another, Jesus told him seventy times seven, or an innumerable number. (Matt 18:21-22)

God invites us to lead a life of forgiveness because we have first been forgiven.  God tells us these things so that we may be free from the burden of a bitter heart and live a life of love.  If we are unwilling to forgive, this only shows that our hearts are rooted in pride and a desire to seek justice on our own terms.  If we held ourselves to that same standard with God we would not be able to have a relationship with Him.

But God wants us to be free.  And the way towards freedom is lined with a heart that is willing to forgive those who trespass against us and clothe ourselves with humility and remember that because we are forgiven but God, we ought to always forgive.  It takes courage to live that way.  But it is the way of freedom.