The way I see it, we don’t forgive in order to be nice, to do what we should, to be good Christians, or even to be spiritual. We forgive so as to set ourselves free. Forgiveness helps us to see beyond our masks to who we truly are. It shows us that who we really are has nothing to do with what happened to us in the past.
— Robert Holden, Loveability, p. 182
I grew up with angry and resentful people and have struggled my whole career to help thousands of resentful and angry clients achieve a better life. The hardest truth for any of them to grasp is the difference between feeling powerful and being powerful. Most anger and resentment are attempts to feel powerful at the cost of being powerful.
Steven Stosny, PhD, Soar Above, p. 45
It is true that Jesus came, in delivering us from our sins, to deliver us also from the painful consequences of our sins. But these consequences exist by the one law of the universe, the true will of God. When that will is broken, suffering is inevitable.
But in the perfection of God’s creation, the result of that suffering is curative. The pain works toward the healing of the breach.
The Lord never came to deliver men from the consequences of their sins while those sins yet remained. That would be to cast out the window the medicine of cure while still the man lay sick. Yet, feeling nothing of the dread hatefulness of their sin, men have constantly taken this word that the Lord came to deliver us from our sins to mean that he came to save them from the punishment of their sins.
This idea has terribly corrupted the preaching of the Gospel. The message of the Good News has not been truly communicated. Unable to believe in the forgiveness of their Father in heaven, imagining him not at liberty to forgive, or incapable of forgiving forthright; not really believing him God who is fully our Savior, but a God bound — either in his own nature or by a law above him and compulsory upon him — to exact some recompense or satisfaction for sin, a multitude of religious teachers have taught their fellow men that Jesus came to bear our punishment and save us from hell. But in that they have misrepresented his true mission.
The mission of Jesus was from the same source and with the same object as the punishment of our sins. He came to do more than take the punishment for our sins. He came as well to set us free from our sin.
No man is safe from hell until he is free from his sin. But a man to whom his sins are a burden, while he may indeed sometimes feel as if he were in hell, will soon have forgotten that he ever had any other hell to think of than that of his sinful condition. For to him his sin is hell. He would go to the other hell to be free of it. Free of his sin, hell itself would be endurable to him.
For hell is God’s and not the Devil’s. Hell is on the side of God and man, to free the child of God from the corruption of death. Not one soul will ever be redeemed from hell but by being saved from his sin, from the evil in him. If hell be needful to save him, hell will blaze, and the worm will writhe and bite, until he takes refuge in the will of the Father. “Salvation from hell” is salvation as conceived by such to whom hell, and not the evil of the sin, is the terror.
— George MacDonald, The Hope of the Gospel, “Salvation From Sin,” quoted in Discovering the Character of God, edited by Michael Phillips, p. 39-40.
Grievances don’t make you happy: Sometimes we hold on to grievances because we are afraid that our past was our best chance for happiness. However, you can’t continue to carry a grievance and hope to be happy. To be truly happy, you have to be willing to make love more important than your grievances, your ego, and your past. There comes a time, then when you have to accept that every grievance has an expiration date. By being willing to forgive, you come to see that there is life after a grievance.
— Robert Holden, Loveability, p. 182
It often helps to explain that forgiveness is not saying it didn’t matter; it is not saying we simply choose to overlook the offense. Forgiveness is saying the cross is enough — we require no further payment than Jesus paid. Forgiveness is releasing the person to God for him to deal with.
— John Eldredge, Moving Mountains, p. 195
The truest way to give up being a victim is to give up our need for revenge. One of the most hidden dynamics in any victim situation is the search for revenge. We are in a power struggle where the way to get back at someone is to hurt ourselves. As children, when we did not get what we wanted, we sometimes threw tantrums and hurt ourselves. We felt rejected, so we did something to get revenge.
— Chuck Spezzano, If It Hurts, It Isn’t Love, p. 95
The purpose of your life is not to carry a grievance. With forgiveness, you can grieve and then ask love to help you use the past to create a future that moves in the direction of love.
— Robert Holden, Loveability, p. 182
Guilt is a place where we have made a monument to a mistake and left the path of life to worship at this monument. It has us withdraw and then withholds us from the people we love. We may feel we have made a mistake in relation to our partner and now feel guilty about it, but guilt not only reinforces the mistake, it starves our partner of the very love and nurturing they need. Forgiving ourselves cuts through the guilt and allows us to give the love and nurturing. Guilt keeps us stuck like the great superglue of life; the primary reason for our guilt is so we don’t have to move forward and face the next step. Our willingness to allow the next step to emerge cuts through fear in much the same way that forgiveness cuts through guilt.
— Chuck Spezzano, If It Hurts, It Isn’t Love, p. 54
Believe not that there is a limit, an end, to God’s forgiveness, and his redeeming love and power. Believe it not, lest you justify your unforgiving heart and thus not be forgiven yourself, but go down with those your brothers to the torment, from where, if God were not better than that phantom many call God, you and the rest of them should never come out, but whence assuredly you shall come out when you have paid the uttermost farthing. Out you shall come when you have learned of God in hell what you refused to learn of him upon the gentle-toned earth, when you have learned what the sunshine and the rain could not teach you, nor the sweet compunctions of the seasons, nor the stately visits of the morning and eventide, nor the human face divine, nor the word that was nigh thee in your heart and in your mouth — the story of him who was mighty to save, because he was perfect in love.
O Father, thou art All-in-all, perfect beyond the longing of thy children, and we are all and altogether thine. Thou wilt make us pure and loving and free. We shall stand fearless in thy presence, because perfect in thy love. Then shall thy children be of good cheer, infinite in the love of each other, and eternal in thy love.
— George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, First Series, “Love Thine Enemy,” quoted in Knowing the Heart of God, p. 349
Long enshrined traditions around communion aside, there are always folks who fancy themselves bouncers to the heavenly banquet, charged with keeping the wrong people away from the table and out of the church. Evangelicalism in particular has seen a resurgence in border patrol Christianity in recent years, as alliances and coalitions formed around shared theological distinctives elevate secondary issues to primary ones and declare anyone who fails to conform to their strict set of beliefs and behaviors unfit for Christian fellowship. Committed to purifying the church of every errant thought, difference of opinion, or variation in practice, these self-appointed gatekeepers tie up heavy loads of legalistic rules and place them on weary people’s shoulders. They strain out the gnats in everyone else’s theology while swallowing their own camel-sized inconsistencies. They slam the door of the kingdom in people’s faces and tell them to come back when they are sober, back on their feet, Republican, Reformed, doubtless, submissive, straight.
But the gospel doesn’t need a coalition devoted to keeping the wrong people out. It needs a family of sinners, saved by grace, committed to tearing down the walls, throwing open the doors, and shouting, “Welcome! There’s bread and wine. Come eat with us and talk.” This isn’t a kingdom for the worthy; it’s a kingdom for the hungry.
— Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday, p. 149