Necessary for Healing

Forgiveness, Healing, Life, Relationships 0

Forgiveness can wrap up the grief, but it does not prevent the inevitable and necessary suffering.  When there is a serious injury or loss, there is no way to avoid pain.  If you want to have a satisfactory future, you will need to feel the loss and then let go of the hurt it has caused you.  You need to forgive.

Even if you decide to divorce after a betrayal, you will still need to forgive….  When you forgive, you are able to be at peace even though rejection, disloyalty, and dishonesty have been a part of your life.

Your best chance for successful future relationships and overall happiness is to forgive your former partner.  Forgiveness is not a substitute for grief, nor does it preclude the pain caused by your partner’s cheating.  But it does gently allow your grief to ebb so that you can move on and live a successful life.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 21

An Essential Skill in a Successful Marriage

Forgiveness, Marriage 0

Being able to remain calm when your wishes are unfulfilled is an essential skill in a successful marriage.  If you are honest with yourself, you will agree that not getting exactly what you want from your partner is a major challenge in even a good relationship.  One reason this happens is that we experience such minor disappointments on a regular basis.  Our partners do things against our wishes every day, and even if they do what we want sometimes, it is not exactly the way we wanted.  Learning how to cope with this successfully is essential….

Forgiving your partner does not mean you have to accept everything your lover does.  It simply means you can contentedly live with your lover without getting upset every time he or she chooses to ignore your wishes.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 16-17

Forgiveness as Acceptance

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The ability to remain at peace when you do not get what you want is forgiveness….

When you want something different from what you actually get, you are always in a position of struggle.  That struggle often shows up as anger or despair or a sense of helplessness.  The good news is that you can get over those negative emotional reactions and learn to be at peace….

Whether or not you remain at peace is mostly up to you.  Forgiveness contains the understanding that another person’s action, no matter how awful, does not compel you to be endlessly miserable, angry, or emotionally distraught.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 14-15

An Essential Ingredient

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Think about it.  The centrality of commitment in relationships is expressed through the marriage vows, which ask us to love our partners through richer and poorer, in sickness and in health, and for better and for worse until death.  That means that we promise to love them when they are not doing well, when they have failed, when life is not exactly turning out as hoped, or when we’re going through a financial reversal.  What I see in the marriage vows is a basic prescription:  if we want our relationships to last, we better be prepared to forgive.  The vows make it clear that over the life of a marriage we will experience difficulty and pain and that it is our responsibility to stay connected to our partners.  How could we possibly do this without forgiveness?  What other form of healing would clean the slate and give us fresh eyes and an open heart?

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 4

Transformed Sinners

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We do know this — any offender who is restored by God’s grace is not simply returned to where he was before it all took place.  Through the Lord’s great mercy, guilty sinners can be declared guilt-free and restored to lives of greater fruitfulness than they ever dreamed possible.

— Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Choosing Forgiveness, p. 111

Working Together for Good

Forgiveness, God, Healing, Life, Trials 0

If you’re a child of God, the ordeal you’re undergoing, however wrong or unfair or heartless it may be or may have been, in His providence and skillful hands will be used to take you somewhere good — deeper into His heart, to a place of greater dependence and trust, more perfectly refined into the likeness of Christ.

— Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Choosing Forgiveness, p. 107

Forgiveness brings Peace.

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Even when you can’t see the results — though the situation may not clear up entirely or get any better at all — you can still know that you’ve done what God has required of you.  You can continue to forgive as His grace and love flow through you.  And you can walk in peace — His peace.

— Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Choosing Forgiveness, p. 100

Justice is God’s

Forgiveness, God 0

We sometimes feel that, if we forgive someone, justice will not be served.  They’ll get off scot-free.  We’ll be doing little more than giving them permission to do wrong again, seeing how easily we let them get away with it this time.

From a human perspective, this makes sense.  But our minds need to be renewed to think God’s way.  According to God’s Word, wrongdoers will get their just due.  But we’re not the ones responsible to mete out the penalty….

Letting the offender off your hook doesn’t mean he’s off God’s hook.  Forgiveness releases the accused from your custody and turns him over to God — the righteous Judge — the one and only One who is both able and responsible for meting out justice.

And so what feels like the height of unfairness, what seems to be nothing more than giving our offender the pass, actually becomes for us a step of freedom….

But listen to Joseph’s response to his distraught brothers:  “Don’t be afraid.  Am I in the place of God?” (Genesis 50:19 NIV).

What wise, humble words!  Am I in the place of God?  Is it my job to make you pay for what you’ve done?  Do I really want the added burden of this after all I’ve been through already?  Isn’t it foolish to think that revenge could be as sweet as advertised — sweet enough to make up for the pain of all these years?

— Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Choosing Forgiveness, p. 92-94

Forgiveness from Christ

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While forgiveness is indeed costly, it is not beyond the means of those who have Christ’s life flowing within them.  When God tells us to love our enemies, He also gives us the love to go along with the command.

Yes, you can do this… because He can do this….

And so because He has forgiven us — and because of His boundless life which now indwells us — what offense is too great for us to forgive?

— Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Choosing Forgiveness, p. 90-92

A Choice

Forgiveness, Healing 0

When we get hurt, no matter how serious the offense or how deep the wound, God has grace available to help us deal with the offense and forgive the offender.  At that point, we have one of two choices:  We can acknowledge our need and humbly reach out to Him for His grace to forgive and release the offender.  Or we can resist Him, fail to receive His grace, and hold on to the hurt.

— Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Choosing Forgiveness, p. 75