Let It Go, Let It Go

The Life Group of which Sharon and I are a part is going through a series entitled The Gospel-Centered Life published by World Harvest Mission.  This has been a challenging and growth-inducing study of how the gospel not only saves us, but is the basis for on-going life change.

Last night was “Getting to the Heart of Forgiveness.”  The assignment was to identify a few people whom we have not forgiven or who we need to more deeply forgive because we have not, in the words of that immortal song from Frozen, “Let it Go.”

It took me a few minutes to identify two people.  What I noticed was that in each of the two cases one of the reasons I was having difficulty releasing them from the hurt to me was that they had never acknowledged how they had hurt me.  They couldn’t see that what they did was hurtful and inappropriate.  As an ENFJ (the same temperament as Jesus) I am wired for reasonableness.  These two people have not been persuaded by my reasonable presentation of their offense that they were ever in the wrong.  If they could see and acknowledge their sins against me it would make it so much easier to forgive them.  But they don’t.  So I have to keep working on my attitude toward them.

The group agreed that these are the hardest people to forgive.  Those who are unwilling or unable to acknowledge that they have wronged us.  Hurt us.  Unless a person is one of those who repeatedly “repents” and then continues to inflict pain, we all agreed that the person who acknowledges their wrong is much easier to forgive than the person who will not admit their sin against us.

By the end of the exercise I was graphically reminded that, as Lewis Smedes writes in his classic work Forgive and Forget, forgiveness is a choice AND a process.  We take the debt on ourselves and pay it for them.  We release them from the wrong they did to us.  (That doesn’t mean, by the way, that we continue to put ourselves in the place of allowing them to keep hurting us.  As Dan Allender writes, “Forgiveness involves a heart that cancels the debt but does not lend new money until repentance occurs.”

The study brings us back to the gospel.  We have been forgiven much more than whatever it is that has been done to us.  If God took the initiative to forgive us our debt against Him, how can we not seek to extend that same grace toward those who have sinned against us.  (Trusting the other person after an egregious offense is a blog for another time.  See the Allender quote above.)  Jesus says in more than one place that we are expected, as God’s forgiven children, to pass that forgiveness along.  Today I choose to let it go.  Again.