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Originally Posted by aqua@home I know what I believe forgiveness to be, but what do you believe it is?
How do you forgive and is it possible to forget?
If you have any answer or input to any of these questions, I would really appreciate it.  |
Forgiveness is when you cancel the debt created by the offence and treat the person who has offended you as if there had been no offence.
Forgetting is another matter because it has to do with memory and not with will. To overcome the effects of an enduring memory of an offence, it is necessary to forgive and to behave as if one had forgotten. When Jehovah says he will forget sin, he means that he will no longer hold the individual accountable for it.
Isaiah 43:25
I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins.
It is not likely that his memory will be expunged from the mind of Jehovah, but it is reasonable to consider that he will mark the accoung
"Paid in full." That is something that we can do, and it is therefore an act of forgetting.
Hebrews 8:12
For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.
It is a mercy that Christians are expected to emulate if they have any hope to expect mercy for their own shortcomings at judgement. The disciples of Jesus baptised people for a remission of their sins, which was effective when they entered the waters of baptism. Besides being the rite of entry into the Christian church, baptism is also the witness on the part of God that man's sins are remitted, pardoned, and forgiven, and that in the eyes of God he is clean again, born again, ready to begin a new spiritual life and his sins will not be held against him again as long as he refrains from sinning. Thus, baptism means forgiveness of past sins on condition of repentance.
Baptism also means forgiveness of future sins on condition of repentance. This point needs clarification. There is no perfection in human nature, and though a man has corrected mistakes of the past and is committed in faith to Christ, he is bound to err and fail in the future. Repentance, like learning, is a constant need of the believer, therefore, baptism is both retroactive and operative in relation to the future, and is the divine assurance that the earnest, repentant disciple of Christ will be forgiven the sins which he will no doubt commit in his progress toward perfection in Jesus Christ.
The promise of forgiveness, both in relationship to the past and the future, must not be taken as license to sin. Moral failure brings with it sorrow and suffering for ourselves and for others. And though, through repentance and baptism, we attain a remission of sins, we will have already suffered considerable loss and have done harm to others. Foolish is the man who toys with sin through confidence in forgiveness. Such an attitude ignores the law of justice in his own life and the principle of mercy toward others, and may make it much more difficult to gain mercy for himself. By dallying with temptation and sin, a man may readily succumb to them and then find repentance beyond his power.
A question often asked is:
Though we have been forgiven of our sins, will we not have to pay the full price of our sins—either here or in the hereafter?
It is true that no one can do wrong without suffering a loss, and the extension of forgiveness by God does not mean that no damage has been done. In our wrongdoing we suffer pain and forgo all the rich experience and development which would have come had we been spending our strength in worthwhile pursuits. Even the repentant will have suffered certain losses through his wrongdoing. There is no question about that. His sinful deeds in the past, with their effect on himself and others, are not undone by repentance and forgiveness. But this does not mean that a person must pay the full price of justice for his sins.
There is an element of grace in forgiveness. If a person had to pay the uttermost farthing for his wrongdoing, or, in other words, if justice alone prevailed, then forgiveness would have no meaning. Neither would love or mercy have place or meaning. Forgiveness implies that there is something to forgive, some unfulfilled obligation that is pardoned and erased. To illustrate:
A father had a son to whom he lent $5,000 at a low rate of interest. The son signed a note—a promise to pay. He began to repay the note faithfully; then misfortune overtook him. His wife's ill health and his own failure in a business venture ruined him financially. His intentions were good. He tried honestly to fulfill his obligation to his father. Time and again, the son sacrificed his own comfort to make a small payment to his father.One day the father said to his son, "My boy, despite your misfortune and the prolonged and expensive illness of your wife, you have made every effort to repay me the loan. I am going to forgive you the rest of the note. Here it is, torn to bits."
The father was happy to forgive his son because the latter had done his part as well as he could. The father truly forgave because there was something to forgive. Most of the original loan had not been paid. It was to be cancelled.
Had the father said, "Son, I forgive you the loan, but you must still pay it back with interest," what meaning would forgiveness have?Forgiveness comes immediately with full repentance. There is no concept of purgatory in our theology—no place after death where men will be punished to satisfy divine justice for sins committed in the flesh of which man has repented fully. The repentant sinner pays a price for his wrongdoing; he knows sorrow and remorse and the digression or delay his wrongdoing has brought into his life. He can know also, however, that God's interest is in helping him attain unto godlike living, not in punishing him for the sake of justice, revenge, or glory. Therefore, to the repentant sinner the Lord will not add his own punishment to that which is the natural consequence of sin.
Forgiveness is complete and final if our repentance is also complete and permanent. God has no interest in punishment for punishment's sake. His greater interest is in the sinner, not the sin. As a wise minister said,
"A sinner is greater than all his sins."
Even though it is more difficult for we humans to forgive on the scale that God forgives, and to forget on the scale that he forgets, that should be the target towards which we continually strive. We must always do the best we can to follow his example, recognising that the reconciliation effected through Christ's atonement is incomplete unless we take it further than healing the rift between God and man, and make it available from us to all those who have offended us, and become wholly reconciled to them. Where we cannot remove the memory of what they have done towards us, we can behave as if it had not been. Often, that will be the 'forgetfulness' in the equation. Rev. Professor Haddon Wilmer said that
"Forgiving is not forgetting: it is remembering but acting differently." [SIZE="6"]MRGANITE[/SIZE]
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