As I understood the original question, to forgive, from the viewpoint of being personal is the first step in a process to heal self, ridding the soul of hatred and anger to bring about peace and understanding. I am not qualified to quote scripture so I can't speak on forgiving people in jails or institutions but those who cross my path and do harm to my sphere of life I can address the forgiving IF I CHOOSE to. That doesn't mean I condone what I feel is bad behavior or welcome you into my world after you've done me no good. It does mean I will not carry the poison your actions have brought to my world and trust me just me now, I NEVER,EVER, forget!:cool: ;)

One last thing I have been mulling over concerning this topic is this: I have an image of the now deceased Pope visiting the man in prison who attempted to assassinate him. From what was reported, the Pope was there because he was concerned for the man's spiritual well being. Hit me as an incredibly forgiving action. And the look on the Pope's face gazing at the man, it was the face of love. WOW

But he rode in the bulletproof Pope-mobile thereafter, too.

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Originally Posted by 31pumpkin

Sometimes I think it's up to God to forgive certain injustices. What happens when (God forbid) your brother gets murdered and his case goes in the cold file.
Do you think you would feel sorry for people then? for evil people? Need to forgive them? WHEN they get the lethal dose, and the family's there THAT'S when they will probably forgive them.


I'm thankful I don't have anyone to forgive at this time.

Later...
The Gator. :D

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I know exactly what you are trying to convey 31pumpkin.
I think that the confusion is based isolating a scripture without letting the other parts shed some light on it. For example the scripture where we are told to forgive as he forgives us. The relevant question here is how does he forgive us? If we don't know how, then the scripture might be misunderstood and generalities about God's character drawn from it. The way to avoid doing this is to read the rest of the scriptures. When we do so, then we find that God's forgiveness is ultimately based on our acceptance of his laws and regulations and the ransom sacrifice he provided for our sins. We are repeatedly told that if we reject these, then we will lose out on life.

God is not vague on this point. We are clearly reminded that his patience will come to an end with evildoers and that when it does only the righteous will benefit from his forgiveness while the wicked will be objects of his anger. We cannot ignore this if we claim to believe the whole Bible.

Psalm 37:11
But the meek shall inherit the earth,And shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.

Psalm 37:10-12
But with righteousness He shall judge the poor, And decide with equity for the meek of the earth; He shall strike the earth with the rod of His mouth, And with the breath of His lips He shall slay the wicked.

Isaiah 11:3-5
Seek the LORD, all you meek of the earth, Who have upheld His justice. Seek righteousness, seek humility. It may be that you will be hidden In the day of the LORD's anger.

Matthew 5:5
Blessed are the meek, For they shall inherit the earth.

About forgiveness of others:
Now, let's say that we are present when God passes judgment.
We see him condemn someone to be destroyed because of unrepentance
And rejection of the ransom sacrifice. Let's say that we feel sorry for that person and begin arguing with God that he should be allowed to live. In short, that he should be forgiven despite his rebelliousness. If we did so, then it would be a sin.

2 Peter 3:5-7 (New King James Version)

5 For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, 6 by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water. 7 But the heavens and the earth which are now preserved by the same word, are reserved for fire until the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.


BTW
King Saul spared the king of the Amalekites and lost God's favor because of it.

Pumpkin: I assumed (based on your post #35) that this really was your family member we were talking about. I apologise for my error. Please consider all that I said in post #37 as hypothetical and not actual.



Aqua: To demonstrate how I eliminated any concern about whether they knew it was a sin or not, this is how it reasoned out to me:

#1 If they didn't know, then they deserved forgiveness

#2 If they did know and did it anyway, then I consider that insanity (what sane person would choose knowing all that came with it?) and since insanity is really a sickness to me, then they deserved forgiveness since they didn't know what they were doing. Back to #1

So it boils down to what is insanity and do we deal with it as an illness or a crime or a sin?

(Psssst if we keep this up we may have to move this thread to the Health section LOL ) :rolleyes:

VS - yes my #35 post was a hypothetical.

But I can't really grasp what or who you are talking about in #2 of your previous post. I don't think someone(s) have to be insane to knowingly keep doing wrong.
I think they might be sinners, but not necessarily insane. Too easy of an excuse. And insanity(if not treated) usually climaxes at some point and leaves a dreaded trail to all involved.

Aqua@home - When you mentioned in your post about an example like parents not knowing or knowing, and passing on their perverted or abusive actions to their children. Well, here I see is where God steps in. The parents and children while indulging in behavior that is contradictory to God's word, whether they are informed or not spiritually, then during this time they will have unfavorable consequences IN THIS LIFE NOW. Only God knows who are His. At some point, whether the child or parent or both,come into repentance;(could be in jail - OR maybe NEVER) That's going to be up to God to decide. Only He knows their hearts and minds and whether they are His or not.

Talaniman, I agree with you 100%. You have said some very good things.

Starman you said "...God's forgiveness is ultimately based on our acceptance of his laws and regulations and the ransom sacrifice he provided for our sins. We are repeatedly told that if we reject these, then we will lose out on life." And think that this is wonderful. If we believe this as our faith and we accept His laws, regulations and everything else to go along with this faith then ultimately the choice is up to us. We know the consequences. I think that's partially what you are saying?

Valinors I understand your point of view. I'm not sure there are only two reasons people would continue to sin as we are not perfect and we will all continue to so all we can do is continue and do our best. With that being said, I think if that's how you differentiate then that is great. I guess I don't really know how I do. I think sometimes it may be harder because I take my relationship into consideration. I expect far more from the people that I know and surround myself with than someone I don't know at all.

Pumpkin, I agree that God has a great responsibility to those who don't know Him or know His true word. I know He knows everyone's heart and mind and I am counting on Him to be the judge. This is exactly why I was saying that forgiveness is only needed by the wrong-doer when they are aware they have done something wrong.

**I believe though forgiveness benefits those forgiving versus those that need to be forgiven. My thoughts are evolving though. If it wasn't important to be forgiven then why would groups like AA believe receiving forgiveness is a large part of recovery? Anyone?

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Originally Posted by aqua@home

**I believe though forgiveness benefits those forgiving versus those that need to be forgiven. My thoughts are evolving though. If it wasn't important to be forgiven then why would groups like AA believe receiving forgiveness is a large part of recovery? Anyone?

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May I suggest that concerning AA and the 12 steps, it is very much not forgiveness that is sought?

Several of the steps deal in the alcoholic making amends to those they harmed. I can tell you from having taken the steps that making amends is not the same as seeking or gaining forgiveness, not at all. It is specifically taught in AA that amends is about "cleaning up your side of the street" with a great big never-you-mind if the amends is accepted or not (meaning you do it anyway whether the person you made the amends to forgives you or not).

The way I work these two, forgiveness is as separated from amends or apology as making amends is from receiving forgiveness. Forgiveness is meant to release the one harmed, amends is meant to release the one who harmed. Easily confused but very different and NOT dependent on each other unless, of course, you want to play some seriously destructive head games like people do in dysfunctional families? :eek:

That way no one is control of you and your guilt. Nor should they be. Again, its between you and your creator then. A really nice by-product of completing the steps is that we discover that we do it to ourselves ALSO whenever we do it to other people. It made me a whole lot more careful with you all, which is a good thing, a very good thing. :)

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And think that this is wonderful. If we believe this as our faith and we accept His laws, regulations and everything else to go along with this faith then ultimately the choice is up to us. We know the consequences. I think that's partially what you are saying?

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Well Aqua, that another way of stating it. My main point is that God doesn't always forgive and that we don't have to feel guilty for agreeing with God that some people are not deserving of forgiveness. This doesn't mean that I am saying that we should be unforgiving of others. Only that we shouldn't think of God as being a God who always forgives everything from everyone with no end in site to his patience.

VS -
I found your post regarding the 12 steps another way of looking at forgiveness/amends.

I'm glad that you have found a therapeutic way to forgive yourself and move on.

Many people have addictions and personal problems that they have (praise God) been freed from, some behaviors hurt others more than others. But many people's personalities have had some negative effect on others.

I think people learn as they go along, and I think we all have something to feel guilty about if we keep "crying over spilt milk". We really need to forget those sins as God promises that He does.

Repenting like you do, make 'amends" and move on. It makes sense to me.

We all (maybe if in subtler ways) have not been angels...

Our God is a God of second chances for all who call on Him.


OUR GOD IS A GOD OF SECOND CHANCES... remember that from Vege-Tales Movie? Jonah and the Whale? :)

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Originally Posted by 31pumpkin

VS -

Our God is a God of second chances for all who call on Him.


OUR GOD IS A GOD OF SECOND CHANCES.....remember that from Vege-Tales Movie? Jonah and the Whale? :)

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I agree 31pumpkin.
There has to be a willingness, a sincere desire to do his will.
The difficulty in accepting that God requires this is that to some it seems to mean that God is cruel in ultimately not forgiving the unrepentant and willfully rebellious. However, getting rid of the troublemakers in order for there to be peace on earth is not cruelty, it is an act of love toward those who are willing to repent and be productive members of a righteous society.

BTW
That's the reason why the paramount troublemaker, Satan must be gotten out of the way before peace on earth becomes a reality.


1 Peter 5:8
Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:

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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.:)

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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."



M:)RGANITE

I believe forgiveness is letting go of any hostility, anger or bad feelings towards another person. One has to let go of these feelings for yourself, not necessarily for the other person or persons. When you harbor these feelings they bother you more than anyone else. In order to keep ourselves in a peaceful place you can not have those feelings. Don't we all want to be at peace with ourselves. Once you truly forgive in your heart the forgetfullness will follow. That does not mean that you will set yourself up for anything like that to happen again. Choose to look at it as a lesson in life that will make you grow and become a wiser soul. I believe we are all here to learn lessons so we can get on to a higher level of life. Hanging onto that anger or bad feeling only hurts you. We do not want to hurt ourselves. Good luck

Most of the people I have forgiven in my life are actually not the least bit repentant. Either they just see themselves as flat out having done no wrong, despite the fact that it cost them a relationship, or a closeness, or some other tangible aspect like trust or they see their offending action as justified in some sort of "holier than thou" or "payback is hell" angle. I eventually see them as just making a mistake they haven't figured out yet and heaven knows, I have made enough of those myself.

The first is a kind of denial or disconnect on their part that I don't feel obligated to address (after the first dozen times you figure out its pointless) and that latter just makes me cross the street when I see them coming.

So if I had to rely on apologies or amends before I could forgive, YIKES... I would be up that proverbial creek. I like to think of forgiveness as cleaning out my spiritual dustbin. And my amends as cleaning my side of the spiritual street. Both feel good (although it takes a bit of trudging in the amends part sometimes to get to where it feels good?). Both are healing for me and the world at large.

There is the spiritual side of forgiveness, which is my view. There is the emotional side also. When you are harboring any negative feelings toward someone you are giving them power over you. One may not realize how much energy is spent harboring negative emotions towards someone. You feel like if you let go and forgive you are letting them off the hook. That is not true. They will always be responsible for their actions, just we are for ours. As for forgetting, who wants to remember them? If you have God in your heart it is filled with love and it will spill over to others.

I think forgetting is sometimes improperly used to suggest that is a way to measure complete forgiveness. The compete measure of forgiveness is that one no longer carries any hurt or anger about it.

I think Morganite made an excellent point and I would have quoted him here except its woven all through his post instead. The forgetting part comes IF and WHEN a complete amends is made along with the forgiveness. The combination of BOTH resets it all back to where no transgression was made.

So therefore forgiveness without an amends means that it is prudent not to forget. It means that although I have forgiven someone for an incident, I don't set the stage for them to create another one just like it. That would be foolish on my part and actually unkind. It is possible to still remember without it carrying any emotional weight. It comes off more like, "Oh yeah, that's who I am dealing with, a person who makes mistakes like that". And then you act accordingly.

Remembering isn't carrying a grudge; its knowing who you are dealing with and acting on that awareness.

When I speak of forgetting along with forgiving, I suppose I am saying I am forgetting the issue. We always remember the lesson we learned that went along with the incident. You could spend a lifetime waiting for an amends to happen and sometimes it just "ain't gonna". You may still have to deal with this person because of work or family or friends. Circumstances prevent you from avoiding them all together. Letting go of the issue, the anger, the hurt, does not mean you are letting go of the lesson. Even if amends were made, you remember the lesson.

I believe the universe settles everything in due time. It may take a while, but the old saying "what goes around comes around" is very true. I often find myself actually wishing someone would stop their wrong doing because I do not want them to have to go through what they are going to inevitably go through down the road.

There was a difficult time in my life where I was so hurt and dissapointed and confused as how to deal with a situation. I was in my early 20's and wanted it resolved and I wanted acknowledgment that I was right. It filled a good part of my time and energy. An incident happened and my heart filled with sorrow for this person and it was an unreal feeling how all of the anger and hurt left me. It was a physical and emotional feeling. That night I cried and thanked God for whatever happened to me at that time. I have not been able to harbour those feelings again. It was like a cleansing of sorts. As life goes on, I still learn lessons and understand that is what other people are doing also. I may not be around to see them pay for their actions, I am sure they will as I have mine.

Just to look at the other side of the coin-In my past I have caused others hurt through no fault of their own and had to ask for forgiveness as I was truly sorry for what I had put them through. While I was forgiven I'm sure that they didn't forget what I had done. I still felt so bad I tried to make amends, which worked for some but only enraged others. In being willing to set things right it is really not your choice as how this can be done and some people really want nothing to do with you anymore so a wise man counseled me to ask God to forgive me and then forgive myself. Something's you cannot change or control, but you must at least be willing to make things right so beating yourself up is not productive to healing self. I have not been perfect, but in the effort of turning things around I did find a certain peace with myself that allows me to move forward and try to be better with relationships and life. I have NOT forgotten my past though as I try not to repeat my mistakes.:cool: ;)

I find that it's easier to forgive a transgression if I am reasonably sure it was not personal or intentional.
Forget? Naw!

Yes, when things are personal or intentional it is much harder to forgive.

I think it is a struggle that we must try to perfect for all parties involved.

If you can't forgive it isn't fair to expect forgiveness either.

I think forgiveness humbles us both in asking for forgiveness and offering it
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