There
is an extraordinary true story about a woman called Corrie Ten Boom,
a protestant living in Holland during the Second World War. She lived
with her sister and father and they used to read the bible every
evening after dinner. During the war as Holland was occupied by the
Nazis and Jewish people began disappearing, they ended up hiding
people in their home, although they didn’t set out to do this.
Eventually they were caught and sent to one of the Concentration
camps in Germany called Ravensbruck. Her sister and father both died
there, but she survived and was eventually released. When she
returned home she began working to help the many people who were so
hurt by the war. She felt that God was calling her to speak about the
need for forgiveness and so she did. She was invited to speak all
over the country and in other countries.
While
speaking in Germany one day, a man came up to her after her talk and
thanked her for this message of forgiveness. He said, ‘It is good
to know that Jesus forgives all our sins.’ She recognised him as
one of the SS officers who had been in charge of their prison. As he
extended his hand to her, she found herself freezing up and unable to
respond, but she realised that if she did not forgive this man who
was responsible for the death of her sister and father, all her
preaching would be meaningless. So she found herself praying to God
on the spot asking him to help her to forgive and she was finally
able to put out her hand to him. The book is called The Hiding
Place and it is an amazing story. She wrote: ‘And so I
discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our
goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells
us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love
itself.’
Probably
the greatest obstacle to God’s helping and healing us, is our
refusal to forgive. When we refuse to forgive someone we shut the
door to God’s grace, we prevent God from healing us, but there is
an important thing to remember about forgiving someone. Many people
think that in order to forgive someone I must feel like
forgiving them. In other words, the hurt has to have gone and so now
I can forgive. That is not how it works. Forgiveness is not just a
quetion of how I feel, or whether I feel like forgiving someone or
not. Most of us when we are hurt, are often hurt for a long time,
sometimes for years, and of course we don’t feel like
forgiving. The deeper the hurt the longer it takes to heal, but
forgiveness is a decision of our will, it doesn’t depend on whether
we physically feel like doing it or not. ‘Lord I forgive this
person because you ask me to’. It doesn’t mean that all the hurt
will instantly disappear, but if we are prepared to do this much,
then we open the door to allow God’s Spirit to begin to heal us. If
I refuse to forgive, I am preventing God’s Spirit from helping me
to heal. We may think that by refusing to forgive someone we inflict
some kind of revenge on the other person. The truth is that they may
not even be aware of the hurt we carry. Refusing to forgive someone
who has hurt us does not hurt them, it wounds us. The resentment
becomes a poison within us, which festers. God wants to heal us and
help us move on, but we must be willing to forgive. It is not an easy
thing to do, but we must try. That is why Jesus spoke about it so
many times in the Gospels and in very strong terms. If we expect to
be forgiven, we must also be prepared to forgive and I doubt that
there is anyone who does not need to forgive someone. If you find
yourself angry at someone, it usually means that you need to forgive
them. Maybe a good question to ask yourself when you find yourself
angry with someone is this: if I was in their position, would I hope
that the person I had hurt would forgive me?
For
a few years I worked as a hospital chaplain and I met many old
people, most of whom were at peace, having come through all the
trials of their lives, but sometimes I would meet someone who was
bitter and full of resentment, refusing to forgive. They had been
hurt, but they refused to forgive and you could see how it had
consumed them. It was a sad sight. It had destroyed them. People will
hurt us, but we always have a choice to forgive them or not.
I
am sure that all of us here expect that the Lord will forgive us.
It’s what all the Gospels are about, it’s what we believe in and
yet in no uncertain terms the Lord says, if you expect God to forgive
you, you must be prepared to forgive others too. That’s how
it works. Forgiveness is a decision of our will that we must make.
Once we do this, then we open the door to begin to heal.
‘Forgive
us our trespasses,
As we forgive those who
trespass against us.’
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