Faith and forgiveness...you can’t have one without the other. No amount of late night negotiations with God with separate them. Trust me...I’ve tired. The act of forgiveness requires an act of faith. Faith to know that God sees the hurts and the struggles and the pain. Isaiah 41:10 states, “fear not, for I am with you...”. When we’re living in the trenches, day in and day out, it’s easy to forget this. We wonder how God can be with us and still let all these terrible things happen.
Matthew West sings a song called Forgiveness. There is a line that says, “It’s the hardest thing to give away...It always goes to those who don’t deserve.” This is so relatable. We all go through junk. We all get hurt. We all have moments and seasons where we grip our forgiveness with a white-knuckled fist. We’re so confident that we deserve to hold on to our forgiveness and wear it like a badge of honor. After all, we were the ones hurt. We went through hell and came out on the other side and we’ll be damned if we’ll give “them” the satisfaction of being forgiven.
The word forgiveness brings a whole host of emotions...bitterness, emptiness, weakness, damaged, anger. These are emotions that have the power to chain us to the bottom of a dark emotional hole. A place many of us aren’t willing to go back to if given a choice. It may have taken every bit of strength and courage we possess to have crawled out. If we forgive we might as well give our consent to all the nasty, hurtful, damaging things we survived. Things that stripped us to our soul. True forgiveness does require a searching of the soul. I won’t lie and say it isn’t painful because it is, but when done in unison with faith, Christ heals the hurts. Psalms 147:3 says, “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.”
Forgiveness is not a sign of weakness. It’s not bowing down to the circumstances that are causing us pain. It is bowing down to Christ and laying our junk at His feet. It is stepping out in faith knowing He can and will take care of us. We are all sinners who don’t deserve to be forgiven, but because Christ went to the cross, we are. When we do the work and make the conscious decision to forgive through Christ, we’re not dismissing the hurt, we are confronting it. We are acknowledging the junk and living on the other side of the pain it caused. To live freely beyond the offense requires faith.
In my opinion, faith is foundation of our lives. It is what all other aspects of being a Christ follower are built on. Faith is a level of trust rooted deep within our souls, secured by the Holy Spirit. When we are faced with a choice to either forgive or not, we are actually choosing to have faith in God or not. There’s a line in the song that says, “Help me to do the impossible.” I know forgiveness can seem like an unimaginable thing. How can we forgive when we hurt so badly? Luke 1:37 tells us, “For nothing will be impossible with God.” When we choose to forgive, just as Christ has forgiven us, we are choosing to trust. Trust God to do good works within us and have faith that He is walking right alongside us, through our own personal hell, and will see us to victory on the other side.
“So, let it go and be amazed by what you see
through eyes of grace. The prisoner that it really
frees is you.”
Forgiveness by Matthew West
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