Forgiving Others
Gracious and forgiving of the faults and wrongs of family members.
Heart
Having spent the prior posts discussing how to receive grace, it runs the risk of redundancy to now consider forgiveness. Yet, let me suggest that this is in fact the natural order of things. In the Lord’s Prayer, Christ instructs His disciples and in turn, we ourselves, that we are to expect to receive forgiveness as we have forgiven others. Now, a word of caution in how we treat such a statement. This is not to suggest that God is waiting for us to forgive in order to measure out how much forgiveness we are deserving. We deserve none. If God were waiting on our action, He would have a long wait indeed.
We know that of our own accord, we are not likely to seek to forgive others in any measure similar to the gracious love and forgiveness that our Lord has and desires to extend to us. However, having been forgiven, the Holy Spirit works a change in our hearts that enables us to be able to and in fact to desire to forgive others.
Paul, in Ephesians 4:32, urges us to “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” Note the instruction to be tenderhearted. This should remind us of stories from the Old Testament, when rather than tenderhearted. God turns people over to their hard-heartedness. We see this especially in Exodus as Moses comes before Pharaoh seeking his leave to take God’s people out of bondage. In the aftermath of plague after plague, we read that Pharaoh hardened his heart extending the back and forth between the Lord until the tenth and final plague breaks his will to resist.
Peter connects tenderheartedness to humility when he urges his readers to “have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind.” (1 Peter 3:8) This is a key point to keep in mind as we work with our children and seek to help them to extend the forgiveness of Christ to others. When we struggle to forgive, we often do so because the hurt we carry prevents us from seeing and feeling from the perspective of the other. A humble, tender-hearted person is more inclined to consider the perspective of those who sin against us.
Receiving forgiveness prepares our hearts. Receiving God’s forgiveness acts as a sort of spiritual heart tenderizer. When we know the love of God, the Holy Spirit reshapes our hearts more into the image of Christ. With a more Christ-like heart, we are better able to humbly understand the position of those who sin against us and we are more likely to desire to forgive them.
As has been mentioned before, verbalizing words of forgiveness is powerful in the heart tenderizing process. When our hearts are prepared by receiving those words of forgiveness, we come to know the life-changing freedom that forgiveness brings and we grow in our desire to share that life change with others. With softened hearts, our children gain experience in speaking their own words of forgiveness, paying forward the gifts given to them.
When our children forgive others they continue the process of softening their hearts toward the people in their lives. In Proverbs 17:9 we learn that “Whoever covers an offense seeks love, but he who repeats a matter separates close friends.” This covering of offense is not hiding, but removing of sin from within a relationship. The love expressed is highly relational language.
We can all remember slights that we felt at times when we were kids. Emotionally, many of us are likely to have vivid memories of an embarrassment or insult given to us by someone who we believed to have been a friend. When we are hurt by a friend, out of a need to protect ourselves, we may believe that we need to harden ourselves against future injury. We are not likely to actually talk about hardening our own hearts, but practically speaking that is what is taking place.
We can see the hurt in the face and tears of our children as they learn these hard lessons themselves. Likely our impulse is to protect them from these harsh realities, and there is some wise cause to do so. We need to assess their developmental preparedness to handle the challenging conversations the come with disappointments when friends sin against our kids. Honestly is sounds overly dramatic to put this into such direct language, but there is a need to be honest with ourselves about what is likely taking place. We may, depending on the age and maturity of our children, soften the language that we use to explain and bring comfort to them, but without adding to or assuming too much about the motivations of our children’s friends, we do need to acknowledge that as fellow sinners, they are perfectly capable of sinning against our kids.
Now all that said, in our protection of our children, we need to keep in mind that in order to encourage the cultivation of a tender heart, we need to balance an honest assessment of the reality of sin and its impact on all of our relationships, which out impugning other children in the process. Our focus ought to be on the restoration of the relationship. We can and should acknowledge the reality of sin and its impact, focusing our children’s hearts on their ability to share the forgiveness of Christ with their friends.
This emphasis on relational restoration can keep our children focused on what is important and what is most damaged by sin, relationships themselves. Helping heal their hurts and learning to tender-heartedly forgive even those who are a challenge to forgive or those who seem to need forgiveness on a regular basis opens our children up to experience the grace of God by sharing that grace through the forgiveness of others.
