According to the dictionary to forgive is to stop feeling angry or resentful or to cancel a debt. Synonyms include overlook and commute. The image I get from this is someone who has messed up, erred, caused harm and longs to get back, get a do-over, which of course in the best of cases does not happen because we cannot magically undo damage our actions and words cause.
But my perspective of "forgive" as a follower of Christ is more this: that which is needed for someone who has broken a relationship, become willful and causes or exacerbates walls and fissures that distance people from one another. It is truly OK with me if I never again hear someone say, "Well, I'll forgive them but I'll never forget." I honestly think it would be kinder to forget and stay angrily away from them!
Here is how I have experienced forgiveness from my God:
Where I am broken, I am not only healed but restored to a closer relationship with God because the experience of healing has resulted in greater trust, a deeper connection, a more urgent desire to bless others with understanding of what I have experienced.
What I owe the creator for the gift of my being and what I owe my Lord for my willfulness and causing myself massive damage and what I owe God....well I don't owe God. Rather I would never under any circumstances have resources or capacity adequate to the job, so Christ paid in full for me. He did not demand I become His slave. He did not wait for me to "get it". He did not limit how much I would be blessed by that. He just loved me all the way to the cross and through the Resurrection until today and for forever.
God's forgiveness does not just take me back to where I started, or recovers what has been lost. God's forgiveness rehabilitates me into a shiny, delightful, amazing new person. For some folks, that is almost too much to accept and they keep trying to be "good enough" or "try harder" and they miss the free part to a large extent. They really have an incorrect egocentric perspective that does not understand, it not about them: it is all about God. There is really nothing I can "do for God" because God is not incomplete without me. So acknowledging my relationship with and in Christ is not about making God whole or being important to Got for what I can do or accomplish. My relationship with God is about accepting God's gift of wholeness and live a life of amazement and wonder at the joy and peace and love and light and truth that infuse my every day.
I think that is not what the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was defining, but that is my life as God's forgiven (reconciled, restored, rehabilitate, renewed, reclaimed) child.
But my perspective of "forgive" as a follower of Christ is more this: that which is needed for someone who has broken a relationship, become willful and causes or exacerbates walls and fissures that distance people from one another. It is truly OK with me if I never again hear someone say, "Well, I'll forgive them but I'll never forget." I honestly think it would be kinder to forget and stay angrily away from them!
Here is how I have experienced forgiveness from my God:
Where I am broken, I am not only healed but restored to a closer relationship with God because the experience of healing has resulted in greater trust, a deeper connection, a more urgent desire to bless others with understanding of what I have experienced.
What I owe the creator for the gift of my being and what I owe my Lord for my willfulness and causing myself massive damage and what I owe God....well I don't owe God. Rather I would never under any circumstances have resources or capacity adequate to the job, so Christ paid in full for me. He did not demand I become His slave. He did not wait for me to "get it". He did not limit how much I would be blessed by that. He just loved me all the way to the cross and through the Resurrection until today and for forever.
God's forgiveness does not just take me back to where I started, or recovers what has been lost. God's forgiveness rehabilitates me into a shiny, delightful, amazing new person. For some folks, that is almost too much to accept and they keep trying to be "good enough" or "try harder" and they miss the free part to a large extent. They really have an incorrect egocentric perspective that does not understand, it not about them: it is all about God. There is really nothing I can "do for God" because God is not incomplete without me. So acknowledging my relationship with and in Christ is not about making God whole or being important to Got for what I can do or accomplish. My relationship with God is about accepting God's gift of wholeness and live a life of amazement and wonder at the joy and peace and love and light and truth that infuse my every day.
I think that is not what the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was defining, but that is my life as God's forgiven (reconciled, restored, rehabilitate, renewed, reclaimed) child.
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