Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. (Ephesians 4:31-5:2 ESV)
Paul says something to these Christians that I want us to think about. We are to be forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave us. How did God forgive us in Christ? Since this is the parallel and example that we are given, it is important for us know what the forgiveness of God looks like so that we can properly appreciate it and be transformed by it. In fact, the very next thing Paul said to these Christians was to be imitators of God as his beloved children. If we have grown up in the pews, then it can be easy to take the forgiveness of God for granted. You have heard about it your whole life. Even if you did not grow up in the pews, God forgiving us can be a truth so assumed that we forget the power of it in our lives.
The Problem of Forgiveness
I want to begin our study today by talking about the problem of forgiveness. You might wonder how there could be a problem with forgiveness. But God’s forgiveness is commonly questioned. Why can’t God just forgive people? Since God loves the whole world, why can’t he just forgive everyone? I want to answer this in a little bit of a different way to help us understand what God is doing. A question like this portrays God as just having a problem with us because we broke his laws. This is true that we are condemned because we have not listened to God and followed his commands. But is this all there is to the problem or is there something deeper that we need to be thinking about?
While God is a God of justice which would explain why God cannot just unilaterally forgive everyone, I want us to consider that there is yet another problem. God is about relationship with his people. He is not merely concerned about law violations. God wants us. God wants to have a relationship with us. We do not have to go far in the scriptures to see God repeatedly proclaiming this to his creation. God loved the world to such a degree that he gave his only Son (John 3:16). God isn’t just about broken laws. God is about loving the world and wanting to be in relationship with them. Further, God is about us wanting to have a relationship with him. This is the most fundamental idea of love. Love wants to have relationship and connection.
So why can’t God just forgive everyone unilaterally? One reason is that God wants relationship. God has to inform us that we have a problem with God and are separated from him because of our sins so that we can have a relationship with him. God is light and he can’t be with darkness. So just blindly forgiving us does not solve the problem. We have to know the problem so that we can respond to him and have a relationship with him. Sin alters the relationship we can have with God and we have to be informed about this so we can change and have a relationship with God. Let me give a very real life illustration. A married couple comes in for counseling and the wife complains that the husband keeps doing things that are mean and insensitive that really hurt her. But she never said anything. She just keeps unilaterally overlooking it. But now it is to the point that the relationship is damaging because he keeps doing wrong by her. But he throws his hands in the air because he had no idea this was a problem. It is a simple picture to try to carry the idea that God wants relationship with us and has to tell us what is keeping us from being in relationship with him. God has to tell the problem and show that we are fractured the relationship so that there can be a future relationship. Overlooking does not solve the problem. Overlooking keeps us in darkness and keeps us from the love relationship God wants to have with us.
The Mechanism of Forgiveness
Now I want us to think about what God does in this situation. We have fractured the relationship that God wants to have with us by sin. Again, God is light and darkness violates the very nature and character of God. So what does God do? I want us to think about the proactive nature of God even though he is the one who has been wronged. We have broken the relationship with God. There is no one who is righteous and all have sinned against him (Romans 3). Think about how hard this is for us. When we are wronged, the last thing we often want to do is be proactive. We want to show our anger. We want to make the one who hurt us pay. We want to repay them for what they have done to us. In some cases, depending on the hurt, the last thing we want to do is have anything to do with this person anymore. Further, we expect that person to come to us first. We expect that person to come groveling with great acts of sorrow and penitence before we will even consider being kind or restoring the relationship.
But I want us to think about what God has done. God has been wronged and sinned against by every person in the world. But God does not sit back in anger, having nothing to do with us. Instead, God was proactive. God reaches out with a call to all people to come back to him. God says to each person that he still wants a relationship with us even though we severed the relationship. This is the heart of Romans 5.
But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8 CSB)
God did not wait for people to come back to him. God planned for this act of love before the foundation of the world (1 Peter 1:20; Ephesians 1:4). God made forgiveness possible. God reached down to us and gave his Son that there could be forgiveness and the relationship could be put back together. Notice that this is the impact of God’s love.
For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. (Romans 5:10 ESV)
All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. (2 Corinthians 5:18-20 ESV)
The point of God’s forgiveness is reconciliation. This goes back to the point we made at the start. God wants a relationship with his people. Can you think of any circumstance in the scriptures where God says that he forgave but that the relationship was not restored? The point of God’s forgiveness is so that there is reconciliation of the relationship. Please appreciate our God. God, the offended one, comes to us and tells us what we have done. Not only does he tells us what we have done, he then says that he wants to be reconciled, restoring the severed relationship. Not only does God want us to be reconciled to him, God make reconciliation possible by giving his Son as the sacrifice of atonement for our sins. God then extends his forgiveness to all who will respond to his call. If you want to come back to God, there is nothing stopping you from coming back to him. But let me clarify that point a little more. There is actually only one thing stopping you from coming to God. But it is not God. The only thing keeping us from coming to God is us. If we do not want a relationship with God, then we won’t have a relationship with him. If we don’t want his forgiveness, then we will not receive his forgiveness. If we do not want his reconciliation, then we will not be reconciled. Our forgiveness is not unconditional but presumes that we also want the relationship restored. Naturally, if we want this relationship, then we will do what we must on our part to restore the relationship. Think about restoring a human relationship after it has been fractured. We are going to listen to what we did to cause the fracture and do our best to never do that again because we love that person. Are we being petty? No, because that is the essence of love and relationship. You tell me that I hurt you and I don’t want to hurt you. So I will now try not to hurt you. God tells us what breaks the relationship, showing us what sin is, and we respond by trying to avoid those sins.
Amazing Grace
The final piece that is so amazing about God’s forgiveness is that it is limitless. There is never a number in which God says that are sins are too many or too great. We read in the scriptures that God forgave David who committed adultery and murder. We read in the scriptures that God forgave Manasseh, the worst king to rule over Judah. His sins were so great that he caused the downfall of the nation. We read about Jesus forgiving and restoring Peter who denied him three times on the night he was betrayed. If we are still unsure, then listen to the apostle John.
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9 CSB)
If we come back to God, then he will forgive us and restore the relationship. This is the amazing power of God’s forgiveness.
Go and Do Likewise
Now I want to come back to where we started this lesson in Ephesians 4-5. We are to forgive others just as God in Christ forgave us. We are to imitate God as his beloved children. Jesus said that we will not be forgiven by the Father if we do not forgive others from our hearts (Matthew 18:35). It seems like forgiveness is a constant question that Christians have. What does it mean to forgive and what does it look like? I think the reasons for the difficulty is because the world has a false definition of forgiveness that they often use. In our world, forgiveness often merely means not retaliating. But when we have a question about forgiveness I want us to simply follow the pattern that our Lord gave to us.
God forgave even though he was the one who was wronged. So we forgive when we are wronged. But God did not sit back and wait for us to come to him. So we do not sit back and wait for the person to come begging or groveling to us. We proactively reach out to them, wanting to forgive that person so that the relationship can be restored. We will even provide the means of reconciliation like God did for us through Christ. We will make the offer of reconciliation. The other person may not want forgiveness. The other person may not want to be reconciled. But like God did toward us, we will do all that we can to make forgiveness possible so that the relationship is put back in place. Finally, God forgives us no matter how many times we sin so long as we come back to him. So we also forgive the wrongs of others no matter how many times they come seeking it. This is what Jesus taught for us to follow.
If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. (Matthew 18:15 ESV)
Notice that the whole point is reconciliation. We want the relationship restored and not for the offense to break the relationship.
Pay attention to yourselves! If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him, and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, saying, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.” (Luke 17:3-4 ESV)
Then Peter came up and said to him, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times. (Matthew 18:21-22 ESV)
When we see the amazing forgiveness of God, then we will be ready and able to forgive those who have deeply hurt us. Breakthrough and forgive because you have seen how much and how often your Lord has forgiven you.