The Power of Forgiveness

In these last few years we all have heard a lot about renewable energy. There really is authentic renewable energy that God has given to us, and it is called forgiveness. When we unleash it in our lives, it has the power to renew and empower us. It sets us free from enslaving and unforgiving habits.

Forgiveness doesn’t come easy for any of us, whether we are the offender or the offended. It seems unnatural that we should let people off the hook who have hurt us. Our natural sense of justice wants them to experience some of what they have done to us. When we forgive, we are really saying that we trust God more than we trust ourselves to be the final arbiter of justice.

Jesus gave specific directions to the offender. If while you are in the presence of God with all your fellow believers you realize you have offended someone, then leave that place. Then go and make things right between you and that person and then come back to God’s house (Matt 5:23-24).

Jesus told a story in Matt 18:21-35 that deals with the offended. In Jesus’ story there is a man who has accumulated an impossible debt that he cannot repay. When ordered by the king to repay the obligation, he begs for mercy, and the king has compassion on him and forgives his trillion dollar debt. Forgiveness allows us to let people go just as the king released the servant from his debt.

Shockingly, that same servant would not forgive. The previous scene is so powerful with the master forgiving his servant that we are struck with the master’s generosity. In the second scene we expect to see the same attitude from this servant because he has been the recipient of the king’s mercy. But that is not what we find. What should have been a given is not as the servant assumes an unforgiving spirit. That servant finds a fellow servant who owes him a minuscule amount and demands he pay it all. When he couldn’t pay, he had him thrown in prison.

Can you imagine how baffled the king was when he found out that the servant whom he forgave the impossible debt would not forgive a fellow servant a trifling amount? That is how our unforgiving spirit is seen by our heavenly father.

Families that don’t forgive is one of the saddest things there is. Not only do they deprive themselves of the open and genuine friendship and love that come from forgiving each other, but they also teach this to their children. Husbands and wives who don’t forgive are on their way to divorce. Friends who refuse to forgive and harbor grudges are robbed of the friendship that they could enjoy. Some people grow up in homes where they are taught to hate. Many a parent has laid an unbearable burden on their children by teaching them to carry grudges.

Jesus makes it clear that the king in the story is our heavenly father, and he expects us to forgive as he has forgiven us. Who in your life needs to be released by your forgiveness?

 

A Polished Arrow

The Christmas story begins with Caesar Augustus. This is only his title. His name is Gaius Octavius. His rise to power began in 44 B.C. when Julius Caesar was assassinated and he surprisingly named Gaius Octavius as his sole heir. Though just a teenager he proved himself to be ambitious and brutally cruel to all those who opposed him. By the age of 32 he emerged to total power, and the senate proclaimed him Caesar Augustus, which meant they proclaimed him a god.

Luke begins the story of the birth of Christ with a few words about Caesar Augustus who issued a decree that a census should be taken (Luke 2:1). Caesar wanted more money as all politicians do, and in order to level another tax, he needed to know how many subjects he had. That meant that people from the Rhine River to North Africa all the way to Palestine would have to travel to their home towns. Mary was in her ninth month of pregnancy, and even for her there was no exemption. Joseph and Mary must travel the 90 miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem. After all, that is what Micah had predicted 400 years earlier, "But you, Bethlehem though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times" (Micah 5:1-2).

Caesar Augustus was the most important person in the world…or at least that is what he thought, but in reality he was just a piece of lint on the page of Biblical history. God was taking this little couple to the exact place he wanted them. How appropriate are Solomon’s words: “The king's heart is in the hand of the Lord; he directs it like a watercourse wherever he pleases (Prov 21:1).

God’s polished arrow that had been sheathed for eons was about to be unsheathed for all the world. Isaiah says that the Christ child born in that lowly stable and laid in a feeding trough was indeed God’s polished arrow: “He made my mouth like a sharpened sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me into a polished arrow and concealed me in his quiver. He said to me, "You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will display my splendor" (Isaiah 49:2-3).

The difference between Christ, our deliverer and conqueror, and the world’ greatest conquerors is like night and day. Christ does not come with physical weapons of destruction and intimidation but with his word that is like a sharpened sword. Jesus was hidden like an arrow until the precise moment, then God sent his son into the world with divine accuracy. God’s chosen servant displayed the splendor of God. As the Apostle Paul says, Jesus truly “made himself nothing” (Phil 2:7). Philip Yancey writes:

…almost no pagan author used the word humble as a compliment before Jesus. The God who came to earth came not in a raging whirlwind nor in a devouring fire. Unimaginably, the Maker of all things shrank down, down, down, so small as to become an ovum, a single fertilized egg barely visible to the naked eye, an egg that would divide and re-divide until a fetus took shape, enlarging cell by cell inside a nervous teenager. Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb,” marveled the poet John Donne or as the Apostle said He made himself nothing…he humbled himself and was made in human likeness.^[i]

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[i] Philip Yancey, The Jesus I  Never Knew,  (Grand Rapids, MI, Zondervan: 1998), p. 36.