Dear Friends:

We two have paddled in the stream,

from morning sun till dine;

But seas between us broad have roared

since auld lang syne.

— Robert Burns, 1788

A lot of us will make resolutions this New Year’s weekend. Behavioral scientists who study these things say that 85% of those resolutions will not lead to permanent change.

Why don’t we change that outcome this year by making a resolution with truly transformative power. We can resolve to forgive.

Some years ago, on the afternoon of New Year’s eve, I gathered with some colleagues at their office to watch the DVD of a movie that we were interested in discussing. We discovered that someone had stolen the office’s DVD player over the holidays. We had no computer available satisfactory to the task. It seemed that our gathering was for naught.

A couple of nights before, I had outlined a study of Jesus’ great parable of forgiveness found in Matthew 18:23-35 and Paul’s insightful advice to two women in conflict found in Philippians 4:1-7.

My outline was handwritten on a couple of sheets from a legal pad. I pulled it out and said, “Here’s something we could talk about.”

Copies were made and we worked through the Scriptures for a couple of hours. The points we covered can be summed up as follows:

1. One has to know the extent of the debt before one can forgive it and write it off the books. There has to be an accounting or else forgiveness is nothing more than a sham (Matt 18:23).
2. We owe an enormous debt to God far above our ability to repay it that will strait-jacket us forever, but that doesn’t stop us from begging God to let us repay it (Matt 18:24-26)
3. God is merciful to us and forgives us without limit (Matt 18:27)
4. Pride and greed can cause us to force payment and refuse forgiveness to those who owe us relatively petty debts (Matt 18:28-31).
5. God’s mercy which is limitless and timeless is withdrawn from us when we don’t forgive our debtors because we are putting ourselves in the place of God and holding our interests to be more important than His. He allows us both the freedom of our choice and its consequences (Matt 18:32-33).
6. Our unforgiveness leads God “to hand us over” to imprisonment and torture until our debt to God is repaid which is never going to happen. By not forgiving those who have sinned against us we are chaining our hearts to the time, place and person who injured us. Every time we think about our injury and the person(s) who owe us redress for it the chain of unforgiveness pulls tight against our heart and opens the wound again to our torment (Matt 18:34).
7. Our Father in heaven will leave us to our imprisonment to the past and its torments if we don’t forgive our brother or sister from our heart (Matt 18:35) That is because our Father is eternal and beyond time and our insistence that the past must be redressed before we can move on keeps us fixed in time without the release of his mercy. We are giving the person(s) who we are not forgiving more power over us than we yield to God. This is why our prayers are ineffective when we refuse to forgive because we aren’t willing to move in God’s direction (Matt 6:12,14-15; Mark 11:23-25).
8. We really do suffer wounds and hurts and it is hard to forgive them in our human frailty. We need the Lord’s power to do that. That’s why Paul advised Eudoia and Syntyche, two women believers in the Philippian church who were in some kind of conflict, to get their focus off of each other and on to the Lord in praise and prayer to know his surpassing peace (Phil 4:1-7). In other words, look to God in forgiving, not the person who hurt you.

One of the persons present was Brad, a talented, effective executive known for his quiet, but intense devotion to God and his family, and for his integrity. Brad listened intensely, but didn’t say a whole lot during the discussion. A week later he told me that his heart was convicted of his need to forgive. He left our meeting and went to look for his estranged brother who he hadn’t spoken with in years because of betrayal and disgust.

Brad couldn’t find his brother, so he moved on to a New Year’s Eve party where he asked to speak privately with a friend from whom he’d withdrawn after some offense. He reconciled with the friend who was open and contrite himself. They prayed together in worship and new found fellowship.

Later on, Brad did speak with his brother and began to let go of the hardness of his heart toward him.

Even though I hadn’t known that Brad was troubled by these things, his forgiveness noticeably lightened his spirit and softened his heart. Forgiving those who had wronged him permanently brightened his outlook toward the Lord, others and himself. I was stunned by his testimony because I thought I had made that outline on a whim and had no intention of discussing it when we gathered to watch the movie. Clearly, God had other plans and I was the courier of his message that afternoon.

Love is God’s nature and forgiveness is his policy (1 John 4:7-21). He has forgiven us our offenses even before we’ve asked him to do so (Rom 5:6-11). He calls us to drop our bitterness, righteous indignation, anger, bickering and slander and replace it with the same kind, tender-hearted forgiveness that he showed us in love when “he gave himself up for us.” (Eph 4:31-5:2).

Jesus Christ has specifically given his followers the authority of the Holy Spirit to forgive the sins of anyone (John 20:22-23). If we refuse to do so, what do we think we are going to do with those sins and those sinners? We are going to sentence ourselves to jail and to torture for the offenses committed against us. How absurd is that?

I shared God’s Word on forgiveness with Brad, but its power was unleashed when he chose to apply it in his relationships. Forgiveness cleans out the clutter of resentment from our hearts and allows God the room and light to do his healing work.

It is a wonderful thing to be forgiven and our Father in heaven gladly runs to forgive us. But he wants us to be full participants in his mercy and his joy by passing it on to others (Luke 15:11-32). This will transform our prayers from scribbled notes in the complaint box to bold access to the throne of grace and mercy in our time of need (Heb 4:16).

Forgiving those who have offended and hurt us breaks the chains to the past that hold us back from eternity. Forgiveness is every bit as much about releasing the forgiver as it is setting free the forgiven.

If you want to look toward the future with hope and assurance, then resolve to start 2012 with forgiveness. It is the one New Year’s resolution guaranteed to move you forward.

I can’t tell you that this won’t be a struggle. Forgiveness, like healing, is a process in most cases, not an instant cure. It takes time for calluses and scars to form over abrasions, wounds and breaks. It can take a while to peel and strip that defensive tissue away.

You may be so knotted up or damaged that you do not even know where to begin. I suggest starting right there by telling God the truth: “Lord, I know I need to forgive and I want to be free from the past, but I don’t know where or how to start. I am not even sure that I want to forgive. Your Word promises that “If anyone is in Christ, that person is a new creation: The old has gone, the new is here” (2 Cor 5:17, NIV). Please do  your creation work in and through me to change my heart to what you want, not what I want or what the person who hurt me wants. May your love have its way with me. In your holy name, I say, “Yes!”

“O taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are those who take refuge in him” (Ps 34:8).

Under the mercy of Christ,

Kent

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Please note that the content and viewpoints of Mr. Hansen are his own and are not necessarily those of the C.S. Lewis Foundation. We have not edited his writing in any substantial way and have permission from him to post his content.

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Kent Hansen is a Christian attorney, author and speaker. He practices corporate law and is the managing attorney of the firm of Clayson, Mann, Yaeger & Hansen in Corona, California. Kent also serves as the general counsel of Loma Linda University and Medical Center in Loma Linda, California.

Finding God’s grace revealed in the ordinary experiences of life, spiritual renewal in Christ and prayer are Kent’s passions. He has written two books, Grace at 30,000 Feet and Other Unexpected Places published by Review & Herald in 2002 and Cleansing Fire, Healing Streams: Experiencing God’s Love Through Prayer, published by Pacific Press in spring 2007. Many of his stories and essays about God’s encompassing love have been published in magazines and journals. Kent is often found on the hiking trails of the southern California mountains, following major league baseball, playing the piano or writing his weekly email devotional, “A Word of Grace for Your Monday” that is read by men and women from Alaska to Zimbabwe.