FaceValues - FORGIVENESS: Is forgiveness possible?
Sermon preached at Barclay Church, Edinburgh by Rev D. Graham Leitch
based on materials provided by FaceValues
15 September 2002

When this FACEVALUES series of services was launched last Sunday, we began by looking at some of the ways life in our country - the shape of society - has changed in the past 50 years.

During this period (within a generation!) the foundational values provided by the Judaeo-Christian tradition which, for centuries, informed personal behaviour and public policy alike, have been increasingly questioned. The old rule book is being torn up. The old moral consensus has gone. It is now not just argued but practically taken for granted that to prescribe values for another is presumptuous - each person must choose his own way.

THE AIM OF FACEVALUES
The aim of this FACEVALUES series is twofold. First - it is part of a national campaign, co-ordinated by the Evangelical Alliance and reaching across the denominations, encouraging Christians to reflect upon the core values which lie at the heart of their faith. And second, FACEVALUES nationally is a PR and media campaign, running for the next fortnight,expected to reach 30 million people and inviting the whole country to think again about the kind of country we want to be and bequeath to our children.

Long ago Jesus told a simple story to illustrate the importance of choosing the right ideas, the right teaching - the right ideals - to build your life upon.....

THE TWO HOUSES - “The Miraclemaker”

In FACEVALUES we’ll be encouraging people to think about the values that inform their judgments and and control their decisions and determine their behaviour towards others... what they are and what they should be!!

THE CORE VALUE OF FORGIVENESS
The core value we’re turning our attention to this morning is forgiveness. FORGIVENESS is an important virtue because we’re not living in a perfect world.... the Bible says “we all make many mistakes” and “all of us have sinned” and “no-one is righteous”

In a perfect world there would be no need for forgiveness. But we know that our world is far from perfect! We go wrong and we do wrong! We hurt others by accident and we hurt others by intention.

We have wronged others and we have been wronged!! SIN and WRONG are part of the inevitable fabric of human life in a fallen world. And this is where forgiveness comes in as a value that matters:

When someone wrongs us and makes us angry - upsets us or does us harm - the way we react will determine not just the way we’ll be with that person when we next meet them - next week, next month or next year; the way we react will contribute to harmony and peace and to the world’s well-being, or detract from it.

There is an infectiousness about the kind of behaviour that people display when people wrong others or people are wronged!!

A CHOICE TO BE MADE
It’s up to us to choose - but in choosing we help to create a culture and to contribute to the kind of world we live in!!

In his book “What’s so amazing about grace?” Philip Yancey characterises the choice in this way:
One - the way of forgiveness - is the way of grace. The other - the opposite - is what he calls the way of “ungrace”.

The way of ungrace is the unforgiving way. “I’ll never forgive them for what they did!” It’s the way that nurses grudges, breeds resentment and hatred and often gives birth to violence. We see this way in international relations in the “tit for tat” actions of the Jewish and Palestinian authorities in the Middle East in which the agenda is neither justice nor peace but REVENGE.
But we see the same when families fall out, when neighbours fight - in the ordinary human relationships of everyday life. Ungrace is the way that draws lines, builds walls.Ungrace inevitably feeds unhappiness and sours life.

Forgiveness is the opposite way - the way of grace.. It recognises that no-one is perfect and stands ready to forgive.

A PROFOUNDLY CHRISTIAN VIRTUE
It is a PROFOUNDLY CHRISTIAN VIRTUE.

* It was because God chose the way of forgiveness when we went wrong that Jesus came and was
put to death at Calvary for sins’s pardon.

* He it was who taught his disciples whenever they prayed to ask help to forgive as they had been
forgiven.

* He it was, who answered Peter’s “How many time must I forgive my brother?” with a phrase
“seventy times seven” than means “endlessly”

* And as God’s perfect Son who had done no wrong, was sentenced to a sinner’s death and nailed to
the cross, and hung there in the agony of his dying, it was He who prayed “Father forgive them.”

What kind of people do we want to be - forgiving or unforgiving? What path are we going to choose - the way of grace or the way of ungrace? The kind of society we’ll bequeath to our children and their children depends on our choice!!

CHOOSING FORGIVENESS NOT ALWAYS EASY
To choose forgiveness may not always be easy - if your child has been killed by a drink-driver in a hit and run accident, if your daughter has been raped at knife-point, if your spouse has been unfaithful, it can be the hardest thing in the world....

God’s own forgiveness was no light or easy thing - it cost him blood, sweat, agony, pain and death - its price was CALVARY! Choosing forgiveness isn’t easy; but actually forgiving is harder still! :

CORRIE TEN BOOM
When the second word war began, Corrie and Betsie Ten boom were arrested by the Nazis.They had bravely decided to conceal Jews in their home during the Nazi occupation of Holland. Discovered, they were sent to to Ravenssbruck Concentration Camp where, on arrival they were forcibly stripped naked and made to parade before the sneering German officers and to suffer unspeakable atrocities at their hands.

Sustained by her Christian faith through the death of her sister Betsie as a result of her mistreatment in Ravenssbruck, Corrie was release at the end of the war. And as a Christian she toured German churches speaking about forgiveness.

It was while she was speaking in the basement room of a church in Munich that it happened. Her eyes set upon a balding heavy-set man in a grey overcoat with a brown felt hat clutched between his hands,

Before her eyes his appearance changed and he was wearing a blue uniform, a visored cap with a skull and crossbones - “it came back with a rush” she says “the huge room with its harsh overhead lights, the pathetic pile of dresses and shoes in the centre of the floor, the shame of walking past this man. I could see my sisters frail form ahead of me, ribs sharp beneath the parchment skin....”

When her talk on forgiveness was over the former guard from Ravensbruck approached her - he didn’t recognise her but, since she’d mentioned Ravensbruck in her talk, he came over and held out his hand - “I am a Christian now and I know God has forgiven me.. but I would like to hear it from your lips... will YOU forgive me?

Since the end of the war she had run a home in Holland for the victims of Nazi brutality. She knew that those who had been able to forgive their former enemies were able to return to the outside world and rebuild their lives, whatever their physical scars. But she knew, too, and I use her own words, that “those who nursed bitterness remained invalids.”

“I stood there with the coldness clutching my heart. But forgiveness is not an emotion - I knew that. Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart/ ‘Jesus help me!’ I prayed silently. ‘I can lift my hand. I can do that much. You supply the feeling!’
“Woodenly, mechanically, I thrust my hand into the one held out to me. And as I did an incredible thing took place. The current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm, sprang into our joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being....I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then.”

Choosing forgiveness isn’t easy, but forgiving is harder still! Yet it is the healing way, the freeing way - the way that the door of hope to our future and our peace.

Moreover, it is God’s way!!

What kind of people do we want to be - forgiving or unforgiving. What path are we going to choose - the way of grace or the way of ungrace? The kind of society we’ll bequeath to our children and their children depends on our choice!!

A healthy society is one in which those forgiven by Jesus Christ - choose and model for others a new, forgiving way..... but what are the contours of such forgiveness?

A FORGIVING SPIRIT.....

...FACES THE REALITIES.
It doesn’t pretend that there has been no wrong done, nor does it minimise the magnitude of a wrong or the extent of its consequences. It is no service to the world or to the individual to call evil good or to shrug off its damaging consequences!!

Forgiveness is not blind to fault and blame or uncaring about its effects.

.....REFUSES TO NURSE GRUDGES
But forgiveness renounces both the natural right to get even and the instinct to hit back or take revenge. God’s nature is merciful and, as He is, so His children should be. Indeed the Bible tells us that His forgiveness has a prior condition:

“If you do not forgive others, neither will your Father in heaven forgive you....”

Ultimate justice is in His hands not in ours.

“I will pay back” says the Lord.

A forgiving spirit is one that refused to nurse grudges, hate and hit back or take revenge. Although it was 15 years ago now, many of us surely still remember the response of Gordon Wilson, who survived the bomb blast at Enniskillen on Remembrance Sunday 1987 that killed his daughter. There was not a trace of bitterness or hatred in his response. Instead he spoke only of love and forgiveness as his prayers for his daughters murderers captured the attention of the world’s media.

A forgiving spirit is one that refused to nurse grudges, hate and hit back or take revenge

.......THINKS THE BEST
A forgiving spirit is one that thinks the best not the worst of the person who has wronged us. Whenever we are badly treated or feel we’ve been badly wronged we’re instantly tempted to think the worst and see the worst, Our whole picture of them and everything about them is distorted - we rewrite thew whole history of our knowledge of them from a new and unflattering angle.

Any objectivity is forsworn for the sake of blackening their name! But when we forgive, we discover that the person who wronged us is in all probability just a complex,weak, confused, vulnerable person, not so much different from ourselves.

A forgiving spirit goes out of its way to see the best in people, to give them the benefit of the doubt. It isn’t quick to blacken people’s names or magnify their guilt.

...PUTS THE PAST BEHIND
A forgiving spirit let’s bygones by bygones! In the Bible God describes himself as one who not only forgives but FORGETS:

‘I am He who blots out your transgressions and remembers your sins no more...”

What this means is that when God forgives us he treats us as if our past mistakes are entirely forgotten - as if he cannot remember what it was we did.

In practice it is often practically impossible to remove from our consciousness wrongs done to us...but God calls upon us both to treat the person as though the wrong never was, and to refuse to let that wrong done poison or control us.

We are not only consciously and deliberately to forgive but but to put the past to rest - to bury it!! To let bygones be bygones! Charles Spurgeon, that prince of Victorian preachers told his people “When you bury a mad do, don’t leave its tail above the ground!”

This is not a matter of denying the past - it may be a matter of confronting the past and working though our feelings of hurt by ourselves, with others and before God so that we can move on.

To develop Spurgeon’s analogy - the dog needs to slain before it can be properly buried!!

When Kim Phuc was eight years old a war photographer in Vietnam captured what would become the world famous image of her fleeing naked, screaming in pain from the third degree burns cause by a napalm attack in 1972.... seventeen operation and much suffering later she was able to face up to what had happened to her and with the help of Jesus Christ, forgive others and move on. It meant facing it - confronting it, not denying it or running away as she had from their Napalm years before.

Today, as well as being a Christian, she is a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador, eager to see people’s hatred overcome and peace prosper -

....SEEKS RECONCILIATION.
Finally, a forgiving spirit seeks reconciliation. The fact that attempts at reconciliation may be rebuffed and the hand of forgiveness or word of apology rejected doesn't mean we shouldn;t try. Nothing less should be both our prayer and our goal.


But all this is so contrary to my instincts, you say - and you are right. It is not merely unnatural, it is SUPERNATURAL - the way of ungrace is the world’s way and the path to disaster. The way of grace is God’s way and can alone lead to peace.

In the world Christians, as those who are a forgiven people - ought to be a forgiving people. In this way GRACE begets GRACE....

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