Naturally, as a Christian, I freely forgive people. . . . Naturally. I’d like to take a sharp stone and scratch ‘I forgive you’ on the bonnets of their cars.” When I first read that statement from Christian writer and humorist, Adrian Plass, I knew exactly what he meant. Of course I’d forgiven the person who had hurt me, but it would be so nice to have something like that happen to him. Perhaps God could arrange to have him stampeded by emus the following week, too . . . But wait a minute.
That’s not forgiveness.
In his statement about “forgiveness,” I think Plass expressed something we all occasionally feel when someone hurts us and we realise we have to forgive them, even though we don’t really want to.
David Stoop speaks about this in his book Real Solutions for Forgiving the Unforgivablewhen he says, “When horrible things happen to us, there is typically a period of time when we fantasise about all kinds of retributive punishment. However, staying with vengeful thoughts is like playing an endless and painful video in our
minds over and over again.”
Constantly dwelling on these things is likely to make us bitter and twisted, rather than better people who are loving and demonstrate Christ’s love to others.
And by maintaining an attitude of hostility and hurt, we can be doing ourselves more damage than we realise.
Social science researchers are finding that far from being “just a Christian obligation,” forgiveness can help to heal victims, both emotionally and physically.*
When we don’t forgive others, there can be physical problems because we are living in a state of stress. This can cause physical, mental or emotional burnout. Adrenaline increases, and maintained high levels of this
have a serious effect on the heart and nervous and immune systems.
It can be difficult to let go of the hurt, and harder still to replace it with forgiveness of those who caused it in the first place.
But it’s better than cultivating a grudge, which is what some people actually seem to enjoy doing (presumably so they can hand it down to the next generation along with the Royal Doulton hand-painted periwinkle tea set).
This can mean that the lack of forgiveness lives on way past its use-by date, and get to the point where people no longer remember why they don’t speak to certain other people.
For some reason, I suspect this isn’t the way God wants us to live. Jesus made things clear about His expectations of forgiveness when He was on earth, and He set the example of how we should be in our
dealings with others.
Jesus asked God to forgive the people who executed Him, even as He was on the cross, which is amazing. He also told us to love one another as He has loved us, and if that wasn’t enough of a command, to love
our enemies and pray for those who aren’t all that nice to us.
And who could forget that we are told to forgive those who wrong us 70 times seven? Not that we should keep a notebook with the number of times we’ve said “I forgive you” to people tallied up in it.
There is meant to be no limit to the number of times we forgive people, in the same way there is no limit to the number of times God forgives us for the mistakes we make that hurt Him.
However, we cannot expect that God will allow us to be unforgiving of others while we are forgiven. The parable Jesus told of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18 is an example of this. In Luke 6:37, He
says, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven” (NIV).
As Christians, we are representing the idea of true forgiveness to the world. It’s not something we can keep to ourselves, either, but a gift we should be sharing with others.
Although not every person will accept it, you can still offer it to them and be a peacemaker on behalf of God.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer noted, we are destroyed by sin and healed with forgiveness. We will make it into heaven because we have given ourselves over to God’s grace and forgiveness, not because we have
done something to earn it.

*Gary Thomas,“The forgiveness factor,”<www.ctlibrary.com/ct/2000/jan10/1.38.html>.