Victims of major crimes stand out from the pages of Scriptures as sources of inspiration when we ourselves need strength in forgiving offenders. Joseph, David and Stephan are three biblical characters that can inspire us when we need to forgive major offences committed against us still today. Joseph truly and fully forgave his brothers for selling him as a slave to Egypt. David forgave Saul for his repeated attempts at murdering him. Stephen forgave his murderers.
The testing of your faith produces steadfastness (James 1:3-4)
These experiences of forgiveness that survived to our days within the pages of Scriptures have become a source of inspiration for me personally whenever I need to process through my own forgiving of persons who wronged me severely, or in the forgiving of smaller offences that occur in the natural process of day-to-day living and working.
Together, they form a part of what the Holy Spirit of God uses to comfort me and help me through difficult times in my life, as we learn from Romans 15:4, about the way the Word of God generally operates in the lives of those who love God. The French version of this article, Le pardon de Joseph, David et Étienne, presents this in a more thorough way. As far as this English shorter rendering of these vital concepts, my advice would be for every reader of this post to read the biblical text relating the experience of forgiveness of these three men of God: Joseph, David and Stephan.
How Should Christians consider forgiveness when dealing with the most severe of offences imaginable? This question of how to face severe offences can be considered from complementary angles: to whom does forgiveness benefit? forgiveness considered as a choice; forgiveness as a refusal to avenge oneself; the forgiveness offered by God to the worst offenders; Christ’s sacrifice for our forgiveness and that of others.
1. Forgiveness benefits the offended, not just the ofender
People from all sides would agree on this with what Christians have been saying for a long time. Forgiveness not only benefit to the offender, but also to the offended. When you have been sinned against with a great evil, forgiving the offender frees you. It allows you to love again, to trust again, to live again, without keeping to yourself.
2. Forgiveness is a choice
When we stop to think about it, everything we do or don’t do in life is the result of a personal choice. It is a lie to think that because so and so did such and such we have no choice to react in any socially predictable manner. «He struck me so I had no choice to strike back» is a lie that only leads to being enslaved to circumstances and people.
Some choices are difficult to make, and they certainly don’t feel natural. Forgiving falls in that category. Someone compared the choice of forgiving to a monk’s poverty vow. You make your choice once, when you join the brotherhood, and you renew it daily. Forgiveness is of that nature. We need to decide that we do forgive Amanda or Freddy for what they have done to me. The fact of having forgiven them does not mean that you don’t need to reiterate this forgiveness, for example when the pain is there again.
3. Forgiveness as a refusal to avenge oneself
Now, those of us who define ourselves as Christians should not consider it Jesus’s wish list that we would forgive one another our offences or even the offences of our enemies. These are part of the Christian’s marching orders, that we forgive not only the minor irritants caused by our interacting with others, but also severe offences from anyone. Let us review a synthesis of Jesus’ teaching presented by the apostle Paul in what is quite a systematic presentation of the Christian faith found in the Bible, the book of Romans. Towards the end of that book, we can read what follows:
Repay no one evil for evil. Respect what is honorable in the sight of all men. If it is possible, as much as it is up to you, be at peace with all men. Don’t seek revenge yourselves, beloved, but give place to God’s wrath. For it is written, “Vengeance belongs to me; I will repay, says the Lord.” Therefore “If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in doing so, you will heap coals of fire on his head.” Don’t be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good (Romans 12: 17-21, WEB).
One of the things it means to truly forgive is that we do refuse to avenge ourselves. This Christian attitude can be observed in the lives of Joseph, David, Stephan, and Christ.
4. The forgiveness offered by God to the worst offenders
I have just mentioned David amongst those who refused to avenge themselves for severe offences brought against them. But David, at a later time in his life, became very aware of the fact that he was the recipient of God’s forgiveness. Here is how David expresses it:
Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit (Psalm 32.1-2, ESV).
By that time in his life, David had ordered the murder of the husband of a woman he had seduced while the man was fighting on the front. Yet God had forgiven him.
5. Christ’s sacrifice for our forgiveness
Likewise, all of us living today stand before God’s offer of forgiving any severe offences we might have committed. He expects for us to accept this free gift from him to us. He also expects that we will forgive the offences of those who offended us. This forgiveness comes to us through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. We may live in a time and culture that makes this very difficult to us to understand. Still, try to considering the following passages of Scripture in an prayerful attitude before God:
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2.1-10, ESV).
A man of sorrow and acquainted with grief… he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows (Isaiah 53)
(Photograph of a painting from Cécile Beaulieu, used with permission)
You don’t quite understand the above quote? Ask God to help you through it. Pray as your read! Talk it over with God assuming that He has the Power and Interest to listen. Also you may want to read some of the personal testimonies and articles of this web site dealing with various aspects of my own conversion or sometimes that of others. These may help provide some concreteness to what God wants to do for yourself, dear reader:
The French version of this article Le chrétien et le pardon d’actes graves provides a more in-depth coverage for most of the five complementary angles we have just surveyed above: to whom does forgiveness benefit? forgiveness considered as a choice; forgiveness as a refusal to avenge oneself; the forgiveness offered by God to the worst offenders; Christ’s sacrifice for our forgiveness and that of others.
I pray that God touches the heart of every person reading this article, from anywhere in the world, and at any time that they happen to be doing so. Please let us know of how God stopped you in your ways and transformed your life through this or other means.
How did I move from a situation where it was evident for me when God was answering my prayers, to a mindset where it had become natural for me to doubt about God’s intervening in my life after I had prayed, instead of believing He has answered? How did I move from a posture of faith to one of struggling to perceive God’s action on my behalf?
The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer (Ps 18.2)
Becoming conscious of this difficulty helped me to slowly move from this posture of doubt to the posture of faith I had earlier held in my life. One key to this reverting from unbelief to faith in practical affairs of God’s answering or not my prayers was to consider as a part of my faith to thank God for what He had done in response to any given prayer. Faith is thus not be limited to the act of asking, but is also extended to that of receiving.
You wish to get involved and discuss about life-related subject matters, feel free to join our trilingual Community of dialog about the Christian Faith (French, English, Spanish). You are also welcome to share below some aspect of your hard-gained life experience.
This page was last updated on August 2017, January 2018, and March 31, 2021.
Can married couples be restored? Can God restore old broken married couples? What about Christian couples struggling in situations where they see no exit? My answer: assuredly! My wife and I spent a number of years in a situation that could too often have been described as more painful than joyful, yet we both remained faithful to one another.
I called out to the Lord, out of my distress, and he answered me (Jonas 2.2, ESV)
In fact, without knowing it, we were trying, as many do, to fill through each other the unanswered needs from our past. This is often the case, for intimate relationships tend to reactivate childhood wounds in need of being healed. According to the therapist Hartville Hendrix’s Getting The Love You Want, it is in the context of a real commitment to each other that those wounds can be healed, as we have also experimented ourselves.
This has been far from obvious though. For a long time, we tried very hard to get things fixed, but somehow never seemed to succeed. After a while, we just let go of the issues that bothered us, and both agreed to disagree about our perceptions, no longer really trying to convince the other. We just lived side by side as best we could while we focused each on our own responsibility before God. I then discovered some of the relational patterns that I had developed when I was young, and on the basis of which I was still interacting; I began to replace these for more effective strategies. It was a first step.
At the same time, about ten years ago, I was asked by my supervisor to hire someone to replace me on the specific job I had been hired to do for my employer, because I wanted to take other responsibilities at work. As it turned out, I trained this person, and worked alongside her for six months. She was a Christian, from a different branch of the Church than ours, and we had some very interesting conversations together.
She was one of the means God used in my life to think through what the basis of my faith had been. This led me to identify one specific area of my life I had let myself slip into. The Holy Spirit of God made it clear to me that He wanted me to repent from it – no later than right now! The impression left on me by this realization was so clear that I became convinced I needed to make a choice right there and then. So I did, immediately. From then on, the guilt that had greatly burdened me, and indirectly affected my relationships, completely disappeared. I was freed from it, liberated as if from a rush of wind from God.
What followed was a series of steps where I went from the position of one who feels a victim of circumstances, as if a prison of a spiritual nature encased me, to one who knew he was God’s son, a prince under the authority of Christ, co-heir with the King. It became clear to me that I could call upon my Father, and receive answers to my petitions in resisting whatever temptations were before me. I am not saying here that I became sinless. What I am saying is that I became a warrior against the forces of darkness – as I had been in earlier years. I remembered who I was in Christ, and I began to be much more efficient in turning immediately to my source of strength for fighting sin.
These changes became the basis for a new outlook in my relationship to my wife. She saw the changes that had occurred with me. I also began to pray God for her every time she did or said something that I did not like. I began bathing her in prayer, until one day she told me she felt loved and accepted. Our relationship then took a completely different turn. It must be specified that in the mean time, my wife was also going through experiences of spiritual liberation of her own. This allowed her to welcome the renewed person I had become, walking along with me anew, closer than we ever had been.
Our adult children – who were no longer living at home at the time, and both had careers of their own – began teasing my wife and I. Eventually – within the same year – they began saying things like: “Mom, dad is courting you! Don’t you see it?”. A little later they began to teasingly accuse us of suffering from blind love ! A good problem, isn’t it? : “You are really strange parents, they said jokingly. It seems as if you both believe the other has no defects or shortcomings of any sort. You are like young lovers who just met.
Up to this day, my wife and I still enjoy a very good relationship for which we thank the Lord. So when I say to anyone I feel the joy of Christ, and His peace within me now, these two events related just above are always in the background of my mind and heart.
People in our Church who have known us for many a year began to say that the changes they saw in us as couple have encouraged them greatly in not losing hope that God can work in their lives too in ways that they had began to despair would be possible.
Reading through the epistles of Peter, paying close attention to First Peter 5:6-11, it strikes me that the prowling evil-one tried to destroy both my wife and I, and, through us, our entire family, yet he failed. God prevailed. I am thankful to my Father.
As I conclude this article, I am raising my heart in prayer on the behalf of all who struggle in their marital relationship, and might be tempted to adopt a despairing attitude.
I pray God to use this testimony for providing some measure of hope to suffering couples. Are you amongst them? I am praying that the Holy Spirit will perhaps lead you to the right people, or that He will bring home to you some passages of Scriptures, in such a way that it will help you understand your own situation in a better light. I am praying that He will enable you to trust Him to set things right in your own heart, so that you will know how to restore whatever needs to be, both in relationship to your spouse and to your God. I pray that you will want to do whatever needs be done with this regard.
I first published the above testimony, December 10, 2014, on Christian Forum Site, under Forums –> General Forums –> New Members Welcome –> New to group… how much help has this group been to you? It has been adapted to better suit its present context, and amplified to provide a richer human dimension to what occurred spiritually.
Relying on God helped you getting through situations that seemed desperate at times or this article was helpful to you in some ways, feel free to let me and others know of it.
You wish to get involved and discuss further about the above topic, please consider doing so at Christian Forum Site. I will be happy to engage with you there.
We also would like you to feel more than welcome to join our nascient (as of this writing) trilingual Community of dialog about the Christian Faith (French, English, Spanish). Or, you may simply share some aspect of your hard-gained life experience in the box below.
Knowing one is loved by God: the key for loving others–Our love for others will be limited unless we understand God’s love toward us, since it is the love that God has for us that is the source of the love we have for others.
Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. (Isaiah 49:15, ESV)
You wish to get involved and discuss about life-related subject matters, feel free to join our trilingual Community of dialog about the Christian Faith (French, English, Spanish). You are also welcome to share below some aspect of your hard-gained life experience.
Loving with opened eyes is loving a person for who she is in reality, instead of loving her as we would like her to be according to our imaginary world based on personal preferences. This is far from always being obvious. I came to realize that I sometimes had a tendency to project upon others the qualities I would like to find in them. I observed this with regards not only to individual persons, but also to groups in certain periods of my life. When I am disappointed with such expectation toward a person or a group, I begin to feel a sort of inner turmoil which is difficult to describe.
His way is in whirlwind and storm ( Nahum 1.3, ESV)
In this article, I would like to share with you what I have learned from such a struggle, and how it led me to review how God should be my all in all. To do so, I will invite you to ask yourselves such questions as the following: Is it the image of a person that you love? Do you love the person for who she is really? Do we love the image of Christian leaders? Is it the image we create for ourself about a group – Christian or not – that we love? And I will close with a challenge to love not with folded eyes but with eyes wide opened.
Loving with opened eyes or loving the image we form of a person?
At times – and it took me many years to come to this understanding – I have observed that I come to new relationships attributing to certain persons the qualities I would like to find in them, without them necessarily having these. I then appreciate these persons in part because I perceive them through the filter of the virtues I am supposing they have.
When I come to realize that they do not own-up to these personal characteristics, I begin to experiment a feeling of deception. Pleasant emotions are replaced by unpleasant ones. Instead of wanting to be with such a person or of hearing her advice, I shift into a mode according to which I no longer wish to find myself in the presence of that person.
Do we love people as they really are?
The above reflection led me to understand the importance of loving others for who they really are instead of loving or hating the image we create of them for ourselves. This in term led me to formulate for myself the maxim «loving with opened eyes» or, perhaps I should not shy away from the formulation «loving with eyes wide open», even if it is the title of a film that has little to do with what I am talking about here, the expression does.
I used this maxim or leitmotiv «loving with opened eyes» as a guiding principle to think through my expectations and dispositions toward other people, and the conditions with which I engage or refuse to do so in true Christian love, in love with a capital A.
Loving with opened eyes – or with eyes wide opened – means loving a person bearing in mind (and heart, as it were) who she really is rather than how I want here to be. This entails accepting that even the most legitimate of my expectations might not be met. For example, when a teacher does not master what he is mandated to teach me, or when a mentor lacks sensitivity towards my outlook on life.
Loving the image of Christian leaders we create for ourselves?
I realized eventually that something of that nature had occurred to me with regards to my relationship with the very first Christian leaders God had placed in my life as mentors or as guides in my first few years of growth in the Christian life. I was expecting them to be incarnation of the Christian values, the foundations of which they were transmitting. My admiration for them was quenched when I came to realize that they were in some ways or others falling short of some of the so very important truths they were teaching.
My perspective today is to try to be of as much help as possible to people who prove themselves to be wanting in key areas of their lives, no matter their role in the Church.
Loving our own image of a group – Christian or not?
In the context of this reflection about loving with opened eyes, I also came to realize, bit by bit, that I sometimes projected to entire groups the qualities I wanted them to have. It is the same whether they be major collectivity as the Evangelical Movement in general or tiny gatherings of twenty or a subset such as a local church or a tiny Bible study group.
The principles at work are the same whether these are secular or religious groups. I sometimes understood the groups to which I belonged in terms of my own needs in relationship to this group instead of understanding who the people of these groups were. From whence I came to realize that yes sometimes we our loving the image we create for ourselves of a group instead of loving the people who are in it as they are in reality.
Loving, not blindly, but with eyes wide opened!
The present reflection led me from a love that we sometimes call «blind» to a love that makes room for the full conscience of who is the other person. This means not to exclude whatever tendencies a given person before us might have that might be unpleasant to us or aggravating to the environment we are comfortable and familiar with.
The most surprising aspect of what I am trying to describe in the present article is this. I am now under the impression that God at last granted me what I prayed for years back. That prayer – based Ephesians 3.14-21 – was that I may become able to love in truth.
The leitmotiv « loving with opened eyes », or «with eyes wide opened» led me toward this way of being and preserves me in this pursuit. One that in years past was beyond me. What seemed beyond my ability to understand and to live is now part of my life. This, as it seems to me, is a result of what I sometimes call spiritual integration, meaning the coming together of several aspects of Christianity that it took me years to finally grasp. Jesus loves us with opened eyes so that we may love others with our eyes wide opened.
You wish to get involved and discuss about life-related subject matters, feel free to join our trilingual Community of dialog about the Christian Faith (French, English, Spanish). You are also welcome to share below some aspect of your hard-gained life experience.
