Forgiveness is hard to understand and even harder to do. Grownups ask me all the time about what forgiveness is and isn’t, and if it means forgetting and acting like nothing happened or if we can still be careful when someone is dangerous. Learning about the forgiveness from God we have through our King Jesus, and what Jesus told us to do, and how He helps us grow from people who never want to forgive and don’t know how to even begin, to people who are able to forgive, helps us to follow God maybe more than any other thing He asks us to do.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions.
Forgiveness is a really tough thing to understand. It’s even tougher to do, and especially when we are confused about what forgiveness is and isn’t. What about when we are told we need to forgive someone? What about when we want someone to forgive us? Does forgiveness mean pretending like nothing happened or that everything is okay? Does forgiveness mean that everything goes back to the way things were? These are all questions that grownups really struggle with and I get questions all the time. The answer to all of the questions about is—it depends on what happened and why it happened. Like all difficult things in our lives, we need something called wisdom when it comes to dealing with forgiveness. And when things require wisdom, we know that there are never any easy answers or rules that apply to absolutely every situation in the same way. That doesn’t mean that we don’t need to forgive or that it’s going to be easy. Not at all. Forgiveness is something that has to be learned, and true forgiveness isn’t something we can fake. But it is something we can get better and better at as we learn to walk with God and listen to Him, and we can also get better at deciding what forgiveness looks like in different situations. Not all sins are the same and so not all forgiveness is the same either. I guess we should start with looking at the forgiveness God gives us through Jesus.
The forgiveness we have in Jesus is different than all the other kinds of forgiveness that we have here on earth. In the days of Jesus, the Jews were talking about sins in terms of a debt or a bill that needs to be paid. A debt is money that you owe to someone. Like a house payment or a car loan or maybe you borrowed five dollars from someone and promised to pay them back. That’s a debt and the Bible tells us how important it is to pay our debts—especially when someone has done work for us and we owe them money for it, because they have to eat, right? But the Bible also tells us to be merciful when people owe us money and they just don’t have it. Every seven years, the children of Israel were commanded to forgive the debts of anyone who owed them money. That’s right, they had to just tear up those bills and toss them in the fire. God promised to make things right for the people who were generous and kind to people who just couldn’t pay them back.
And you know what? By the time I finally started listening to Jesus, I had such a huge bill from all the sinful, mean things I had done, and all the lies I had told, and even the mistakes I had made that hurt people—well, there was no way I could ever pay God or the people I had hurt back for all the awful things I had done. And I was doing just fine (well, not really) until the day that God told me how much I was hurting people and hurting Him too. Wow. And it took him two whole months of talking to me all the time, poking and prodding me with thoughts about how much I needed Him and that He wanted me to be an entirely different person. Boy oh boy did I put up a huge fight. But it was that last week that was just the worst because day and night, night and day He wouldn’t leave me alone. He was determined to get through to me that He loved me, even though I wouldn’t understand it for many years. I just thought He wanted to be the boss of me and, in fact, when I finally gave my life to Him that’s exactly what I said, “Okay, I get it, you’re the boss of my life.”
And even though I was wrong about that—well, not totally wrong but I sure didn’t realize that God loved me yet—things began changing in big ways in my life. That was twenty-five years ago and I am still changing a lot. I was really messed up, so He is still working on me. So, anytime you think you are hopeless because your life isn’t changing overnight, just remember that God is still working on Miss Tyler to get her to where He wants her to be. No one can go from being like I was to being like Jesus overnight—it takes a lifetime and even then we aren’t exactly like Him. He’s perfect.
The thing is that God wanted to rip up the bill I owed Him and everyone else so He could throw it in the fire. He knew that I couldn’t ever hope to carry all those terrible sins and make a fresh start. Have you ever heard that expression? To make a fresh start? It’s like those poor people in ancient Israel who owed more money than they could ever pay—maybe because a famine had destroyed their food or their land or enemy soldiers had come in and stolen everything. There are lots of reasons why someone can be too poor to pay their bills. But unless someone tore up those bills, they would be paying them for the rest of their lives and they wouldn’t ever be able to have a chance to be free. We all need to be forgiven sometimes, right? It might not be money—sometimes we need for people to forgive us when we have done something wrong so that we can be friends again or at least not enemies. To forgive someone else is a very great gift. Until we forgive a person, they have to carry their guilt forever and even after they are sorry and have changed.
Have you ever done anything to hurt someone, where you feel really sorry and want to be friends again but they won’t forgive you? That hurts a lot, right? It’s like they are holding you in a prison that you can’t ever get out of until they say so. Maybe they do it because they are hurting and they don’t want to hurt anymore and they are so angry that they want you to hurt as much as they do. They might be angry that they can’t go back and change things to the way they were before they were hurt in the first place. But when we hurt people, or help people, we change their lives. They can’t go back to being the same person that they were before they were hurt or helped—they have that memory in their mind and they were changed whether they wanted to be or not. That’s why, the sooner we give our lives over to God as our King, the better because we can’t ever totally take anything we say or do back. When we agree to let God be our King and believe that Jesus is our King, and let them change us, we will hurt people less and less because we will begin to care more about them and the Holy Spirit helps us to stop being mean, little by little, day after day, year after year. That’s how we learn to love people the way Jesus tells us to.
When we start to understand that Jesus wants us to have a clean slate, meaning a fresh start, by forgiving what we have done in the past, it means that we have the freedom to start living a different way. We aren’t stuck in that ditch of sin forever. God lifts us out of it and we can be different people. Imagine if you owed someone else a bazillion dollars and you had to pay them back a thousand dollars a day. You would know that there was no way you could ever get it done. It would be hopeless. No one has that kind of money. But with God, it is never like that. Sure, we owe Him a bazillion dollars but His favorite thing to do is to tear up bills and throw them in the fire. It’s what He wants most in the world. He isn’t just hoping to be able to punish us—that’s the last thing in the world He wants. He wants us to accept Him as our King so that He can forgive us and show us a new way of living where we can begin to forgive others too, the way we have been forgiven. But we can’t do that unless He forgives us first. That’s one of the ways that we follow Him. But what does forgiveness look like in our lives?
There are different kinds of forgiveness. A lot of people don’t understand that. The first kind of forgiveness is called “turning the other cheek.” In Jesus’s time, reputation was very important and if someone slapped a man, he had to slap them back or he would be shamed and made fun of by the other men. His whole family would get angry at him for making them look like a bunch of wimps. Getting revenge was very important to them so that people would respect them and their family. But Jesus told them to stop doing that—when someone insulted them by smacking them across the face, they had to forgive that insult by refusing to get even. That wasn’t something that anyone wanted to hear. That was the opposite of what they were all doing and had been taught to do. I can hear them grumbling in the crowd, “What? How on earth does He expect us to be respected if we just let people get away with insulting us? Everyone will think we are pathetic weaklings! They will walk all over us and our lives will be ruined!” And maybe they were right, but Jesus was very serious. Not insulting those people back was a way of forgiving them for being mean. Jesus was telling His fellow Jews that it was important to God that they become peacemakers by letting the small stuff go. People insult me on the internet all the time, but if I fight back then I know I will start looking just like them and then people will take sides and it will be a mess. But if I talk to them calmly instead and they keep insulting me, it makes them look bad and people see that they don’t need to take sides at all because I have things under control and I am not hurt at all. When I do that, I am forgiving them and giving them another chance.
But what if someone robs my house or attacks me with a weapon? Do I get them back by robbing their house or going after them with a weapon? Jesus says no. I should call the police to let them know that there is someone dangerous out there who needs to be stopped, but if I go after them then I am just getting revenge and revenge is the opposite of forgiveness. And I won’t be happy no matter how much I hurt the person who has hurt me, scared me, or robbed me. I will just keep hurting them over and over again because my hurt will never go away. As long as we are getting even, we will always be angry and hurting because nothing will ever be enough. We have to know when to say enough is enough and so enough has to be before we get even in the first place. Justice is very important to God and so it should be important to us too. People do need to be caught when they have done bad things, by people who will hold them responsible—the Bible teaches us that. But it’s about impossible for us to do it and still be merciful when what we want isn’t justice but to get even. Getting even with someone else is always about doing something worse to them than they did to us. That’s why we call the police because hopefully they will be fair.
Jesus told His disciples that they need to be willing to forgive or they wouldn’t be forgiven and that scares a lot of people but I don’t want you to be scared. Jesus knows how hard it is for us to learn to forgive, and that we have to be taught how to do it and how to be gentle and loving. He is very patient to teach us all those things and He understands that it isn’t something we can just decide to do and suddenly be good at it or wise about it. The best place to start forgiving is to be kind to the people who have hurt you and are really very sorry and want another chance. Maybe someone lied, or maybe there was just a misunderstanding and they got mad at you for something you didn’t do, and they said something mean. That happens to all of us, and we all do things that hurt other people. We want people to forgive us and give us a hug when that happens and to understand that it wasn’t because we hated them. That happens in families all the time, right? We get frustrated and cranky and we say something nasty just because we want someone to feel hurt, but then we come to our senses and realize that it just made things worse and we want a clean slate to start over again. So, we say we are sorry and do nice things to try and make up for it. Forgiveness means that the other person decides to be kind and understanding and accept you again. But if they hold a grudge and don’t forgive you for even the small things, that can feel worse than anything you did to them. That’s another way to get revenge—by not forgiving.
That’s a very dangerous kind of unforgiveness because we are all guilty of sinning that way. I have apologized to my kids and my husband for being mean—a lot! I want them to know that I love them and that I am sorry and that I was wrong to be mean. I want them to know that they deserve an apology. I want them to know that they are important to me, and that I owe them an apology. I don’t apologize to get them to forgive me. I can’t make them do that. I apologize because I was wrong and they didn’t deserve what I did to them. I can’t make it so that my sin never happened, but I can let them know that I was wrong. We won’t all steal or hit someone with a stick, but we have all said and done things that are hurtful. If we aren’t willing to forgive others when we do the same things that they do, then how can God forgive us for doing the exact same things? Fortunately, He is very patient as we learn how to forgive. It takes a long, long time. But it also gets easier the more we do it.
It’s funny, in a way, that God tells us that we have to forgive BUT we can’t force anyone to forgive us. All we can do is ask, and whether they forgive or not is up to them. That’s why we need to learn not to sin against other people because we never know what will be the last straw for them—the thing that they decide is too much and they never want to be around us again. We owe it to God to forgive people, but that isn’t the same thing as us being able to force people to forgive us. Honestly, when we do that, we aren’t looking like we are very sorry or understanding about what we did to hurt them. And some people will get angry over a misunderstanding and won’t forgive us even when we didn’t do anything. We can’t do anything about that either except to be kind and leave them alone. That’s really hard, let me tell you. I had a really good friend in the 8th grade and we were close all through the summer before our first year of high school. One the first day back, she looked at me with hatred and hurt in her eyes but to this day I don’t know why. She would never tell me. I wouldn’t have hurt her on purpose, but I guess she thought I did and never forgave me. I had to be kind because the only other thing I could do was be mean. I wasn’t a Christian then, but I knew that being mean back to her wasn’t going to solve anything. I couldn’t make her tell me what was wrong and I couldn’t force her to forgive me. But I could learn to forgive her. It took a long time.
What do we do when someone hurts us and apologizes and then hurts us again and apologizes again and it just keeps going on forever? Well, there is the kind of forgiveness where we are friends again just like we were before and then there are sad times when we forgive the person who is hurting us but have to keep them away from us. When we can go back to normal with a person, that’s called reconciliation. Reconciliation is like a hug after an argument, okay? Where there is still love there and trust and the relationship you have with a person has been hurt but can get better again and you want to work on it. But what about when someone is dangerous? You can forgive them by not getting back at them and by being kind to them instead when you see them, but that doesn’t mean they should be a part of your life. Someone once told me a story and I wish I knew where it came from because it was a good one. Someone came up to Jesus once and asked him how many times he should forgive his brother for sinning against him—seven times maybe? Jesus said, seventy times seven times! And that doesn’t mean you keep a score sheet for every time you forgive a person—that’s messed up. It means that we keep on forgiving forever. But what does that look like in real life? Here’s where the story comes in–
A friend knocks at your door and you open it and they punch you right in the face and walk away. Then they come back later, knocking on your door and saying they are sorry, so you open the door and after forgiving them and talking a while, they punch you in the face again. And this happens again and again. Opening that door was reconciliation, okay? Trying for things to be good again. But there comes a time when forgiveness is all we can give because the other person doesn’t want the relationship to be good—they just want us to open the door so that they can punch us again. At some point, when you hear the knock at the door and the person says sorry, you leave the door closed and say, “I forgive you but I am not going to open the door again to give you any more chances to punch me.” I really like that story because it shows the difference between forgiving someone and letting them hurt you forever. You don’t have to let anyone hurt you forever. You can leave the door closed when it is dangerous to open it. That doesn’t mean you aren’t being forgiving, it just means that you are done with being punched. And, if anyone is doing something like that, I would suggest calling the police. You don’t deserve to be hurt. Forgiveness means that you don’t hurt the person who hurt you, but it doesn’t mean you have to let them hurt you forever.
Forgiveness is really hard to learn. I don’t want you scared that God is going to like send a lightning bolt at your butt for not being able to forgive perfectly and especially not right away. There are times you will feel like you have forgiven a person totally and then something happens and you feel all the terrible anger and bad feelings for them all over again. That’s normal. It makes me angry when someone hurts me and especially when they don’t even care or never apologize. But when I don’t forgive, my mind starts thinking of all the terrible things I wish would happen to them. I don’t want them to change. I want them to be bad so that they can be punished forever. That’s what happens in my brain when I am unforgiving. But when I am forgiving, I start to understand that I do want them to change. I don’t want them to keep being bad just so that I can have my revenge against them. I want them to change to be good so that they won’t hurt anyone else and so that the world will be a better place. I want the people who have hurt me, to stop hurting others too. If they never change, then how many other people will they hurt? Satan wins when that happens. I want God to win. I want God to take the people who have hurt me the most and to change them into the kinds of people who are sorry for all the bad they have done, and help people instead. When we forgive them, and we don’t get even, we get out of their way and it makes it easier for God to reach them and change them.
There are people who did that for me, even though I didn’t understand it at the time. They didn’t get back at me when I hurt them—if they had, I would have just gotten back at them even worse because sometimes I didn’t think I had done anything wrong in the first place. But they were patient with me because God was patient with them. They showed me a different way and as they were kind even when I was mean, I started to feel bad when I would hurt them. God was using their forgiveness to teach me how to start loving others as they were loving me. I wanted people to forgive me. I needed people to forgive me. Sometimes, I needed people to walk away from me so I could understand that I can go too far. Without forgiveness—the forgiveness of God and other people in my life—I would still be who I was twenty-five years ago and the world would be a worse place than it is now, at least for the people who know me.
People didn’t keep me in a jail by not forgiving me, and when they were wrong they said they were sorry. That showed me a different and better way. I liked how it felt when they said they were sorry when they had hurt me. I wanted other people to feel that way when I hurt them and knew I was wrong. And the more I did that, the more God could trust me and show me the other things I was doing that hurt people. And He showed me how to make things better. I still hurt people sometimes, but I know that making things right again is an easy way to help someone else’s heart heal. And I give people space when they don’t know how to forgive me yet. I can’t force them to forgive me. I also can’t force them to apologize. That’s God’s job. It’s good to learn to say sorry, but no one can make us mean it. God wants us to say it and to mean it. And He wants us to be able to learn how to forgive too.
Next week, we are going to start learning how to be more like Jesus and I am very excited about this. Before we move on to more of the life story of Abraham and Sarah, and then to Isaac and Jacob and his sons, we need to look at Jesus so we can see the difference between being perfect and being really messed up and in need of Jesus!
I love you. I am praying for you. And I know that you can change your life and the world around you by learning to forgive.