What is forgiveness? When should it be given? And how does the Bible illustrate it? Roseanne, thank you for joining us for this episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. for this episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. On two previous occasions, you joined us for a conversation or for two conversations about abuse, and you gave us an overview of how churches have responded to abuse, both in the past and the present.
And you helped us to think about how to help those around us when we learn that they have been experiencing abuse. After hearing these conversations, some in our audience nudged us to speak more about forgiveness. And they were specifically addressing the concern that if an abuser experiences ongoing consequences for their actions, that they have not been properly receiving forgiveness. So in this episode, we want to address what forgiveness is, how the Bible illustrates it.
And then I think you plan to share what forgiveness has meant for you. So to begin, let's think about the definition of forgiveness. Or what does forgiveness even mean? That question has been answered by a lot of people from a lot of different perspectives. Some of them have done a far more in-depth study than I have, but let me just give you a few clarifications of what I mean when I talk about forgiveness. forgiveness is not forgetting. forgiveness is not forgetting.
There are a lot of scriptures that talk about God remembering our sins no more removing them far from us, making us white as snow, and so on. But not forgetting God is choosing, not to mention our sins to us again. God is choosing not to exact revenge on us. God is choosing to remove record of our sins from outstanding debt. But I don't think there's scripture that says God forgets in the sense that he has no memory of our former sins.
There is a scripture where Paul talks about forgetting those things which are behind in Philippians, but he seems to be referring to forgetting his own efforts to achieve righteousness, rather than forgetting the fact that he was a sinner saved by grace. We also don't repeatedly practice communion because we or God have forgotten the price he paid to forgive our sins. We're celebrating the sacrifice he made so that our sins could be forgiven.
forgiveness also is not denying, minimizing, or excusing another person's sin against us. When Jesus was forgiving sin, he didn't typically say, oh, that's okay. We all sin sometimes. Or I understand you were under a lot of stress at the time. He would typically say your sins are forgiven and then give direction to go forth a changed person. There was no minimizing or excusing in the forgiveness. Forgiveness is not a feeling.
Psychology today defines forgiveness as a release of resentment or anger. And although part of forgiveness is recognizing our feelings about the sin and the sinner and releasing them to God for healing, for sure, forgiveness in Scripture is more of a transaction between two parties than a release of feelings by one party. Scripture talks about confronting the sinner. Confession by the sinner. Repentance. Forgiveness by the one sinned against, and then the forging of a new path forward.
This is a transaction, a process, not a feeling. In fact, forgiveness is more often a choice to obey God rather than because we wake up one day feeling in a forgiving mood. Saying to someone you need to forgive me is like saying you need to love me. God does command us to love one another and forgive one another. But neither of these is scripturally based on feelings. And the fourth thing I think of when I think of what forgiveness is not, is reconciliation or restoration to a former state.
This is probably where most of the questions about forgiveness have arisen. Is forgiveness the same as reconciliation? Again, we might not all mean the same thing when we say reconciliation. I mentioned previously that when Jesus forgave, he did not say, return to your former ways. Okay, so the forgiven sinner should not return to their former ways. Repentance means turning from your sin. How then can we encourage the one forgiving, to return to their former relationship with the one who sinned?
Forgiveness is not restoration to a former state, but transformation into something new that glorifies God. The former sinful relationship didn't. So that's what forgiveness is not. What is it? How do we define it? For me, it's a commitment not to dwell on the injury mentally thinking about it all the time, not to bring it up and accuse the other person with it ever again, and not to bring it up to others to gossip about it. This doesn't mean you won't ever think about it again.
You won't forget as soon as you forgive. It's about choosing not to dwell on it. You might not feel much release or peace either, initially. You'll need to choose this commitment over and over and ask God to help you with it. If it's not possible to confront the one who sinned against you due to death or other circumstances, you can prepare your heart between you and God to make that commitment, not to actively remember anymore or talk about it in terms of a debt owed to you.
I think that's my best attempt to define forgiveness. That's good. That's very good. Thank you. Thank you. In a previous conversation with us, that you did called Responding to Abuse, which we would encourage our audience to listen to if you haven't yet. you encourage us to look into the stories of Scripture where characters experienced forgiveness. Can you share a story or two with us from the Bible where somebody experienced forgiveness, particularly in light of the ongoing consequences?
Okay, so one of the Bible's overarching themes is humanity's fall into sin and God's plan of redemption. So forgiveness is found all over in Scripture. It it's all about God's forgiveness for us and ours for one another. Because this particular episode is framed in the context of something like sexual abuse, I think of David and Bathsheba story.
The Bible tells us that David stayed at home in his palace in Jerusalem while his troops went out to battle, as he was walking around on his palace roof. He saw a woman bathing. He sent for her to be brought to his palace and he slept with her. Then he sent her back home. I can only imagine that he expected that no one would ever know about this. Some have talked a lot about the sin of Bathsheba. She shouldn't have been bathing where David could see her.
She should have stayed away, etc. etc. this feels to me like an attempt to deviate from the intent of the entire scripture passage. The story is about David, anything said about Bathsheba's responsibility or lack thereof is conjecture. When David received word that Bathsheba was with child, he had her husband killed to try to cover up his sin. This was a man who knew God's law. A man who knew that adultery was punishable by stoning and murder was punishable by death.
But David required a confrontation by the prophet Nathan before he was willing to admit his sin. If you read Psalm 51, you get a picture of David's heartfelt confession, repentance, and sorrow for his sin. You asked about ongoing consequences. Second Samuel 12:11-14 gives us consequences after David was forgiven. God promised he would not die immediately, but the child conceived in the affair did.
God also spoke of ongoing calamity in David's household and the eventual taking of his wives by someone else, as he had taken Uriah's wife, Bathsheba. Scripture then goes on to record the rape of one of David's daughters by her brother, the murder of one of David's sons by his brother, and the public adultery of Absalom with David's concubines. There were definitely ongoing consequences of forgiven sin that is stated pretty clearly in the text.
The consequences didn't signify lack of forgiveness. They were an outcome of the sin that had occurred. It's interesting to me that David's writings were not removed from Scripture on account of his sin. They have much to teach us, but neither did God remove the consequences of the sin entirely. Now you might say, well, that was that was Old Testament. What about Jesus teachings on forgiveness? I mentioned earlier that Jesus often said, your sins are forgiven.
But we seldom have accounts of those people after their forgiveness by Jesus. We don't know what consequences may or may not have followed them. I think sometimes Jesus prayer for his executioners on the cross when he prayed, father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. This is sometimes held up as a model to encourage people to immediately forgive any wrongs without interacting with the wrongdoer.
I find it interesting that Jesus did not specifically say this to Judas in the garden when Judas betrayed him, nor did he say it to Peter when Peter denied him. Those disciples, when confronted with their sin, had to choose to repent or not and deal with the consequences of their sin. I doubt it was easy for Peter to face Jesus again. Now I know a lot of groups of worshipers struggle with the issue of ongoing sanctions administered by the church body.
In the case of members who've been found guilty of abuse, I have not been called to church leadership, so I don't feel comfortable commenting on that specifically. We can speak about forgiveness conceptually and in a rather detached fashion. But these questions have deep implications for the human soul. And for many people, questions of forgiveness come with vivid memories, deep pain and real heart rending implications.
On a previous occasion, and I think it was in one of the episodes that we already, published with you, you shared with us that the choice of forgiveness has directly confronted you. Can you share about this? I think people's journeys, as you mentioned, to forgiveness and healing, are deeply personal. They're as diverse as people's stories of how they came to Christ. The stories are very powerful.
Revelation 12:11 says, the saints in heaven overcame Satan by the blood of the lamb and by the word of their testimony. So I will try to share a few lessons learned on my unique journey. Not saying that any of my story applies to anyone else, but in case there could be some help or insight someone could gather.
So I grew up in a faith community where our heroes were those Christians who love their enemies, bless those who cursed them, did good to those who hated them, and prayed for those who mistreated them. Forgiveness was a very deep, foundational concept in our theology. At the same time, I grew up being abused by an adult who was considered an upstanding citizen in that same community. As all children do. I tried to make sense of my world.
The abuse had to be kept secret, so it must be wrong if the perpetrator was an upstanding citizen in the community and something wrong was happening between us, then the fault must be mine. So I spent a lot of time as a child praying and pleading for forgiveness, and still was never able to stop the abuse. The thing that was wrong. So I was I was very conflicted. There must be something flawed in me, so flawed that even God couldn't fix it.
Or if I entertained the idea that the fault wasn't mine, then I knew that I should forgive. And I did. Often I promised God, I forgave, but still nothing changed. Imagine if you can, the ideas that developed out of that conflict. People couldn't be relied on to care for me. God either couldn't or wouldn't protect me. I was too twisted to be loved, accepted, or redeemed. I gave my life to Jesus and was baptized in my teens.
Then for a short while, I felt relieved because now I had done everything the Bible taught for salvation to the extent of my understanding. Surely I would be forgiven now. Then it occurred to me that I might be responsible for the abuser going to hell if I kept the secret and said nothing. But I kept getting confused with feeling that if I said anything it would be mean spirited and unforgiving, and that was sinful to.
So imagine trying to reconcile in one soul, forgiving a sinner and sharing communion with that same sinner while maintaining responsible for hiding the sin and never letting anyone know about it year after year. By the time I turned 30, I had survived depression, burnout, and an eating disorder, which all finally led me to talking about sexual abuse with a counselor.
When I finally truly understood that this thing had never been my fault, and that I had suffered all that guilt and anguish unnecessarily, and that this had affected all my relationships with other people in lack of trust and so on. I finally responded in anger, and I felt like it would be fair for the abuser to be penalized according to the damage caused by the abuse.
Untangling all the ideas I had woven into my worldview in all those years was a long, painful, and sometimes excruciating process. I share this as a caution about pushing people to forgive too quickly. I tried to forgive for many years, but I never understood what I was actually forgiving or what forgiveness meant. For so long, my so-called forgiveness had merely covered someone’s sin. I had also been well schooled in the Matthew 18 format for dealing with offenses.
So I approached my abuser alone. In hindsight, I would recommend that someone who's been abused from childhood should never approach their abuser alone. Even as an adult, the victim requires a lot of healing before they can respond as an adult to the one who's abused them all their life. Eventually, I was offered an apology. One of those I can't remember ever abusing you, but if I offended you in some way, I'm sorry, deals. That is not a confession.
There is nothing to forgive in that statement. So I waited. By the time a confession naming the sin came. I had adopted the definition of forgiveness I gave earlier. It's a while back now, but I think the courts imposed a two year no contact order so that at least that much time elapsed before I spoke to the abuser about forgiveness. By that time, the sinner had been confronted. The sin had been named. A confession had been received.
So I promised to forgive, to not bring up the sin again in such a way as to suggest there was an outstanding debt. I did this because Christ died to forgive my sin, and because he asked me to forgive others likewise, not because I felt like doing it or because the abuser deserved it. As the years passed, I came to understand that some consequences of abuse to the victim are lifelong. Confession and forgiveness do not erase all the scars.
So for me, part of forgiveness also became agreeing to bear the penalty of the sin against me. This is what Jesus did for me. He paid the price. He bore the penalty. I must do the same. What was not my role in this scenario was judging whether or not the perpetrator had truly repented. That was between the confessor and God. Enforcing any type of consequences was also not my role. For years, I would have had difficulty maintaining my commitment to forgiveness.
If I had been any part of deciding consequences for the offender, I just wasn't comfortable around this person until time and God did their work. And they did. I consider forgiveness a miracle. It changes your life. Now, I guess one consequence, if you will, that I was part of was that I didn't return to live alone with the person I had forgiven for sexually abusing me. Some might have thought that was reconciliation to me. That would have been like moving a recovering alcoholic into a bar.
It's love, not unforgiveness, to help someone be accountable to God. As you tell your story, Roseanne. I feel sadness. I feel weighty. You really have suffered much, if it's okay. Can I ask some follow up questions? First, you said that you believed that God either couldn't or wouldn't protect you, and you saw yourself as unlovable. But as I know you now, I think that your view of God has changed. How did that happen?
The other thing I was interested to hear more from you about was when you said that part of forgiveness was agreeing to bear the penalty of the sin against you. What do you mean by that? That? yeah, that would be a fairly long conversation. basically. And, you know, if I was going to try to do it in a short bit, that was part of what counseling was about. It was about exploring, recognizing the ideas I had.
Because we grow up with, the way I've explained it sometimes is I don't know if you do puzzles, but most people, when they make puzzles, they sort of put the frame together first, and then they make an assumption that every other piece fits into that framework somehow. When we're children, we develop our ideas of the world God, people, how things work. We sort of develop that framework in our fairly early years, and then the rest of our lives we spend just putting the pieces into that framework.
Now, in my case, I actually had to go back and undo the framework and redo it so that different ideas could fit into it. And that takes it takes time, it takes study, it takes prayer, it takes practice, actually, you know, recognizing your your thoughts that are wrong and trying to replace them with different thoughts. scripturally, that would be the idea of sweeping the house and replacing it with something new. But it's it's not easy and it's not quick.
I don't know if that answers any of the question for you. I believe that does. Thank you. The other. What was the other one? Oh, about bearing the penalty? Yes. Yes. that's the way I personally think about things like I will never be able to see the world from the perspective of innocence, a belief that these things don't happen, that I can't imagine growing up in a home where you're not abused. I can't imagine growing up in a place where these things don't happen.
I can't imagine not, you know, having had to deal with mistrust and so on. Those are prices I had to pay because no amount of confession by the abuser could ever change that for me. Could ever restore. God does restore our past. But some some scars remain. And as long as we keep, fighting against them, wishing they weren't so, it holds us back.
So I kind of made the decision that that was part of forgiveness, that I agree to bear those things, to live with those things, to allow God to redeem them as he chooses or to leave them as he chooses. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. That is helpful. Yeah. Thank you for engaging with that. I think we will begin to bring this episode to an end or to a close, but is there anything else that you would like to add?
I guess one thing that I think about sometimes when I talk about forgiveness is that I caution not to compare forgiving a long history of abuse by a family or church member with forgiving a single event in an adult's life. All forgiveness is costly. That's true. Recently, I had an allegation of racial discrimination made against me. Not in good faith, but that was a very difficult to forgive as it's a very loaded topic involved investigation, potential job loss and all that.
But I would say that it was easier to process and forgive a single difficult event like that as an adult than my experience of trying to deal with adults in a child's mind. there there just aren't enough words or tools to make sense of it. And so it's it's more of a complicated process. I think. Well, again, thank you for coming to join us for this conversation. And thank you for sharing about forgiveness as a concept, but also sharing how that has been a part of your story.
I trust that this will be helpful to our audience. I know it's been helpful for my own thinking about forgiveness. Okay. Thank you. Hey, Carl. This is, another recording that I'm making for a couple reasons. One is because the other recording the main recording with others and did not have a hook. Also. It's like this today, I was about as comfortable as I usually am on camera, which is to say, very uncomfortable. So I wasn't as articulate as I wanted to be.
With that being the case, there are two particular questions that I am interested in having replaced. One is where I ask Roseanna, tell her story. I said that a little bit clumsily. Also, after Rosanne told her story and I asked for some follow up questions, I was both uncomfortable and a little bit emotional and incredibly inarticulate. So I think that if that question could be replaced, well, we can make it better. So here goes with the hook. let me get my nerves up. What is forgiveness?
When should it be given? And how does the Bible illustrate forgiveness? What is forgiveness? When should it be given? And how does the Bible illustrate it? What is forgiveness? When should it be given? And how does the Bible illustrate it? Do you think that will work? I hope so. Okay. The next what I'm going to do is the question where I ask Roseanne to tell her story. We can speak about forgiveness conceptually and in a rather detached way.
but something I'm conscious of is that these questions about forgiveness have deep implications for the human soul. And for many people, questions of forgiveness come with vivid memories, deep pain, and real heart rending implications. On a previous occasion, I think, I think it was one of the earlier episodes that you did with us, you shared with, you shared with us how the choice of forgiveness has directly confronted you. So can you share with us about this?
We can speak about forgiveness conceptually and in a rather detached fashion. But these questions have deep implications for the human soul. And for many people, questions of forgiveness come with vivid memories, deep pain and real heart rending implications. On a previous occasion, and I think it was in one of the episodes that we already, published with you, you shared with us that the choice of forgiveness has directly confronted you. Can you share about this?
One of the things I'm conscious of when we talk about this is that, though we can talk about it in a rather detached fashion, the questions and the realities of forgiveness have very deep, deep implications for the human soul. And for many people, questions of forgiveness come with vivid memories. deep pain and just real heart rending implications. On a previous occasion, I think in a previous episode you did with us, you shared that the choice of forgiveness has confronted you directly.
So I was wondering if you could share with us about that. Not sure what was going on there in the middle, but I think either the first try or this last try that I did, would be better than. What happened when I was actually in the conversation with Roseanne? one more thing to do is, what I said after Roseanne told her story and ask for follow up questions. I don't know, you could probably do this better. I'm going to try to, do it over again.
As you tell your story, Roseanne, I feel sadness and I feel weighty. You have suffered much. If it's okay, can I ask some follow up questions? First, you said that you believe that God either couldn't or wouldn't protect you, and you saw yourself as unlovable. But as I know you now, your view of God has changed. How did that happen? And the other question had to do with when you said that for you. Part of forgiveness was agreeing to bear the penalty of the sin against you.
What did you mean by that? As you tell your story, Roseanne. I feel sadness. I feel weighty. You really have suffered much, if it's okay. Can I ask some follow up questions? First, you said that you believed that God either couldn't or wouldn't protect you, and you saw yourself as unlovable. But as I know you now, I think that your view of God has changed. How did that happen?
The other thing I was interested to hear more from you about was when you said that part of forgiveness was agreeing to bear the penalty of the sin against you. What do you mean by that? Okay. That's all. I think I'm going to stop with that. Hopefully something in there is, better than what happened the first time around. Thank you. Well, as I. As I hear you tell your story. it's heavy stuff, and I. I really feel, A second hand, but I think. Yeah, it just makes me sad. I'm sorry.
Sorry to hear that. There were a few things that you said that I would be interested in raising a a follow up question on, is that something you would be comfortable with in this section? So, and, You mentioned burying the penalty of the sin. That was that was one thing I would be interested in hearing more. What what did you mean? And saying that you agree to create to bear the penalty of the sin against you. And the other thing was, Oh, you mentioned how how you viewed God.
during the time of the abuse. And I guess I'm assuming that your view of God has changed with time. would that be something you'd be interested in talking about? How? How you were able if you if God developed.