Dear Supporters of SSI,

Forgiveness, we all need it. We all need to forgive others. Webster’s defines the word ‘forgive’ in this way: “To give up resentment against or the desire to punish; stop being angry with; pardon.” Paul writes in Ephesians 4 that we are now new people in Jesus Christ. He is now living in us. We are to put Him on as we would put on clothes. “And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor (loud quarreling) be put away from you, with all malice and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another even as God in Christ forgave you.” NKJV When Jesus cried out on the cross (Luke 23:34) “Father, forgive them they know not what they do,” to put it in modern day vernacular he was saying, “they don’t have a clue.” Having been in S. Africa for a pastors-wives conference this past month we saw a great need for racial reconciliation and forgiveness. Race relations are a hot button in our own culture, too. As in all relations, if we have been wronged by others and we are waiting for them to feel our pain, the chances are good that it will never happen. Sometime back someone wronged me and hurt me rather deeply and I went to him told him that I forgave him. His response was “For what?”

Someone has said that “hatred and bitterness toward another person is like taking poison and wishing the other person would die.” Frederick Buechner wrote “To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel, both the pain you are given and the pain your are giving back is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.” We probably all know people who have shriveled up into a shell of what they once were, in their personality as well as sometimes in their physical presence. The root of it all is an unforgiving spirit that has turned into bitterness.

These things grieve the Spirit of God. God cannot work in that kind of soil. We end up dying a slow death, a little bit at a time. In the words of John Steinbeck, in Grapes of Wrath wrote, “When they die, it was if they had never lived.

Stephen, the first Christian martyr, while he was dying from the stoning in Acts 7, cried out with a loud voice, “Lord, do not lay this sin to their charge.” V. 60 NKJV “Don’t hold it against them.” What grace! We are never more like Jesus than when we are in the process of forgiving others who have wronged us.

Good things come from our unjust suffering if we allow it. In I Peter 2:21-24 we read, “For to this you were called, because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that you should follow His steps: ‘Who committed no sin, nor was deceit found in His mouth’: who when He was reviled, did not revile in return; when He suffered, He did not threaten, but committed Himself to Him who judges righteously: who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness---by whose stripes (wounds) you were healed.”

Healing for ourselves and for others comes from our having a forgiving spirit. God never wastes anything, including the wrongs we have inflicted on others or the wrongs inflicted on us. Joseph is the classic O.T. example. With all the mistreatment he recognized that “But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive.” Genesis 50:20

Stephen’s gracious example of forgiveness no doubt was a factor in the great Apostle Paul’s conversion, for he was standing there watching all of this happen according to Acts 7:58. Paul has had a profound influence in all of our lives, far more then we will ever understand on this side of eternity. The Holy Spirit was not grieved and therefore powerfully at work in the early church. Is there someone you need to ask to forgive you? Is there someone you need to forgive? Don’t wait until you become a skeleton.

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