Forgiveness

Today's Scripture

Lewis called chastity the most unpopular Christian virtue. Then he met this one. Read Jesus's words slowly — including the verse churches tend to skip.

Matthew 6:12 — "and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors."

Matthew 6:14-15 — "For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses."

Matthew 18:21-22 — "Then Peter came up and said to him, 'Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?' Jesus said to him, 'I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times.'"

The Big Idea

Forgiveness sounds beautiful right up until you actually have someone to forgive. Jesus commands it anyway, and ties it to our own forgiveness. Lewis's key that unlocks the command: loving a sinner while hating the sin is not impossible — you have been doing it to yourself your whole life. And the power to do it for others flows from the cross, where God did it for you.

Reflection

A lovely idea, until it isn't

Remember when Lewis was saying all this. It was the 1940s. German bombs had been falling on British cities; nearly every listener had lost something or someone. Into those living rooms, over the radio, Lewis said that Christians must forgive their enemies — and he knew exactly how it would land:

"Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

That sentence finds all of us eventually. Forgiveness is easy to admire at a distance, like a mountain. Then one day the betrayal is yours — the rumor spread about you, the friend who walked away, the parent who broke the family, the cruelty you cannot un-remember — and the lovely idea suddenly has teeth.

We might hope Jesus would lower the bar for hard cases. He does the opposite. Right in the middle of the Lord's Prayer — the prayer Christians say more than any other — sits Matthew 6:12: "and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors." That tiny word as is terrifying if you stop and look at it. We are asking God to treat us the way we treat the people who hurt us. And in case anyone thinks Jesus did not mean it, he adds a footnote to the prayer. Matthew 6:14-15 — "For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." Lewis refused to soften this, because honesty would not let him:

"There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

This is not God selling forgiveness for a fee. It is something more like a law of nature: a clenched fist cannot receive a gift. The heart that locks others out of mercy locks itself out too. Peter felt the weight of this and tried to negotiate a ceiling — seven times sounded generous. Matthew 18:22 — "I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times." Jesus's number is not math; it is a way of saying stop counting. Forgiveness is not a transaction you complete. It is a way of life.

The person you already forgive every day

But how? How do you love someone whose actions you despise? Some older Christians had a saying: hate the sin, love the sinner. Lewis admits he used to find it ridiculous — until he noticed something hiding in plain sight:

"For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life — namely myself." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Think about it. You know your own worst moments better than anyone — the lie you told, the person you froze out, the thing you said that you would pay money to take back. You may genuinely hate those things. But you do not stop being on your own side. You wake up the next morning still hoping good things for yourself. Lewis pushes the insight one step further:

"In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

So the supposedly impossible command turns out to be something you already know how to do. You have been loving a sinner while hating his sins your entire life. Christianity simply asks you to widen the circle — to extend to your enemy the same baffling mercy you extend to yourself before breakfast every day.

Here is what that means practically. Picture the person whose name stings. Eleven o'clock at night, and you are replaying what they said for the fortieth time, polishing the comeback you never got to deliver. Each replay feels like justice. It is actually a treadmill — effort, sweat, no distance. Lewis's move offers a way off: you do not have to pretend the wrong was small. You only have to start hoping for the wrongdoer the way you stubbornly keep hoping for yourself.

What forgiveness is not

Be careful here, because this is where forgiveness gets misunderstood — and misused. Forgiving does not mean deciding the evil was not evil. Lewis is emphatic:

"Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them... But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Not one atom. You can forgive and still call the thing wicked. You can forgive and still testify in court, still set boundaries, still protect yourself and others. Forgiveness is not the same as trust, and it is not amnesia. It is the decision to stop drinking the poison of revenge and to start wanting the other person's cure instead of their destruction.

Few people have tested this more severely than Corrie ten Boom. She survived a Nazi concentration camp; her sister Betsie did not. Years later, after a church service in Germany, a former guard from that very camp stood in front of her with his hand out, asking forgiveness. She stood there, unable to lift her arm — and prayed for help. What happened next she described this way:

"And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself." — Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place

The command comes with the power included. That is the only explanation for people like Corrie — and it is exactly what Jesus promised when he gave the command in the first place. Matthew 5:43-45 — "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven." Loving enemies is not soft. It is the family resemblance of God's children — and, as Martin Luther King Jr. preached in the middle of real persecution, it is the only force that actually changes anything:

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that." — Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love

Paul says the same in six words: Romans 12:21 — "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." Refusing to forgive feels like strength. It is actually surrender — letting their evil keep ruling your heart rent-free. Forgiveness is the counterattack.

Forgiven people forgive

But notice where the New Testament always plants this command. It never says "forgive, because you're a nice person." It says something far sturdier. Ephesians 4:31-32 — "Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you." And again, Colossians 3:13 — "as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive." The engine of forgiveness is not willpower. It is memory — the living memory of being forgiven.

This is where the gospel quietly rearranges everything. John Stott points out that we cannot even see the cross correctly until we find ourselves in the crowd that caused it:

"Before we can begin to see the cross as something done for us (leading us to faith and worship), we have to see it as something done by us (leading us to repentance)." — John Stott, The Cross of Christ

Done by us. My sin helped build that cross. And what did Jesus pray, with the nails still being driven? Luke 23:34 — "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." He did not wait for the soldiers to apologize. He did not wait for us. Romans 5:8 — "But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." While. Still. God's forgiveness ran ahead of our repentance, paid the full bill, and then came looking for us.

Lewis compressed the whole chapter into one sentence, in a later essay:

"To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you." — C.S. Lewis, On Forgiveness

The inexcusable. Not the understandable mistakes — the inexcusable things. That is what God forgave in you, at the cost of his Son. The person who has truly felt that has a new kind of arithmetic: my debt to God was a mountain; their debt to me, real and painful as it is, is smaller than what I was forgiven. Forgiven people forgive — not because the wound is fake, but because the cross is real.

Going Deeper

Take Corrie ten Boom's first step today: you do not need warm feelings, only a willing hand. Write down the name of one person you need to forgive. Then pray two things, out loud if you can: "Father, thank you for forgiving the inexcusable in me," and "Father, I choose to want their good — help my feelings catch up." If the wound is deep, tell a wise believer and let them walk with you. Forgiveness this hard was never meant to be done alone — and it never has to be, because the One who commands it supplies the love.