Facets of Forgiveness - Emotions

The Two Parts of Forgiveness

Tonight we’re going to focus significantly on the emotions of forgiveness. As mentioned last week, we need to talk to your head before we address the heart, but we will spend considerable time on the emotions of forgiveness and how we deal with all of that.

There are two parts to forgiveness. The part we’ve been primarily focusing on is the part that takes place in the head—the part that says, I know I need to let this person off the hook. I know that in my heart, in my head, I forgive this person. Once we have done that, the head part, the decision part, there’s supposed to be somewhere along the line a change in emotions about the person. Ideally, it would result in the emotions turning from negative to positive.

The problem, however, is emotions don’t work that way. You can say in your head all you want that forgiveness is something you need to give to a person. And yet, at the same time, your heart, because of the memory of it, doesn’t feel like it’s ready to forgive. But the first part is a decision, and a decision to forgive is supposed to lead to some correction in emotions. At the very least, when we make a decision to forgive, it’s supposed to result in different behaviors toward a person. At the very least, behaviors change.

Someone hurts you, says something, does something. Our response in terms of forgiveness is to begin to treat that person, to treat that person as if the sin didn’t happen. But the emotions get in the way. The emotional response results in many times feeling like, maybe I didn’t forgive, because I still feel awkward. I still feel like something’s not quite right. So maybe, as long as the emotions are not changing, it’s a sign that I’m not really forgiving.

I tell people with great frequency: you can tuck your head into doing something, but it takes a while for the heart to catch up. And that reality—even if it’s not changing—feels like a sign that I’m not really forgiving. Even though there’s a part of us that says, I know I need to change my emotions with regard to this person, the reality is the emotions just don’t change because you want them to.

If those two parts are an accurate description of forgiveness—that there has to be a decision and there also has to be a change in emotions regarding that person, and because emotions are so slow to change, even after you’ve made the decision—then where does forgiveness occur? When does it occur? Can we at least agree that forgiveness is complicated? That it’s complex? When Jesus says words like, forgive as you’ve been forgiven, that sounds like it’s supposed to be immediate. But when Peter comes to him and says, how many times am I supposed to forgive someone? Peter, being magnanimous, says, maybe seven times, and Jesus says, how about infinite? Peter wonders, how in the world does that work?

The Difficulty of Forgiveness

How many times must a person sin against you before you finally say enough is enough? How many times does a person have to hurt you before you finally draw the boundaries? The reality is, we need to be able to make those distinctions. To continually allow a person into your life who’s hurting you all the time, some boundaries need to be drawn. In fact, we endorse the idea that being hurt repeatedly by the same person, when that pattern has been well established, maybe what we need to do is draw a hard boundary and not allow that person into our life. And in fact, we say that’s healthy.

So how do we deal with this? How many times do I forgive the person who has sinned against me? And Jesus says, how about an infinite number of times? How do we deal with that? How does that work? When the pattern’s established, how do we keep going back to the well of forgiveness and find a way to change our own emotions about it? I will tell you those answers are not easily found.

I am not denying that Jesus commands us to forgive. I’m not denying that Paul writes about that in Ephesians, how important it is for us to forgive, as God has forgiven us. What I’d really like is for there to be a passage that says, in the process of forgiveness, here’s what to do. But there are no passages that say that. And over the years, we’ve become accustomed to the idea that forgiveness is supposed to be instantaneous, and behaviors are supposed to change instantaneously, and emotions will eventually change, and they should change pretty quickly.

Do you know when it’s really easy to forgive? It’s really easy to forgive when it’s a stranger who doesn’t know you—except when they’re driving. It’s really easy to forgive when it’s a stranger and there’s no emotional connection. Now, we may have an emotional response to being hurt by the stranger, but because there’s no emotional connection, there’s no relationship, it’s fairly easy for us to say, yeah, and go on with life, because we won’t cross paths again. You can be all flustered and emotional about it, and you can say that wasn’t right, but you get over it fairly quickly.

When else is it easy to forgive? It’s when someone close to you hurts you, but they immediately follow it up with an apology. It makes it a little easier to forgive. And when I say immediately, I don’t mean a week later. I mean, like, within hours. Their recognition of their sin, their hurt, hurting you, is immediately followed with, I am sorry.

So when is it not easy to forgive? It’s when someone really close to you hurts you in some way, and they refuse to acknowledge it, and they refuse to apologize, and they act as if it’s your fault. Then it’s really tough to forgive.

Is it possible to forgive a person and not feel positively about them? Yes. Is it possible to forgive a person and your emotions not agree? Yes. So if you believe that, then maybe all the emotions that we have in connection to being hurt, maybe all those emotions need to be recognized—that forgiveness takes place outside of emotion. Maybe it really is just about the decision. Maybe it’s just when you say within your mind, I’m going to forgive that person, that forgiveness is taking place.

Power, Control, and Relationships

Relationships are complex. I don’t care how much you’ve been with a person, I don’t care how much you think you know a person, the reality is that relationships are really hard. And because relationships are so hard, there is a dynamic we don’t talk about very much, but the dynamic is this: it’s called power and control.

When someone hurts you, they have exerted power and control over you. The power balance is now out of balance. The whole time, as long as everybody’s getting along and there’s no barbs being thrown and there’s no actions that are hurtful being done, the power balance is pretty balanced. But as soon as something happens, it’s now out of balance and the person who has offended you, the person who has hurt you now has control.

How do I know that? Because you’re thinking a lot about your hurt. And as long as you’re thinking about your hurt, the person has control over you in reference to that hurt. Now, don’t hear me say that you shouldn’t be thinking about the hurt. I’m just saying that the power structure is out of balance. Because it’s out of balance, you’re giving a lot of time and energy to a person who may or may not even know they’ve hurt you.

So either you have to give the person an opportunity to know that they’ve hurt you. That means having a conversation so that the power structure can go back into being balanced. Or you have to devise ways to make sure that the other person gets hurt. That will bring the power structure back into balance. You can either have a conversation to rebalance or you can hurt the other person to bring it back into balance. The problem with the second part is if you try to hurt the other person, the other person feels like it’s now out of balance. And the cycle will just keep going.

Jesus talked about this. He said there are two ways of doing relationships in this world. He says there’s two ways to do relationships: you can either do them through power or you can do relationships through service. I think that applies not only to how relationships are structured, it also applies to how forgiveness takes place. You can forgive either because you’ve lost power and you must regain it—so now you have to hurt the other person—or you can serve them and set things back into balance.

It’s that serving them that gives us the hard part. That’s the hard part because the emotions tell us we don’t need to serve. We need to hurt them. They need to experience the hurt that I’ve experienced.

You’ve been hurt by someone that is close to you. There has been no acknowledgement of that hurt. There’s been no offer of an apology. And forgiveness becomes extremely difficult. It’s a little easier if they acknowledge and say I’m sorry. Failure to do that, it’s out of balance. How do you get it back into balance? How do you work in your brain to say I forgive even though the emotions are seeking revenge?

When the Sacred is Violated

What makes it even more difficult is if in the process of being hurt, there’s a recognition that both of you understand that what’s been hurt has affected what we call the holy, the sacred. That both of us were under the impression that we were valuing the same things and down we find out we’re not.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say you and your spouse are very much trying to be on the same page financially, and you only discover that your spouse has been spending money outside of the budget. Your spouse has been spending money without your knowledge. It’s especially easy if the spouse is the one who pays the bills, and sooner or later it all comes out.

There was an agreement between the two of you about how the money was going to be spent. There was an agreement about how all of this was supposed to be budgeted. There was also an agreement because you’re both people of faith and you’re trying to walk in faith—there was an agreement about how we viewed money. It wasn’t going to be spent selfishly; it was going to be shared. And now it’s been spent selfishly.

This is when it becomes even more difficult to forgive because that which you consider to be sacred, that which you consider to be holy, that which you thought you were on the same page about—especially in terms of your faith—has now been violated. And in your head you know you need to forgive, but in your heart, how do you forgive when the holy has been desecrated?

Your brain will tell you, if you forgive that which has been desecrated, do you not desecrate it in the forgiveness? You’ve got to hold up a standard that says we can’t desecrate that which has already been desecrated by acting as if that wasn’t such a big deal. So we’ve got to make it a big deal, get that power balance back in shape. And so you reprimand your spouse and you tell them they really messed up. Maybe the spouse admits it, maybe they don’t. But either way, the pattern doesn’t change. Money is spent selfishly again.

Do you see how complex this is? Do you see how hard it is to sit in the room with someone and try to figure out, just the two of you, trying to figure out how are we going to make this work when you keep doing the same thing and the pattern has been established and I keep talking to you about how we need to get things back into balance and every time I talk about it with you it doesn’t make any long-lasting changes. It’s just the same thing over and over again. How many times am I supposed to forgive that before I finally say I’ve had enough? Hard question. Jesus says infinite, I guess.

In the meantime, you’re going into the poorhouse. You don’t have enough money to pay the bills, or maybe there’s still enough money to pay the bills, but now you were saving for a down payment on a house. That’s gone. You were trying to do this or that. That’s gone and it can’t be fixed. Not quickly. And all the I’m sorry I messed up doesn’t bring the money back into the household. It’s complex and there is a process.

Obviously, what makes it easier to forgive is if a person says I’m sorry I messed up. But that’s a whole other complex issue because so many times people follow up those words with excuses. I’m sorry, but you know, and now it’s into the excuses. It wasn’t an apology; it was an explanation.

And then in those discussions everybody keeps talking about, but I apologized. I apologized. No, you didn’t. You didn’t apologize; you excused your behavior. But now you’re expecting the other person to forgive you. And guess what that does? It throws the power structure out of balance. Not only did they hurt you, but now they demand you—you’re a follower of Jesus, you’ve got to forgive me. I’m telling you, it doesn’t work.

People come see someone like me and they say, my spouse won’t forgive me. I apologized and they won’t forgive me. And it’s like, I wish I had a camera. Let’s see what the forgiveness sounded like. Let’s see what was said. And we could replay it and come up with a decision: was there really a forgiveness or not? Was there really an apology?

You all get this. I know because we’ve all been in this situation. And it doesn’t matter whether we think it’s major or minor. It’s minor if it’s somebody else; it’s major if it’s us, right? We’ve all been in this situation. When the relationship gets damaged by the words or an action of another person that we thought was on our side, only to discover they weren’t, how do we deal with it?

Because in our heads we’re saying I know I need to forgive, and yet in our hearts all we can think about is, they don’t get it. There’s no apology, there’s no recognition of wrong. But there sure is the expectation that I’m supposed to serve. Do you have an opportunity to do something to please God? Absolutely. But the fact that you do that in order to please God is a wonderful motivation, and I hope we can follow through with it. But even at the time of being able to say I want to do this because it pleases God, even though I can’t make it in my heart, I can’t find the right words, the right emotions, but I want to do this in order to please God—there’s still that depth of hurt that can’t just be healed with a band-aid.

Absolutely. And before long, we do end up thinking, I can’t trust this person who I said I could trust. They violated my trust. There has been this betrayal. And then we generalize that to, who else is going to hurt me? And before long we’re not trusting anybody, which is usually not a good way to develop relationships. And then we isolate and avoid. And in the process of isolating and avoiding, we become lonely. And now we start entering a world that we never intended to end up in, which is a world of isolation, depression, anxiety—always looking over your shoulder, waiting for the next person to hurt you.

Forgiveness and Forgetting

You’ve heard the phrase forgive and forget. It is Satan’s lie. This is evil. This whole idea of forgive and forget—you will not find it in scripture. You will find it as an attribute of God, but you will not find it as an attribute of being a human being.

So when people say, well, you just need to forgive and forget, half that statement is correct. You don’t forget. But let me tell you what that statement is intended to say, and I think you already know this. What that statement is intended to say is, when you forgive a person, you don’t bring up the past and use it as a club to hurt them somewhere down the road.

If you’re going to keep score, just make sure that you understand score gets kept on both sides. So let’s drop the forgive and forget part, okay? Let’s just focus on the forgive part and then commitment. Because of our forgiveness, we’re not going to use past sins as a way to justify our contempt of someone else.

The REACH Model of Forgiveness

Several years ago, I came across a gentleman at a conference. He’s a clinical psychologist, and I was impressed by what he had to say. Over the years, I have tried to find more of his work. He did a doctoral dissertation on forgiveness, which was wonderful. His name is Everett Worthington. He wrote it in 1998. Dissertations are about as interesting as watching grass grow, but there are sections in a dissertation that are just milk and honey—really good stuff. Once you get past all the stats and some other things, it’s really good stuff.

Worthington describes what he calls a pyramid of forgiveness. When I read it the first time, I thought that’s not bad. I read it the second time and I thought, this is good. This is really good. And when I read it the third time, I thought, God gave him something, and I’m so glad he put it on paper.

His idea is that if you’re going to forgive, you have to be able to