SLAcoleridge I am willing to forgive but ………This isn’t about being religious because forgiving someone that has done you a wrong is essentially something that comes from your conscience. So this article is essentially to get you to understand what forgiveness implies and help deal with the common misconceptions about forgiveness. Also I would need to use some religious references for the benefit of those they are religiously inclined.

The barriers to forgiveness can be seen from two perspectives. One is that some people are unable to forgive because they are unwilling to do so, which is a decision that each of us make and have the capacity to change. The other (and more interesting to me) is people  simply do not understand their religion’s definition of forgiveness, due to misconceptions that have distorted its meaning.

Forgiveness does not mean dismissing moral responsibility

Some people try to deal with their bitterness by resorting to a form of popular determinism. Our offenders committed hurtful acts, but they are not responsible because they themselves are the victims of other people and circumstances. If we can convince ourselves that our offenders couldn’t help what they did, we may not have to face the pain of the offense and the responsibility to forgive. In a word, this is a way of playing the ostrich—keeping our heads in the sand instead of dealing with the problems.

God’s Word agrees that our environment can influence us, but there is a crucial difference between influence and determinism. Christians have a basis for genuine empathy for even the most wicked criminals. Because of the Fall, all of us have an inner inclination toward evil that makes us susceptible to external temptation.

…Empathy and compassion must stop short of determinism. To decide that [people are] not responsible for their actions creates an endless sequence of victims. Such thinking reduces humans to robots, programmed by their environment and incapable of love as well as hatred.

Biblical forgiveness always insists on personal moral responsibility, but it transfers the right of retribution to the One to whom this rightfully belongs. When I forgive an offender, I do not decide he couldn’t help what he did to me. Rather, I decide that it is not my place to pay him back. God alone has this right because all sin is first of all an act of rebellion against him, and because he is the only competent moral Judge. In transferring this crime to a higher court, I am not overturning justice—I’m cooperating with God’s perfect justice.

Forgiveness is not primarily a feeling

The Bible describes forgiveness primarily as a choice based on the truth, not as a feeling. God does not say “feel mercy”—he says “show mercy because I showed you mercy.” I can choose against my feelings to lay down my right to exact revenge, because this is the only consistent response for a sinner who has received God’s forgiveness. I can likewise choose against my feelings to serve my offender in love. True, God must empower me to do this, but he promises to do this as I turn to him in prayerful trust and obedience.

Most of the positive emotional changes associated with forgiveness are the result of this choice. If I wait to forgive my offender until I feel warm toward him, I will probably wait forever. In addition, the change in my feelings toward my offender may be gradual. This doesn’t necessarily mean I have not forgiven; it may mean only that my emotions haven’t caught up with my choice yet. Actions are a much more reliable indicator.

Am I turning away from negative thoughts that emerge in my mind? Am I refusing to follow through with the hurtful words and actions that sometimes suggest themselves? Am I choosing to pray for him and treat him with kindness?

Forgiveness is not forgetting the offense

Many Christians say “forgive and forget.” If you’ve really forgiven someone, they say, you won’t ever think about how he sinned against you. If you do think about it, this is proof that you never really forgave him.

This view of forgiveness comes from a misinterpretation of Jeremiah 31:34, where God says, “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” The point here isn’t that God erases our offenses from his awareness. God is omniscient—he knows and remembers everything. Furthermore, he disciplines Christians out of his loving concern for our good, and this discipline presupposes that he takes note of our sins. Rather, Jeremiah 31:34 means that God will never again remember our sins against us—he’ll never use them as a basis for condemning or rejecting us—because he has fully satisfied his righteous wrath against our sins through the death of Christ (1 John 2:2).

Biblical forgiveness means waiving the right to focus on past offenses as an excuse for hating the offender or plotting revenge. It also means choosing not to use these offenses against the person in the future through reminders, gossip, and other forms of retaliation. It may be necessary to speak about the offense at times, but the motivation for doing so will not be retribution.

What can you expect to experience concerning your memory of forgiven offenses? Because you have laid down the right to pay the person back, you will not recall and ruminate over the offense. Therefore, it will play a smaller and smaller role in your thought life.

This doesn’t mean, though, that memories of the offense will never emerge into your mind. Various events (conversations, dreams, and related memories) may trigger your memory, sometimes with alarming emotional intensity. When this happens, you shouldn’t focus on the fact that you remembered the offense or experienced negative emotions along with the memory.

Rather, you should focus on how you’ll respond to this memory. There’s no reason to beat yourself for having this memory—you didn’t have control over this. The best things to do is to confront this memory with two other memories—the memory of your forgiveness by God and the memory of your choice to forgive our offender. Then choose to move forward by setting your mind on something that is true and good.

Part 2 to follow