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Thoughts from Martin Copenhaver

Dear Friends,

Today’s “thought” is about forgiveness. Not the forgiveness we receive as a gift of grace through faith in the redeeming work of Jesus on the cross, but the forgiveness we are called to offer to others for the wrongs they have done to us. It's the forgiveness spoken of by Jesus when he says, “If you do not forgive men their sins, the Father will not forgive your sins” (Matthew 6:15). A forgiveness which can (for many) be the hardest type of forgiveness. This helpful selection comes to you from Martin Copenhaver, in his devotional book entitled, “The Gospel in Miniature.” Enjoy.

Forgiving and Forgetting
“In my experience when someone says, “I will forgive, but I will not forget,” I always wonder if they are truly ready to forgive. Forgiveness requires something that is not forgetfulness in the strictest sense, but is akin to forgetfulness.

In his masterpiece ‘City of God,’ Saint Augustine says that… in the world to come, we will still remember our own wrongdoing clearly enough, but we will no longer remember the pain associated with our wrongdoing. In the book of Jeremiah, the prophet announces God’s new covenant and makes a promise: ‘I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sins no more.’ In forgiving, God chooses not to remember.


We are not expected to erase every memory of hurt or injustice from our cerebral ‘hard drives.’ Rather, we are to forgive so completely it is as if we have forgotten. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard put it this way: Choosing to forget hurt or injustice suffered at the hands of another is like taking something and putting it behind your back. It is still there and, if you are asked about it, you would have to grant that it exists. But you don’t look at it. It’s not between you, but rather, behind you. He writes, ‘The one who loves forgives in this way: in love he turns toward the one he forgives; but when he turns toward him, he of course cannot see what is lying behind his back.’


Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, was famous for her generous temperament. She never bore grudges. Once she was reminded by a friend of a wrongdoing done to her some years earlier. ‘Don’t you remember?’ asked her friend. ‘No,’ replied Clara firmly, ‘I distinctly remember forgetting that.’ In other words, she had put it behind her.”


I was once helped in regard to forgiveness by a gentleman who told me (close paraphrase): “Forgiveness is rarely (if ever) a once-and-done thing. True forgiveness requires a commitment to forgive repeatedly – whenever the anger, hurt, or desire for revenge caused by the event resurfaces – until over time we get to the point where the memory of it no longer carries with it any of those things – especially the animosity, or desire for revenge and payback.”

The event or events are not blotted out of our memory completely, but like God, we ‘remember it no more’ in the sense that we refuse to bring it up to use it against that person. Forgiven remembrance is a benign remembrance. It’s a remembrance emptied of all the anger, hurt, and desire for revenge.


God (who is omniscient) does not ‘forget’ our sins in the sense of erasing them totally from his divine memory banks. Rather, He chooses to “remember them no more” in the sense that He will never dredge them up to be used against us again – ever! And the reason He won’t ‘remember’ them in that sense is because the punishment for them was paid in full, and the wrath against them was entirely satisfied, in the death of the Lord Jesus. That’s the Gospel! The offense is so completely forgiven that it is taken and separated from the offender, “as far as the east is from the west” (Psalm 103:12).


“God’s “not remembering” is not what we usually think of as forgetfulness. God is omniscient. He knows everything, and He forgets nothing. However, He can choose not to remember something. In human relationships, we can choose to remember the offenses someone has committed against us, or we can choose to forget. To forgive someone, we must often put painful memories out of our minds. We don’t actually forget the sin, and it’s not that we are unable to recall the offense, but we choose to overlook it.” (GotQuestions.org, a very good resource by the way!)



May God Give You (as a person forgiven soooo much!) the Grace to Truly Forgive, Pastor Jeff

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