‘And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?’ Matthew 18:33

There is a great deal of confusion about what forgiveness really is. You hear things such as “forgive and forget”. As common as this phrase is, I am not sure of the value of it. It is asking me to do something that I cannot. Although I can forgive, it is not within my power to forget. Apart from some mental defect or divine intervention, we have amazing memories that God created. It is theorized that our brains record every moment of our lives, but we are often not able to access those memories without some type of stimuli. This is why you can go years without thinking about a person, but a smell will bring them to your memory. You will experience a strong emotion, and then be flooded with memories of other times you have felt the same way. To this day, if I hear a popular song from the 80’s I will be reminded of stuff that happened to me in high school. We have an amazing capacity to remember. Forgetfulness is something that no one really values. In fact, many of us are scared of becoming forgetful. We might want to have some type of “selective memory”: where we save and delete events at our discretion. But that isn’t real. We remember!So if we are ever going to forgive others, we are going to have to do it in spite of the fact that we cannot forget! It might be better to acknowledge that we forgive because we can’t forget.

So, if forgiving is not forgetting, what does it actually mean? Forgiveness is actually a banking term. It refers to a debt that is released. It means that someone owes a debt, but then they are not required to repay it. Can you imagine how incredible it would be if the bank called you today and told you that the debt against your home had been forgiven? Or your student loans? Or your car? Anyone who has ever been in debt knows that it is bondage. It ties you to something, often against your will. That is so often the case with unforgiveness. We end up spiritually tied to the people who have hurt us. Unwilling to release them until they somehow pay us back for the harm they have caused.

When we choose to forgive others, we are cancelling their debt to us. This does not mean that we forget what the debt was. It means that we make a choice to never hold that debt over them again. We declare them to be free from it, requiring nothing from them in return. It means that they owe us nothing…not a promise to change…not even an apology. This may seem unfair, and we might protest that they do not deserve to be free. But let us never forget the great sin debt that we owed a Holy God. Yet He forgave us, freely and without strings.

So, today, I encourage you to live debt free. In spite of the fact that you might remember what someone has done to you, make a decision to release them. Declare that they now owe you nothing. That because you were forgiven so great a debt, you will forgive other people their debts as well! I believe what you will discover is that no one will be set more free than you will!

Blessings,

Pastor Brian