Consider the High Cost of Forgiveness
To forgive may be painful. Take a moment and think about the word, “forgiveness”. What emotions does such an activity stir in you? Do you find it fills you with a feeling of sweet security and well-being? Your conscience is clear, and you have peace knowing that nothing is held against you. 
Now remove the ending of the word and you are left with, “forgive”. Suddenly your emotions change as you contemplate whether, or not you are willing to let go of all the hurts you have held onto for years. Intense feelings rise up and restrict your throat and possibly your breathing. Fear, anger, and rage fill your entire being. FORGIVE? How dare anyone suggest such a thing!
Forgiveness is often the last hurdle before we enjoy our healing. We struggle with forgiving those who have hurt us because we think to forgive means to say, “I am over the pain”. Or we think to forgive means, “to let them off the hook; to let them away with it”. They don’t deserve forgiveness and we want them to suffer as much as we have. Pride or fear often gets in the way of forgiving.
Crucial to forgiveness is the understanding of what it means to genuinely forgive and what it does not. One must consider the high cost of forgiveness
Present Relationships
How do you know if past wounds are interfering with your present relationships?
Do you find you keep running into people who irritate you? People you just don’t like or can’t work with. People who always seem to bring out the worst in you.
Until you have healed and have forgiven your offender, you will most likely have difficulty getting along with other individuals with the same personality traits as the one who previously hurt you. Intense emotions will constantly be triggered by present situations that parallel the old wound. You will find yourself reliving the pain of past wounds repeatedly.
You can be sure that no matter how many times you change jobs, friendships, or home address, you will end up having to relate to the same kind of person in another situation. He or she will have a different name, different face, and different shape, but the same personality traits.
Forgiving previous offenders sets you free to live your life and enjoy your present social interactions without being overshadowed by old messages, memories, and emotions.
Forgiveness is a major and necessary step toward healing. Forgiveness sets you free to move through the healing process and continue to grow as a person. Yet, you have the liberty to choose to be either bitter or better. When you don’t choose to forgive, all your other relationships will be contaminated by bitterness, and you will inevitably hurt those you love most.
Refusing to forgive, leaves an individual open to Satan’s attacks and temptations. Frankly, Satan comes knocking on my door often enough without my leaving the porch light on for him. When you choose to be better, you are opening the door to allow God to change you as an individual.
Forgiving your offender means giving up your right to demand retribution. By forgiving the one who hurt you, you are not saying that what he did was okay. Nor are you saying that you’re over the emotional pain. Forgiveness simply means you are willing to live with the consequences of his sin against you. You let him off your hook, but he is still answerable to God.
Essential to forgiveness is the understanding of what forgiveness is and what it is not when you consider the high cost of forgiveness.
What Forgiveness is Not
Forgiveness is not:
- Forgiveness is not just ignoring the pain.
- Forgiveness is not forgetting the hurtful incident.
- Forgiveness is not declaring the other person was right or what he did was ok.
- Forgiveness is not allowing the offender to control your life.
- Forgiveness is not saying you are over the pain.
- Forgiveness is not saying you forgive, while avoiding the offender. (Assuming the offense was not abuse or violence.)
- Forgiveness does not mean the offender should not have to pay the consequences of his actions.
What Forgiveness Is
Forgiveness is:
- Forgiveness is more for your benefit than for the benefit of your offender.
- Forgiveness means you are more interested in understanding why something happened than in getting even.
- Forgiveness states that the offender no longer owes you anything.
- Forgiveness means you are more concerned about moving ahead with your life than being controlled or restricted by your past.
- Forgiveness sets you free to move through the healing process.
- Forgiveness opens the door for God’s blessing on your life.
The Roadblocks to Forgiveness: Chronic Shock Syndrome
When you have been hurt deeply, you may think that you have forgiven your offender, however, you are still bothered by anger, and resentment toward the person. You ask yourself, “Why am I still feeling this way when I have forgiven him?”
Tim Sledge in his book, “Making Peace with Your Past,” lists four roadblocks to forgiveness.
Forgiveness may be blocked by your own denial that you have been hurt. You may find it hard to acknowledge the painful events that occurred in your childhood. Or you may be unable to acknowledge how much these events hurt you…
Chronic-shock syndrome works like this. You are a small child involved in a traumatic event… You experience fear, pain, and anger. Your emotions are so overloaded that you go into emotional shock. You turn off your emotions. You become numb. This is a defense mechanism that God has given you to help you cope with traumatic events…
If you experienced emotionally traumatic events and did not have opportunities to process them in an atmosphere of trust, you may have gone into chronic emotional shock. The emotions of the painful experience are stuffed inside you. Those emotions, along with the emotional load of other painful experiences, can remain bottled inside you until you are willing to remember and reexperience them…
If you are unwilling to confront the pain of your childhood, you face a danger of engaging in a superficial forgiveness of the people who hurt you. You have a sense that you were hurt and that you should forgive. You comply, saying, “All is forgiven…” Such an act seems admirable. The problem is the swirling caldron of emotions buried deep inside you as a result of these unresolved issues and the high cost of forgiveness
Surprising feelings of anger or depression may pursue you. You have skipped an important prerequisite to forgiving; acknowledging the intensity of the hurt you experienced. when considering the high cost of forgiveness?
Roadblock 2: Fear
If you were abused (emotionally physically, sexually, or spiritually) by an adult when you were a child, you were dealing with someone much larger and much more powerful than you. If you were very young when the abuse occurred, the adult seemed incredibly big and powerful.
When the abuse occurred, you felt pain and anger. You could not express the anger to someone much more powerful than you. You had to do something else with the anger. Chances are that you stuffed it inside. You learned to keep it to yourself.
The same fear you experienced as a child can be carried into adulthood. Even though you are grown, you can still feel the same fear you felt as a small child…
Such fear can block forgiveness because it prevents you from dealing with the intense emotions still simmering inside you. Something inside says that if you face the pain and powerlessness of the abuse experience, you will be hurt even more.
Although you may have gone through the motions of forgiveness, it is possible that you have not expressed genuine forgiveness because you are still avoiding the true impact of what happened to you.
Roadblock 3: I Had Good Parents Syndrome
Another rule of a dysfunctional family is “We cover for one another”. Members of a dysfunctional alcoholic family help cover the results of the alcoholic’s drinking. Whatever the addiction, family members spend much time and energy covering up the garbage that results from the addictive behavior. Family members become enablers, unwittingly helping to continue the person’s addiction.
This pattern of protecting the addictive parent carries into adulthood. When someone suggests: “I sense that you are struggling with a hurt from the past. It may grow from your childhood years…” a defensive wall goes up. You reply: “Not me. I had a great family. My parents loved me…”
If you are minimizing [the painful experience] and if you are defending behavior that should not be defended, forgiveness will not come easily. You have skipped an important prerequisite for forgiveness; acknowledging what actually happened and how it felt.
Roadblock 4: Good Christians Don't Get Angry
A fourth roadblock to forgiveness is misunderstanding how a Christian should deal with anger. The thinking goes something like this: I am a Christian. A good Christian does not get angry…When you think this way, you do not have permission to be angry. The Bible on the other hand, gives Christians permission to be angry: “do not let the sun go down while you are still angry” (Eph. 4:26, NIV). You should appropriately express the emotion of anger so you can move beyond it.
You need a constructive, positive way of releasing and dealing with the anger so that, when you lay down at night, your anger is defused. Some pain and grief may remain to be addressed at another time; but you have acknowledged the anger, and the process of emotional healing has begun…
A misunderstanding of how a Christian is to deal with anger may keep you from expressing genuine forgiveness toward other people. You were hurt. The pain led to anger. You felt the anger but denied it. You voiced the words of forgiveness, but you skipped the acknowledgment of what really happened. Genuine forgiveness has not yet occurred.[1]
It is essential to forgiveness that you allow yourself to experience the full extent of the pain caused you and the appropriate emotions associated with the wound. Anything less is denying the degree to which you have been hurt thus preventing genuine forgiveness to take place.
[1] Sledge, Tim, Making Peace with Your Past, Pg. 173-175, LifeWay Press
Forgiveness is a Recorring Experience
Forgiveness is an unending growing experience in which we never seem to arrive. Just when we think we have the course of action down pat; we get thrown another curve and we have to start working through the process again.
David Augsburger has written a wonderful book on forgiveness, entitled The Freedom of Forgiveness, which I have found very helpful. In it, he stresses:
No matter how often we have forgiven or have been forgiven by others, we are all still learning to forgive. Forgiveness is not a skill that is mastered and becomes second nature. It must be faced each time injury or injustice strikes.
Forgiveness is not a gift one claims, internalizes, and then possesses for life. It must be rediscovered in each situation of pain. We never grow beyond the learning stage. We never go beyond the level of student.[1]
Forgiveness is difficult because it is very costly. The cost may require us to risk further hurt by exploring the injured relationship with someone who caused the injury to begin with. The cost may be that we will have to absorb pain without any satisfactory release and restoration. The cost may require us to accept further rejection when the other brushes us off, blames us further, burns us with additional anger, or blatantly refuses to talk.[2]
Forgiveness, although very painful, is a vital ingredient to healing and is much preferred to the alternative. It has been said that “to refuse to forgive and choose to nurture bitterness toward my offender is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”[3] We lose sleep; we lose our appetite; we become anxious and depressed. We develop all kinds of health issues. Bottled-up bitterness causes depression, digestive disorders, organ dysfunctions, high blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes and cancer.
According to The Freedom of Forgiveness, “Central to the work of forgiveness is the task of working through our feelings of anger.”[4]
Forgiving someone who has hurt us is hard work. It doesn’t come naturally. In fact, everything in our being shouts, “FIGHT BACK! GET EVEN! RETALIATE!” we say, “He must pay for the pain he has caused me” or “Pain must be paid for.”
But God says,
Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. (Romans 12:17–19)
Yes, someone must pay. Yes, pain must be paid for, and someone has paid. Someone has paid for my pain and your pain with His very life. His name is Jesus.
One Sunday morning, during the communion service, the Lord showed me that where there are wounded people, there are those who have caused the hurt. And where there is healing for the victim, there is also healing for the perpetrator. He reminded me of Psalms 107:20: “He sent his word, and healed them, and delivered them from their destructions” (KJV).
The Holy Spirit then guided me through Isaiah 53:3–5:
He was… a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering… Surely he took up my infirmities [my wounds, my weaknesses] and carried my sorrows [He feels the feeling of my emotional pain]… the punishment that brought [me] peace [from my sin and emotional pain] was upon him, and by his wounds [I] am healed.
The blood of Jesus Christ wasn’t shed only to save me from my sins. It was also shed to heal me of the sins others have sinned against me, causing my emotional pain. Those deep emotional wounds, inflicted upon me at the hands of abusive individuals, were being healed by the blood of Jesus Christ.
The blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from ALL sin [both my sins and the sins of others against me]. (1 John 1:7, emphasis added)
He also showed me that His blood was shed so my abusers could be forgiven and healed of their destructions. There is healing, whether you are a victim or a perpetrator. Jesus knew and considered the high cost of forgiveness
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