Total Forgiveness: Achieving God's Greatest Challenge

by R T Kendall Ministries Inc.

the first person to experience delight when forgiveness takes place is the one who forgives.

How do we know that we have totally forgiven someone?

‘I am your brother Joseph, the one you sold into Egypt! And now, do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you.

delays can be part of God’s purpose; seemingly unanswered prayer can be as much a part of God’s will as answered prayer.

the same verse that says love ‘keeps no record of wrongs’, says that love ‘is not self-seeking’. This means that we will not play ‘man the manipulator’ when it comes to promoting ourselves; we must let God do it.

Self-pity and self-righteousness – twin sins – are eclipsed when we are prepared to forgive totally and keep no record of wrongs.

he could look at the fulfilment of those old dreams and say to them, ‘Gotcha!’, and then throw the book at them. But no. He lovingly welcomed them and forgave them with tears.

But instead of throwing the book at them (which he had the power to do), he wept. Filled with love, he demonstrated total forgiveness.

1 Do not let anybody know what someone said about you or did to you

Joseph did not want a single person in Egypt to know what his brothers had done to him twenty-two years before.

he knew that if word leaked out that his brothers had actually kidnapped him and sold him to the Ishmaelites, the people would hate his brothers. But Joseph wanted his brothers to be heroes in Egypt – just as he was. This was the only way to ensure that nobody in Egypt would ever discover their wickedness.

not only did Joseph not let anybody know what they had done: he ensured that they could not know. That is one of the proofs that one has totally forgiven.

that is precisely how you and I are forgiven. ‘As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us’ (Ps. 103:12). Our sins are ‘wiped out’ (Acts 3:19). It is as though our sins don’t exist any more – they are gone, gone, gone, gone! As far as our eternal standing and security with God are concerned, they will never be held against us.

we used to sing a chorus that says our sins are buried in the ‘sea of God’s forgetfulness’. This is based on Micah 7:19: ‘You will again have compassion on us; you will tread our sins underfoot and...

By the way, there’s a lot God knows about me that I wouldn’t want you to know about. He has enough on me to bury me. But you will never know. God won’t tell. But why do we tell? If merely for therapeutic reasons, then to tell one other person who will never repeat it is understandable. But, as we have seen, the real reason we usually tell is to punish. We want them punished.

We tell what we know to make others look bad! If we can hurt their credibility or reputation for hurting us, we say, ‘Good, it serves them right.’ So we blab to people about what someone did as a way of getting even with them.

feeling so ashamed over the way they had deserted Jesus when he was arrested, the disciples were behind closed doors when the resurrected Jesus turned up unexpectedly and just said, ‘Peace be with you!’ (John 20:21.) Those disciples were totally forgiven

We all have skeletons in the cupboard; some known, some unknown. It is comforting to know that God freely and totally forgives and will never tell what he knows.

That is why we are urged: ‘Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Chris...

2 Do not allow anybody to be afraid of you or in...

When we have not totally forgiven those who have hurt us, it gives us a bit of pleasure to sense that they are afraid or intimidated. If, when we walk into a room with several people and see one who has hurt us (and knows it) and they freeze with anxiety, we say to ourselves, ‘Good!’, then it shows there is still bitterness in our hearts. For perfect love casts out fear, which has to do with punishment (1 John 4:18). Therefore if people are afraid, we fancy they are getting a bit of punishment – which is what we want.

Fear can cause us to do silly things. It is because of our insecurity that we want people to stand in awe of us. Therefore we are pretentious; we try to keep them from knowing who we really are and what we are really like. Sometimes I think the most attractive thing about Jesus as a man was his unpretentiousness. Jesus did not try to create an aura of ‘mystique’; he was the type of person that ordinary people could relate to.

He might have kept those brothers at a distance; he might have wanted them to praise him for excelling as he had obviously done. Here was a chance for them to fall at his feet in fear and reverence. He might have said, ‘Remember my dreams?’ He might have reminded them of their disbelief when he told them that this day would come. ‘I told you so,’ he might have said. No. ‘Come close to me,’ he said. He did not feel a cut above them. There was no desire for them to stand back and say, ‘Wow! This is our brother Joseph.’ And he wanted no fear on their part. He wanted to be loved rather than admired.

God does not want us to be afraid of him once he has forgiven us.

This is what Jesus seeks to do with all of us; he wants to put us at ease in his presence. When Jesus met with the Eleven in the upper room after his resurrection, there was no hint of saying, ‘How could you do this? Why? How could you have deserted me like that?’ No. He just picked up where he left off before the whole ordeal began and said, ‘As the Father has sent me, I am sending you’ (John 20:21).

When we have totally forgiven, we will not want people to be afraid.

3 We will want them to forgive themselves and...

he repeated, ‘I am your brother Joseph, the one you sold into Egypt!’ (Gen. 45:4.) This shows that he had neither forgotten nor pretended that they hadn’t done what they had done; he was simply identifying himself to them.

he said: ‘And now, do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here’ (Gen. 45:5). He was not about to send them on a ‘guilt trip’; he knew already that they felt guilty enough (Gen. 42:21).

Sometimes we may say to someone, ‘I forgive you for what you did, but I hope you feel bad about it.’ This shows we still want them punished. It shows our own fear which, I will repeat, ‘has to do with punishment’ (1 John 4:18). When fear is gone, the desire to have them punished goes with it.

One way we love to punish is to make people feel guilty. For those of us who are always sending people on a ‘guilt trip’, it is almost certainly we ourselves who have th...

Because we haven’t sorted out our own guilt, we want to make sure that others wallow in the mire of guilt with us. We point the finger partly...

Joseph wanted to set his brothers free. He did not want them to blame themselves or be angry with themselves; he wanted them to forgive themselves.

forgiveness is worthless (in so far as the emotional benefits go) if we can’t forgive ourselves. And it certainly isn’t total forgiveness unless we forgive ourselves as well as others. God knows this, and this is why he wants us to forgive ourselves as well as to accept his promise that our past is under the blood of Christ.

Joseph was trying to do what Jesus would one day do: make it easy for his brother...

God doesn’t want us to feel guilty, so in effect he says to us: ‘Just wait and see, I will cause everything to work together for good to such an extent that you will be tempted to say that what happened was good and right.’ Not that it seemed good – for the fact that all things work together for good, it must be repeated, doesn’t necessarily mean that it felt right at the time. But God has a way of making events come good.

This is total forgiveness: not wanting people to feel guilty or upset with themselves for what they have done, and showing them that there is a reason why God let it happen.

4 We will let them ...

Saving face; this is what God does with each of us.

Saving face means preserving your dignity and self-esteem. It is not only the refusal to let a person feel guilty; it is providing a rationale that enables what they did to look good rather than bad. Or it may mean hiding a person’s error from people so they can’t be embarrassed.

You can make a friend for life by letting that person save face.

God lets us save face by causing our past (however foolish) to work together for good.

There is more, though. By saying what he did Joseph was also admitting that he would have done what they did had he been one of them. He did not condemn them for what they did; he too would have reacted to such arrogance in the same way had he been them. The one who totally forgives from the heart has little self-righteousness, for one of the reasons we are able to forgive is that we see what we ourselves (1) have been forgiven of, and/or (2) are capable of. When we are indignant over someone’s wickedness there is the real possibility that either we are self-righteous or that we have no objectivity about ourselves. When we see ourselves as we are we will see that we may well be capable of any sin ever committed by anyone save by God’s intervening grace.

Letting them save face, then, was not a polite gesture; Joseph was telling his brothers the truth. God had meant it for good; God did send Joseph on ahead. He was not one whit better than a single one of them, and he was not about to act as if he were a cut above them. He wasn’t, and he knew it. He just felt grateful to see them,

When we let people save face we are doing what is right and just, not being merely magnanimous and gracious.

5 We will protect them from their greatest fear

Sin that is under the blood of our Sovereign Redeemer does not have to be confessed to anybody but to God. If you need to tell it to one other person because of what it will possibly do for you, fine. But you do not need to involve an innocent party by unloading information on them that they can easily live without.

Many of us have one single greatest fear of a certain thing being revealed. I know I do. I know what I would fear the most – were it to be told. But God has no desire for this; the only possibility of that occurring would be if I became self-righteous and unforgiving.

I am indebted to a wonderful Saviour who forgives all and will ensure that my greatest secrets will not become known. God does not blackmail us, and if a Christian is guilty of this, it gets God’s attention. He won’t stand for it. To hold another person in perpetual fear because I constantly threaten, ‘I’ll tell’ – when I know what I myself have been forgiven of – would bring down God’s wrath on me more quickly than anything. When I ponder for very long what I have been forgiven of, it is enough to shut my mouth for the rest of my life.