Struggling to Forgive? God Brings His Strength to You in Word and Sacrament (Part III of III)

By Katy Cloninger

Forgiveness (both the giving and receiving of it) is an essential aspect of the Christian life. In Parts I and II of this series, we’ve discussed the need to forgive our neighbors and explored some truths about forgiveness that, once realized, can help us let go of our anger and forgive. Today, we will look at the very source of our ability to forgive—that is, where we get the forgiveness of our own sins and the strength of the Holy Spirit to forgive those who sin against us.

Stay grounded in the Word of God, the Sacraments, and the whole life of the Church. First of all, we should go to church every Sunday. In the readings, the sermon, the hymns, the Absolution, and the Lord’s Supper, our loving and forgiving Lord comes to us and heals us. Through His Word, He convicts us of our sins and makes known to us our forgiveness. Our brothers and sisters who sit with us in the pews can also give us great comfort and support when we are hurting.

Individual confession and absolution can also be tremendously helpful as we process our pain and anger. Here we confess that we, too, are sinners who deserve the wrath of God and eternal punishment. Yet as the pastor places his hands on our heads and pronounces forgiveness in the stead and by the command of Christ, the burden of our sins is released and we find freedom from guilt and shame. When we know and believe that our sins are forgiven, it is much easier to then forgive our neighbor. Of course, talking with our pastors outside of a formal confession setting can be immensely beneficial as well.

Reading the Bible daily at home is also important, for we need to be fed every day. The psalms in particular reflect a wide range of human emotion while teaching us to trust in God to bring about justice and His will. The psalms lead us to confess our sins and to acknowledge God as the One who will vindicate us in His own time and way—either bringing our offender to repentance in this life, or punishing him in the next. (Of course, we should pray for the former, for that is what God in His mercy desires for all of us.) Whatever book of the Bible we read, we can find much comfort and help in processing our emotions. As we read about God’s actions in history, His will for us, and His promises which we have received through Baptism, the Holy Spirit will work in our hearts and lead us to pray, “Thy will be done.” In God, we find all our needs met and all our anxieties and distresses put to rest.

Forgiveness: It Can Be Messy (Part II of III)

By Katy Cloninger

As stated in Part I of this series on forgiveness, our fallen nature means that we are constantly sinning against one another and constantly needing to forgive each other. Sometimes forgiveness is easy when the offense is not severe, but other times, when we have been hurt deeply, forgiveness is much harder. Whether your spouse has left you (as in my case), or some other injury has occurred, forgiveness is a necessary part of living as redeemed people in a fallen world.

In today’s post, we’ll look at three more truths about forgiveness that can help us put our pain in perspective and bring us to the point of forgiving the one who hurt us.

1. You do not have to be completely healed emotionally in order to forgive. In fact, forgiving our offenders will actually help us heal. Because we are sinners and our hearts are hard, we may have to do some healing first before we soften up enough to forgive from our hearts. But we should not try to wait until we have fully healed before we forgive. If we do that, complete healing may never come, and the wound will get more and more infected. 

Forgiveness is a lot like childbirth. It takes some emotional labor to give birth to forgiveness, and the intensity of the pain may wax and wane as contractions do. But just when we think we will never get through it, we are, with the help of God, finally delivered of this burden, and we begin to feel relief, then joy, now that most of the pain is gone. All that remains at this point is the afterbirth—releasing whatever is left of our bitterness, and anything that was feeding our resentment—and then our healing will proceed apace. 

2. Forgiveness is not necessarily a once-and-done deal. When someone has hurt us deeply, particularly someone we must continue to deal with frequently, there may be times we feel that we have forgiven the person or are close to doing so, only to have a memory resurface or a new offense occur that leaves us reeling in pain and anger again. 

This has been my experience. Part of the solution is to recognize that, as we discussed in Part I, forgiveness is not a feeling. Sometimes we may feel forgiving, but we haven’t done all the cognitive work of acknowledging each source of hurt, accepting that it is in the past and cannot be changed, and then giving it up to God. This process often requires hard work over time, not just spontaneously feeling a certain way. 

And of course, if new wounds are being inflicted on us, there will be new offenses to forgive. If we haven’t yet forgiven the initial offense, subsequent ones will be even harder to forgive. However, the more we make up our minds to forgive and let God work in our hearts, the less deeply the new offenses will hurt us. 

Forgiveness is a decision we must walk in every day—and while we are still learning to walk, it may look more like limping or crawling! Each day, we ask God to purify our hearts, commend our offender to Him, and commit ourselves to forgiving the offender. For us hard-hearted sinners, the path to full forgiveness can be a long and winding one, and like love, it takes ongoing effort and determination. (Hmm, could this have something to do with loving our enemies?) 

Forgiveness: A Journey Worth Taking (Part I of III)

By Katy Cloninger

Because we all daily sin much, forgiveness is an important aspect of our vocations.

Sometimes forgiveness is relatively easy: a tiny human ball of energy recklessly slams his skull into our mouth for the umpteenth time today—then, with big eyes and infuriating cuteness, he lisps, “I sorry, Mama.”

Other times, forgiveness is not so easy: someone hurts us deeply, perhaps deliberately, and the trust we had in that person is permanently shattered. How can we forgive in a situation like that?

Forgiving my ex-husband and his second wife has been the hardest part of recovering from my divorce. Though I’ve never desired to take revenge on them, it has taken me a long time to overcome my anger and bitterness over the effects of their actions on me and my son. Even two and a half years after my husband left me, I am just now reaching the point where I can honestly say I’ve forgiven them, and my wounds are still tender. But with the help of God, I have come a long way and learned a lot about forgiveness.

Whatever injury we have suffered, realizing certain truths about what forgiveness is (and isn’t) can help bring us to the point where we are willing and ready to forgive. In this first of three posts on forgiveness, let’s take a look at some of the most basic of those truths.

St. Mary, Icon of Vocation

By Katy Cloninger

Martin Luther famously wrote that faith “is a living, busy, active thing. . . . It is impossible for it not to be doing good works incessantly. It does not ask whether good works are to be done, but before the question is asked, it has already done them, and is constantly doing them.” This is not to say that we never struggle against our Old Adam to perform good works—Romans 7 and experience tell us otherwise—but we have this struggle only because, in our fallenness, we do not possess perfect faith. Nevertheless, as baptized Christians who, according to the New Man, delight to do good works, we indeed rejoice in and seek out opportunities to love and serve our neighbors. There is perhaps no finer example of this “faith active in love” than Mary the Mother of Our Lord.

For all the ink spilled over Mary, there are precious few words written about her in the New Testament. Yet where she is mentioned, Mary is usually depicted either as receiving from God or serving the people around her. In her receiving role, for instance, she hears the message of the angel Gabriel and accepts it (Luke 1:26–38), and she is commended to John, whom Jesus appoints to care for her in her old age (John 19:26–27). Examples of her serving include her going to help Elizabeth (Luke 1:39–56) and seeing that plenty of wine is provided for the wedding at Cana (John 2:1–5). In response to the woman who praises His mother merely for her biological connection to Him, Jesus doesn’t disparage His mother, but He praises that which is most praiseworthy about her and all who emulate her faith: “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!” (Luke 11:28; cf. Matthew 12:50, Mark 3:35, and Luke 8:21). Scripture shows us, in Mary, someone who receives God’s Word,  meditates upon it (Luke 2:19, 51), and acts upon it in a way that is simultaneously submissive and bold.

Losing Everything, Losing Nothing

By Katy Cloninger

The evening my husband came home and told me he was leaving me, my whole world crashed down around me. It seemed that in less than an hour, everything was stripped away from me—the man I loved; my marriage; stability for our new son and the additional children I had prayed would follow; my dream of staying home and homeschooling our children. . . . Now all my hopes for the future were ripped out from under me like a rug. But the biggest thing that was wrenched from me that night, and again and again during the long, painful process of divorce, was my pride, my self-righteousness.

Marriage and family are gifts from God. In the Small Catechism, Martin Luther lists “a devout husband or wife” and “devout children” in defining what is meant by daily bread, which we ask God to give us every day in the Lord’s Prayer. We are right to give marriage the highest possible honor, for it is the bedrock of a stable society, and even more importantly, it was instituted by God Himself in the yet-unfallen Garden of Eden. Marriage is where God performs the miracle of bringing forth children as the two become one flesh, and those children flourish best in a household shared by their married biological parents. As St. Paul tells us in Ephesians 5, marriage is an icon of Christ and the Church, His holy Bride. Through marriage, Christian husbands and wives grow in their sanctification, learning to live together in harmony, giving of themselves, forgiving one another when they sin, and sacrificing for each other and for any children their union produces.

Yet marriage and family can become idols when we regard them as a measure of our godliness or as feathers in our caps, or simply as evidence that we are not as bad as our neighbors. Those who have an intact and fruitful marriage can be tempted to look down on others, even fellow Christians, whose family structures are not so ideal—whether through divorce, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, barrenness, or some other consequence of the fall. We can grow complacent in our outwardly ordered family structure, often failing to see our own need to work on our marriage alongside our husbands. Even if we see some signs of trouble, we may not be doing all we can to address them, because we are sure that everything is going to work out and that the unthinkable could never happen to us and our family. Pride goeth before a fall, and it’s just when we start to think we are doing pretty well that we are most at risk of losing it all. At least, that was the case for me.