Read
For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
Matthew 6:14-15
Reflect
For those of you who weren’t alive in 1974, it’s probably hard to imagine the national outrage that surrounded the presidency of Richard Nixon. For the first time (that we knew of), we had been betrayed by our most public leader, and there was a palpable sense of vengeance in the air for many. So many people wanted their pound of flesh. Yes, many surrounding the President had been hauled off to jail, and it wasn’t enough that he became the first (and still only) president who had ever resigned from office. These folks wanted to see Nixon in cuffs, paraded past reporters and cameras and publicly shamed for lying to and deceiving the American people.
Enter Gerald Ford, the substitute vice president who had entered an administration that was already under fire from the media and Congress. Only nine months after he became vice president, Mr. Ford was suddenly sitting in the Oval Office. And only one month after becoming president, he made a decision that would enrage millions of people – and that would cost him any chance of winning the next election.
Simply put, President Ford pardoned ex-President Nixon.
Many saw it as party politics, and there might have been an element of that. But history has largely seen the pardon as an effort to move the country past the ugliness of Watergate and toward something better and more productive. Ford’s first words after his inauguration were, “Our national nightmare is over,” and the pardon was a continuation of that sentiment. But it wasn’t seen that way by many – at least not for many years. In 2011, the John F. Kennedy Library Association gave Ford its Profile in Courage Award for being willing to place the country ahead of his own political future.
Forgiving people isn’t easy. Our human desire is usually to hold on to the pain caused by others as some sort of fuel for the vengeance we hope to get one day. “After all, they didn’t care about my feelings when they hurt me! Why should I have to forgive them?!”
There’s more than one level to why we should forgive. On the one hand, it’s good for us. My wife so often tells me that God’s Word is preventative medicine and that when we follow His commands, it’s simply in our best interest — and God knew that when He inspired people to write those things down. Why forgive? Because unforgiveness keeps us locked in the past, always looking backward and never ahead. No one would ever try this, because it’s foolish, but imagine that if, on your drive to work, you never looked ahead and only stared at the people in your rearview mirror. There’s not a question about whether or not you’d crash — it would just be a matter of how long it would take.
But beyond being good for us, God demands that we forgive others because that’s His nature. Every time we ask Him to forgive the things we’ve done wrong, He’s faithful to do just that. And the sin debt that He’s forgiven each of us is monumental compared to the tiny things that others have done to us. The pain others have caused you may be enormous, but it’s nothing when placed next to the mountain of sin that God has forgiven you. His demand for our forgiveness of others is so great that Jesus emphasized it several times, including twice in Matthew 6.
There is more than one way to read this passage. You could see it as, “Forgive me my sins in the same way that I forgive the sins of others.” Or it might be, “Forgive me my sins because I’ve already forgiven the sins of others.” And it could be, “Forgive me my sins because, like You, I’m a forgiving person.” But no matter how you read it, God seems to link His forgiveness of us with our forgiveness of other people. It seems vital that for us to maintain a right relationship with the Lord that we have to be forgiving people, because He is, at his very core, a loving and forgiving Father.
I hope that today you have already forgiven those who have wronged you in the past. Again, I know it’s not easy. But if there is pain from the sins of others lingering in your life, it will only slow you down as you try to walk into the future God has for you. Stop looking in the rearview mirror and look ahead. The Lord’s plan for you starts right now with pardon and forgiveness.
Reflection copyright © 2024 Doug DeBolt.
