Forgiveness. So very hard, yet so very necessary for leaders and pastors to lead well and experience personal freedom and relational health. Good leaders and pastors get the concept of forgiveness. And, it behooves every leader not only to understand and practice these 10 key insights about forgiveness but to teach them as well.
- Forgiveness is counterintuitive.
- It goes against human nature to forgive. Yet God rearranges our natural instincts and impulses by His grace.
- If you don’t forgive those who hurt you, you will stay frozen to your pain.
- Unforgiveness will cause your private world to freeze exactly at the point you were hurt, glued to the memory of the past. We create our own personal torture chamber by rehearsing hurts over and over again. However, when we forgive, we become the greatest beneficiary of forgiveness.
- Author Lewis Smedes wrote, When we forgive, we set a prisoner free and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us.
- Forgiveness can break the chain of unforgiveness we can unintentionally pass on to our children.
- Physically we know that we can pass defective genes onto our children. In a similar way unforgiveness is like spiritually deformed DNA that we can pass on from one generation to the next. The Bible says that unforgiveness produces the fruit of bitterness that defiles many (Heb 12.15).
- Unforgiveness can lead to unforgiveness’ cousin: revenge, the passion to get even, a delight to hear bad news about those who hurt us, or wishing ill of those who hurt us.
- Desire for revenge keeps the pain of the wound fresh, like picking a fresh scab over and over.
- Forgiveness does not settle all all questions of fairness.
- What someone did to you is still unfair and wrong. Grace goes beyond fairness. It wasn’t fair that they crucified the ONE who never sinned. Grace doesn’t fit logic. It’s supernatural and beyond logic.
- Forgiveness does not minimize the offense.
- The very nature of forgiveness actually recognizes that an offense occurred.
- Forgiveness is often a process that happens over time.
- The deeper the hurt, the longer the process takes. True forgiveness is not forgive and forget the hurt. It’s more like remembering it less and less.
- Forgiveness does not absolve the offender of the consequences of his offense (in the eyes of the law or in the eyes of God).
- Forgiveness speaks to the longing of every human heart.
- A story in Ernest Hemingway’s short story, Capital of the World, illustrates this truth. A Spanish boy named Paco never experienced a relationship with his mother and his father had kicked him out of the house for some reason. Later his dad regretted it but couldn’t find his son. The remorseful father decided to attempt to reconcile with his son who had run away to Madrid and he took out an ad in the El Liberal newspaper. The ad read, PACO MEET ME AT HOTEL MONTANA NOON TUESDAY ALL IS FORGIVEN. PAPA. Paco is a common name in Spain. When the father went to the square he found eight hundred young men named Paco waiting for their fathers and yearning for the forgiveness they never thought was possible. (source unknown)
- You are well on our way to forgiveness when you begin to wish your offender well.
Leaders must model and teach true forgiveness. When we don’t, we can actually keep a lid on the health and growth of our churches and our lives.
Do you believe that unforgiving leaders can hinder the health and growth of their churches? Why or why not?
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