Forgiveness: A Prerequisite For Problem-Solving

Forgiveness is about making a fresh start in the most important and fundamental part of life —relationships. Would you like to get along better with your husband, wife, sister, brother, friends and significant others….. Would you like to have less anxiety, less destructive conflict, less ill-will, and less fault finding and replace this behavior with more genuine affection, more respect, more appreciation, and more real love? Praise the Lord because this is what God wants for your life as well. In fact, God is doing everything in God’s power to convince us to make some adjustments in who we are. God desires that we have better relationships with God and everyone in life.

Forgiveness is about repairing relationships that have been bent, bruised and broken. Forgiveness is about restoring relationships with those who have hurt us—and with those whom we’ve hurt. Forgiveness is about resurrecting relationships which have been so damaged that they’re all but dead. It’s about taking the high road and doing what is right for the sake of God and our soul salvation. This is why Roman 3:10 says that there is no one righteous; it’s so that we can get real with ourselves and realize that all of us stand in need of forgiveness. All of us stand in need of being restored.

The good news about forgiveness is that it doesn’t require the approval of those who won’t and don’t receive it. But the difficulty is that those who won’t and don’t allow the devil to steal, kill and destroy that which God has deemed good. Therefore, in order for forgiveness to manifest itself in positive ways in your lives, we’ve got to be willing to be open to the Holy Spirit moving in our lives and changing who we are. We’ve got to resolve in our own spirit that if God forgives us, then we MUST forgive others, and allow others to forgive us. Then and only then will we be able to let stuff go and move on in the name of Jesus. We must accept the fact that this can only happen in the supernatural and not the natural realm; forgiveness comes from the author of peace and not the author of confusion and the father of lies. And so, in order to embrace forgiveness as the solution to the problems in our lives, we’ve got to be convinced and convicted that there really is a problem, and we’ve got to understand the nature of that problem.

Just to be clear, the problem is sin. And the nature of sin is that we all do it. So don’t think you’re exempt just because you’re in the church. We sin against God, against ourselves and others; and this is why relationships are so bad today. It’s all because of our sinful nature and our sinful condition. Unless we forgive, life will be full of conflict and tension. Unless we forgive, life will be one problem after another and it will destroy our chance for everlasting life.

And so, the doctrine of sin says that all of us need to be forgiven; first by God, and then by others. Unless we’re willing to recognize our own sin and our own need of forgiveness, we’ll never be able to truly forgive others. If we can’t forgive others, we are implicitly saying that we are comfortable with the confusion and conflict in our lives. But if we see our need for extending forgiveness and being forgiven, we will be on our way to a higher quality of life based on God’s will for our lives.