“Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself.”

Have you ever heard that saying?  I can’t tell where it comes from.  I’m also not clear on what it means.

Does it mean that I should forgive myself when I’ve done something wrong?  If so, it is both true and false.

The true aspect is that I should forgive myself if I am sorry for what I’ve done, if I have done my best to make confession and restitution to the person I’ve harmed, and if I have a plan for how to avoid similar wrongs in the future.

But if any of the big IFS mentioned above are not true, then I’m most certainly not in a position to forgive myself.

But the way I’ve always taken this saying is that, when someone else wrongs me, if I forgive that person, I am giving myself a gift.  It is an expensive gift, and I seldom am willing to lay out the emotional capital to purchase such a gift.

I hang on to past hurts.  I remember them.  I think about them.  I talk about them.  I do not forgive easily.  I don’t know many people who do forgive easily.

However, what if I thought of my resentments as being emotional garbage that I have to drag around with me everywhere I go?  It is heavy, it stinks, there are flies buzzing around, it is loaded with maggots.

I think I’m going to stop there.  I’m making myself sick.  I’m probably making you sick, too.  (Please forgive me!)

Furthermore, every new wrong against me—real or perceived—is added daily to the mess I am carrying.  I become a mobile city dump.

But there is good news: God, in Christ, has already forgiven the other person, me, the whole world.

This morning, it occurred to me that forgiveness of all of us sinners is a gift God gives to Himself.  Think about it: God loves us more than anyone does or can.  Therefore, God is the one who is most offended when I do wrong to anyone, or when anyone does wrong to me.  What if God carried around all those wrongs, and let Himself be embittered by them?  An infinitely bitter, resentful God: now there’s  a picture!  But it isn’t a pretty picture.

Here is what God’s Word says: “I, even I, am the one who wipes out your transgressions for My own sake, And I will not remember your sins” (Isaiah 43:25).  It would seem that God blots out the sins of His people for God’s own sake!  (I looked it up in Hebrew, and it is very clear.  That is what the verse says.)

So, forgiveness of our sins is a gift that God gives to Himself.  Perhaps I should think about bestowing a similar gift on myself.  It isn’t every day that I get to give myself a gift that is not only fit for a king, but one that is fit for The King.

My dear friend, Will, prays the most wonderful prayers for me over the phone!  Today, he prayed for me that I would live in such a way that God would be grateful to me.

I had never thought of it that way before!  I wonder why?

I suspect that the answer reveals something in me that is good, but not good enough.  I tend to think of gratitude as having its roots in dependence.  In a sense, it does.  I am dependent upon others, and therefore feel grateful when they come through.  Since God is not dependent upon anyone, God cannot be grateful.

But perhaps, a gratitude that is rooted only in a sense of dependence has too shallow a root system.  Indeed, many people who are completely dependent on others (or almost so) are steadfastly ungrateful.

On the other hand, what if I think of gratitude as flowing from joy, and not just from a sense of dependence?  If that is true, then God can be profoundly grateful.  After all, joy is one of the characteristics of God (Psalm 16:11; Nehemiah 8:10; Zephaniah 3:17).

Now that I think about it, God’s gratitude is splashed all over the Bible.  In Genesis 1, God sees what he has made and the narrator says that God repeatedly said, “It is good!”  That sounds as if God is having a good time, enjoying himself.  It also sounds like God is grateful.  At the end of Genesis 1, the narrator sums up God’s summary of His creation, “And God saw all that He had made and, behold, it was very good!”  Yes!

And even we mortals can take a proper sense of pride when we’ve done a good job on something.  My wife is a wonderful cook.  Sometimes, I think she is overly self-critical of her efforts, but sometimes, she tastes something and says, “Oh, that’s good!”

In the New Testament, Jesus told a story about a slave-owner who settled accounts with slaves.  He had entrusted them with great wealth, and gone away on a journey.  When he returned, those who had invested his wealth and gotten a good return on their investment heard these words: “. . . ‘Well done, good and faithful slave. You were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master’” (Matthew 25:21).

That sounds like gratitude to me.  When you commend someone, you are expressing your gratitude to and for them and for their efforts.  Notice too, that this grateful commendation is closely connected with joy—the slave-owner’s joy and that of the slaves as well.

A joyful, grateful God!  What an appealing portrait of the Almighty One, the One who needs nothing, but appreciates everything!

Thanks, Will!

DTEB