Choosing Forgiveness: A 5-Day Plan From Nancy DeMoss WolgemuthSample

Day 1: Necessity of Forgiveness

I would like to be able to tell you that forgiveness doesn’t require such total surrender and relinquishment. Forgiveness is not a method to be learned as much as a truth to be lived. The concept of forgiveness will hardly be foreign to most who read this.

For most of us, the problem isn’t that we don’t know about forgiveness. The problem, as I’ve witnessed it in one life after another (including my own far too often), is either that we haven’t recognized and acknowledged the unforgiveness that’s in our hearts, or that we simply haven’t made the choice to forgive. Almost everyone has someone (or ones) they haven’t forgiven.

We can’t talk about forgiveness without acknowledging the reality of pain. If we were never hurt, there would be no need for forgiveness.

I want to begin sorting through this topic by just letting this one expectation settle in around us, as basic and obvious as it may seem:

Everyone will get hurt.

It’s a fact of life. Pain is unavoidable in this fallen world. You will be hurt, wronged, and offended by others. There’s no way around it.

“You will have suffering in this world,” Jesus assured His anxious, bewildered followers (John 16:33 csb), much as Paul would remind his young charge, Timothy, at a later time: “Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Timothy 3:12). So the issue is not whether we’re being particularly godly or not. For while obedience does bring its share of eternal blessing, it is equally true that problems and pain can and will rain down on the best of us—sometimes harder on Christians than others.

Of course, we will be affected by the circumstances that form the backdrop of our lives. They will carve grooves into our hearts that will always be part of our experience. But those circumstances, horrendous as they may be, do not have the power to control the outcome of our lives.

As long as we believe that our happiness and well-being are determined by what happens to us, we will always be victims, because so much of what happens to us is beyond our control. There’s no possibility of hope in that perspective—we can never be different, never be whole, never be free. To greater or lesser degrees (depending on how we have been treated or mistreated) when we place our identity in victimhood, we will always think of ourselves as damaged goods, destined to be dysfunctional people in a dysfunctional world.

We simply don’t have any choice about many of the things that happen to us. Our only hope lies in realizing that we do have a choice about how we respond to life’s circumstances—and it is those responses that determine the outcome of our lives.