Indeed we do! Which one of us has not been hurt by the wrong others have done to us, either directly or indirectly? Now I do not in any way want to minimize the hurt and pain that these things bring. But the problem is that we get imprisoned by the past, seemingly unable to get past what others (or even you yourself) have done. And we don't need to. I have a post “Don't get mad, get even and poison yourself and those you love.” Many of us are trapped by our resentments or bitterness or consumed with plans to get even. It is far too easy to fall into a victim mentality where we blame others for everything that goes wrong in our lives. But how, you might ask, can we not be affected by the past? How can we stop the pain? How can we get past what they did to us?
I don't pretend the answer is easy, but it is simple “Forgive your abuser.” If you want to be free of his or her ongoing influence in your life, this is exactly what you need to do. For some, being told to forgive your abuser can seem worse abuse than the abuse itself. “Why should I let him off?” you might ask. Well first of all forgiving a person is not letting them off, it is releasing God to be at work in their lives to deal with it. “'Vengeance is mine' says the Lord, 'I will repay'” (Romans 12:19). It takes faith of course to trust God that He will be just in dealing with your abuser. And like an older child who insists in taking over from the parent, God needs to deal with us first before He can deal with the abuser. And forgiving is not the same as saying that what they did does not matter, or that it was not wrong. Nor is it giving permission to do it again. What forgiving does is to break the tie between them and us, and between our past and the present. We need to forgive mostly for our own sakes, to release us from all the negativity. When we don't forgive, we find ourselves filled with ongoing anger and resentment and pain. In order to find release we need to give our abusers a gift they do not deserve, the gift of forgiveness.
The Christian of course is commanded to forgive, and this command is related to the fact that God has forgiven us (Matthew 6:12ff). Jesus tells the parable of the unmerciful servant where a certain servant was forgiven a huge debt by his master, but then demanded a fellow servant pay him in full for a much lesser debt (Matthew 18:22ff). He is speaking of the ways we (knowingly or unknowingly) have sinned against God and that in the end the worst that is done to us is small, compared with the offense we cause God. You have to see it to understand.
But there is also a deeper principle here and that is that more often than not we make wrong responses to the wrong done to us (the main response to sin is to sin in return). When we turn to bitterness and grumbling and complaint and gossip and the like, we ourselves are sowing things that we will also reap. If we sow unforgiveness we will reap unforgiveness (Matthew 6:15). If we grumble and spread discontent it will come back on us. The Bible tells us “Good sense makes a man restrain his anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense” (Proverbs 19:11). In the same context as the vengeance passage quoted above, Paul tells us “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21). We do ourselves no good if we allow ourselves to drop to the level of those who abuse us, for in doing so, in addition to the abuse suffered, we reap what we sow in our responses. Anger, wrath and negativity breed and multiply, they produce neither the righteousness of God, nor the abundant life (James 1:20; John 10:10). A godly response to the wrong done therefore is, as last day, not only good and right and proper, it too is smart! We do of course need His help, and it is available.
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