Page 94 - Advanced Biblical Counseling Student Textbook

be earned. Forgiveness is extended from one person to another without regard for the balance
in one’s emotional or relational accounts.

o Forgiveness is Not Forgetting
Choosing to forgive someone who has harmed you does not mean that you wipe it from your
memory. You do not have to spend the rest of your life pretending that the other individual
never harmed you. Often the person who is being forgiven expects the incident to just disappear
into the past once forgiveness has been offered. In reality, however, it doesn’t have to be
forgotten in order to be forgiven.

o Forgiveness is Not a One-time Event
Since forgiveness is not the same as forgetting, this implies that the offense is going to surface at
various points throughout one’s life. Forgiveness is not a one-time decision but is an ongoing,
repetitive choice that needs to be made each time the offense is triggered in our memory.

o Forgiveness is Not an Acknowledgement that the Other Person was Right
If we chose to forgive someone who has harmed us, we are not acknowledging in any way that
what they did was OK. We are not pretending. We are not surrendering the truth. Instead, we
are acknowledging that what happened caused us real pain and that we are not going to hold it
against the person who harmed us.

What Forgiveness Is152

What is the truth about forgiveness? What are the aspects of true forgiveness? Now that we know what
forgiveness is not, we can move on to defining what forgiveness actually is.

o Forgiveness is Freely Given
Christians have the unique advantage of having a role model of
what it looks like to extend forgiveness freely. The cross of Jesus
shows us forgiveness and Jesus is Himself the best example ever
of forgiveness. We forgive because we have been forgiven, not
because the other person deserves it or has earned it.
Forgiveness is extended as an act of free will from the forgiver,
regardless of the merit of the other individuals involved.

o Forgiveness Accepts the Hurts and Drops the “Charges”
When we choose to forgive, we are making a conscious,
repetitive, ongoing decision to lay aside our perceived right to
vengeance. We acknowledge and accept the fact that our pain is
real. We deal with the pain within ourselves without exacting
our “pound of flesh.” We serve as our own witness to our pain,
but we drop the charges and we leave the courtroom.

152 Ibid.

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