Paying forgiveness forward.

One of the scriptures people point at to “prove” you can lose your salvation is the bit Jesus says after the Lord’s Prayer: “If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins.” (Mt 6.14-15 NLT) They point at this verse and say, “See? We can do something that’ll render us unforgiven, and keep us out of the Kingdom.”

Okay, let’s back up to first principles. How do we have the ability to forgive people? I mean really forgive people; treat them as if they never sinned against you in the first place, rather than dismiss their wrongdoing against you, but always hold them at arm’s length lest they mistreat you again. Where does that near-supernatural ability, that fruit of forgiveness, come from? (You might notice I’m laying on the hints pretty thick.)

Yeah okay, God. The Christian’s ability to forgive comes from God. Really, everybody’s ability to forgive comes from God. Forgiveness is a form of love, and all love comes from God. (1Jn 4.7) Pagans can love people with God’s love, and forgive people with God’s forgiveness, same as Christians. The only difference is they might know who empowers them to do that. We do know.

So if we forgive people, it’s because we’re obeying God’s command to love our neighbors. (Mk 12.31) If our neighbors sin against us, we forgive them until we lose count. (Mt 18.21-22) We love them because God loved us first, (1Jn 4.19) and we forgive them because God so graciously forgave us our sins. (Cl 3.13) Indeed, that’s why we can pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us our sins, as we forgave others.” (Lk 11.4) We mimic God’s behavior because of the closeness of our relationship with him.

Unless we don’t mimic God’s behavior, because we don’t have a close relationship with him.

Therein lies the problem. Unforgiveness does not get us un-saved. Unforgiveness is a symptom of a bigger problem: Our relationship with God is lacking. We lack the power to forgive—to radically forgive even the most heinous of offenses—because we lack the connection with God that we need for that kind of generosity. We lack the ability to say, “Nothing is unforgivable,” because we’re not in contact with the One who can teach us that. I’m not saying our relationship with God makes it easy to forgive everyone. Some people are near impossible. I’m only saying we’ll try—because we love God, and God loves them, and we want to try for his sake, at least.

Sadly, most of us know someone who won’t try, not even for God’s sake. They won’t forgive. They don’t care that God wants them to forgive. They cling to their bitterness as if it’s their most valuable possession. (Certainly God’s not it.) And because of this utter rebellion against God, one can legitimately make the case that such people aren’t saved: You can’t legitimately claim to know God if you refuse to obey him. (1Jn 2.4) Were they ever saved to begin with? Dunno. That’s debatable. All we know is they certainly don’t act saved. Saved people produce fruit. Unsaved people don’t.

Hence Jesus’s statement, “If you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins.” (Mt 6.15 NLT) This was not his warning, “You’d better forgive, or you’ll undo your salvation.” This was his explanation, “We tend to see rebellion among the unsaved.” Those who truly follow God don’t need warnings like this. Those who don’t—who think God’s grace means they don’t have to forgive anybody, ’cause God forgives everything!—don’t really know or understand God, (1Jn 3.6) for they don’t love, and God is love. (1Jn 4.8)

So we gotta pay God’s forgiveness forward. He forgave us; we forgive others. We demonstrate his love by showing it to others. We forgive people who know they don’t deserve it, and when they’re stunned by our unexpected behavior, we point back to the One who forgave us, and demonstrate through this behavior that we really are daughters and sons of God. Sometimes it makes them want to know this God we follow—and hence our fruit bears its own fruit. But when we don’t forgive… well, that’s no different from the way anyone else behaves, so of course it doesn’t stand out, or draw people to God. Often it does just the opposite. So let’s not do that.