Biography
Lewis B. Smedes is a professor of Theology and Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, and a member of the editorial board of The Reformed Journal. He is a graduate of Calvin College and Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and has his Doctor of Theology from the Free University of Amsterdam. Dr. Smedes is a frequent lecturer and preacher, and is also the author of a number of very successful books. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"Does It Still Make Sense to Forgive?" 
If you live long enough, some day, some time, you may be let down by somebody you trusted, and somebody you trusted to do you good will be disloyal to you. Somebody you trusted with your whole self can betray you, or perhaps even brutalize you.

The sad and tough fact is that we live in the kind of a world where decent people hurt each other, and where bad people can hurt us a lot. And sometimes what somebody else did to us seems so unfair and hurts us so deeply that it lodges inside of our soul like an indigestible lump.

Or — it’s like a video-tape playing its wretched reruns of the pain inside of our mind. And we can’t forget it, and we don’t know what to do with it, and the person who hurt us once keeps hurting us in our memories.

How to cope creatively with hurts we didn’t deserve and we didn’t have coming?

How to turn them into redemptive renewal for peace and happiness in our own lives?

God invented forgiveness as the remedy for healing hurts we don’t deserve. He tried it on us. It was his way of coping with hurts that we caused him that he never deserved. And he invites us to try it on one another, coping with hurts we didn’t have coming through the surprising, the unexpected, the revolutionary power of forgiving.

A great Jewish philosopher echoed Jesus sometime ago when she said, “The only remedy for the irreversibility of our histories is the power to forgive.”

Maybe you think there are a lot of ways. She says there is only one remedy for the pains of the past that we cannot undo — the power to forgive.

Since I wrote my book on forgiving, I discovered that there are two questions that gnaw at peoples’ hearts and guts after they have been hurt — especially if the hurt went deep and lasted long. One of them is — “Is it fair, is it really fair that I who have been hurt have to treat the person who walloped me as if nothing had happened? Is it fair?”

And I know from my experience with people that sometimes their hurts are so deep, and the pain is so intense, and the memory is so sad, that it simply doesn’t seem fair.

Is it fair to forgive? I want to tell you that the only fair way for the person who has been hurt is to be healed of the hurt, and the only way to be healed is to forgive. Consider this. Once somebody has hurt you and you know that they didn’t have to do it, and you know that they are to blame — what are your alternatives? One alternative is to repress it and try to forget it and that spells trouble later on. That is the way of denial, and denial never works in real life.

The other way is to get even, to follow the old bumper sticker, “We don’t get mad; we get even.” I’ve got news for you — getting even never works. Getting revenge just doesn’t do it for you. In the first place, nobody ever gets even in the game of pain. Have you ever wondered why family feuds lasted until finally people got too old to lift a rifle? It’s because they were always trying to get even, and it never worked. And it won’t work with you. It doesn’t work with me.

Consider this. Supposing the other person isn’t even around for you to get even with them so that it is impossible. Where does that leave you? Supposing the person who hurt you has moved away, out of reach, perhaps dead and gone. Perhaps the person who hurt you tells you to take your forgiveness and flush it down the garbage disposal, supposing you just can’t get even. Are you going to be tied forever to the escalator of pain? Are you going to be a bond slave of your own hurt? Are you going to let that person who hurt you once go on hurting by way of your memory as long as you live?

I spoke with a lady this morning who had been hurt as badly as any daughter could be hurt by an abusing mother, and she finally came to the conclusion that if she didn’t do something to begin forgiving, the abusing mother would go on abusing her in her memory as long as she lived. Is that fair?

I want to tell you that the only way to be fair to the victim of hurt is for the victim to forgive. I want you to remember that the first person who gets the pay-off from forgiving is the person who does the forgiving. And remember this, forgiving is not being a patsy. Forgiving is not being a doormat. Forgivers do not tolerate everything. Forgiving is not the same thing as putting up with bad things.

I was on a talk show not long ago, and a lady called me and asked me, “How do you forgive a man who got drunk and while driving under the influence of liquor, killed your four-year-old boy? Tell me that.”

Ten minutes later another lady called, and she said, “I heard the lady and I have a message for her. The same thing happened to me five years ago, and I lived for two years with that pain, and I realized that the drunk driver who killed my boy was killing me too. They weren’t burying me yet, but they were killing me. I had to do something to forgive. I had to do something to get rid of this gnawing hate inside of my soul, so I began to forgive. But I did one more thing. I went to my parish priest, and together we formed a chapter of ‘Mothers Against Drunk Drivers.’”

Do you see my point — forgive a drunk driver but never put up with drunk driving? Forgiving is not tolerating. So when people ask me, “Is forgiving fair?” I say, “How else can you be fair to the person who has been hurt except to use the one remedy that God gives us to cope creatively with hurts we never deserve.”

Another question that they ask me is this, “Can you really do it? Isn’t it too hard? Isn’t it psychologically too difficult? Shouldn’t we rather just try to understand and forget it?”

And I say, “Yes, it’s hard. It's probably the toughest trick in the whole bag of human relationships.”

I don’t know of anything that is harder to do than to forgive, but there are a lot of us who make it even harder than we need to. I’d like to tell you a few things that I have learned that don’t make forgiving easy but at least make it less hard than it has to be. Let me suggest a few to you.

The first one is this: Don’t forgive because someone tells you it’s your duty to forgive.

I have never met a person yet who forgave another human being because she felt it was an obligation. Don’t do it because you have to. Do it because you want to. And when you think about it, you will realize that wallowing in the bilge of your own hate and resentment and pain is not nearly as much fun as dancing on stage to the melody of healing freedom.

Ask yourself what you really want. Do you really want to stew? Do you really want to develop ulcers? Do you really want to be hurt continually in your life? Or do you want to be free of the hurt you never had coming in the first place?

Wait until you want to and then God will give you the power.

Here's another hint: Don’t force yourself to do it fast.

Forgiving is tough. Forgiving is hard. God can do it in a single swoosh, but you’re not God. The first thing to remember in forgiving is that you’re not God. It takes time.

One of my favorite writers was a great British writer by the name of C. S. Lewis. And about three months before he died, in his 70s, he wrote to an American lady, and he said, “Dear Mary, do you know I think I have at long last forgiven a cruel schoolmaster who so darkened my youth. I thought I had done it many times before, but now I have actually done it.” It took him a long time.

Forgiving doesn’t come for most of us in one big clump. It's like an IRA account. It’s not a bonanza at the beginning, but you work up with increments, and if you stick at it for a while you will discover that you built up a pretty good account of forgiving power in your life. Be patient with yourself. Take your time.

Here's another hint. Don't wait for the other person to come to you to say, “I’m sorry.”

That may never happen. The person who hurt you may be dead and gone. The person who hurt you may have moved away. The person who hurt you may not believe that be or she hurt you unfairly. He may never come back. And then the question is, “Do you want that person to have such control over your life that by his or her refusal to say ‘I’m sorry’, you’re stuck with your pain?” I just can’t imagine anything more unreasonable than to inflict pain on yourself that you don’t deserve just because somebody doesn’t come and say “I’m sorry.”

If they come — wonderful! If they don’t — take a solo flight to freedom and heal yourself with the power that God gives you to forgive.

Here’s another hint — don’t demand a Hollywood ending.

Some people think that every time you forgive somebody, it has to end immediately with an embrace, and tears flowing down your cheek, and then you love each other and are better friends than you’ve ever been before. That may work sometimes but it doesn’t have to. It doesn’t have to.

You know there are some people who are just not good for you. There are some people that you better not be close friends with. There are some people you better not be married to. Just because you forgive somebody, you don’t have to like them. Just because you forgive somebody, you don’t have to get married to them again.

Listen: forgivers are not fools. Don’t demand a Hollywood ending. It may frighten you too much. The important thing is to heal yourself and then go on from there and take whatever God in his providence gives you by way of a new relationship with the person who hurt you. Don’t demand a Hollywood ending.

This is going to be my last hint: don’t forgive too much.

Don’t try to forgive too much at a time. God can forgive wholesale. We need to forgive retail — one thing at a time. Be concrete. Don’t try to forgive people for what they are. Don’t try to forgive people for being slobs or unkind or cruel people. Forgive them for what they did to you last Thursday. Write it down. Be specific. Be concrete. Stick to one thing at a time.

I find in my life that most of the jobs that I do can be handled more successfully if I section them off, if I don’t try to think about doing the whole job. If I’m writing a book, I get paralyzed if I think I have to write a whole book. Sometimes I get stymied if I’m trying to write a whole chapter. But if I take this paragraph and this sentence one at a time, finally something happens. And the same is true in the game of healing ourselves.

Well, I’ve offered to you some hints — five of them.

Don’t force yourself to forgive too quickly. Take your time. God has patience. So can you.

Don’t do it as a duty. Do it because you want to.

Don’t wait until the other person repents or says she is sorry.

Don’t demand a Hollywood ending to every time that you forgive.

Don’t try to forgive too much at a time. Be concrete. Be specific.

And here’s another thing that I’ve discovered. I learned it from a lady who came to me, after I’d been talking about forgiving, whose husband had left her and left her with a huge lump of pain. And she asked herself, “How can I get rid of this pain? My husband is gone; he’s not going to come back. But how can I get rid of the pain? I’m not getting anywhere with this. The memory of what he did to me is so painful and so strong that I can’t get rid of it.” So she said, “I decided I would pray for him.” So she began to pray for him. She didn’t mean it at first. It was like priming a pump that’s a little dry, but you put a little bit in at a time and before you know it, you've got a stream of water. Prime the pump.

Something happened to me about three years ago that made me terribly angry. I want to tell you that I was never more angry at anybody in my life. Somebody had done something very harmful to my youngest son. If you want to hurt me, get at me through my kids. Well he did. I was dancing to the rhythm of hate like you couldn’t believe, and I went to a close friend and told her about it. And I expected her to join my dance. But she didn’t. She said, “Why don’t you practice what you preach?”

That’s a terrible thing to say to a preacher, “Why don’t you practice what you preach?” And I decided, “Yeah. There’s only one way. It’s the way that I talk about, but how can I do it?”

Do you know what I did? I went alone into my study where nobody else could hear me. And I said, “Mr. X, in the name of Jesus Christ, I forgive you.” I said it out loud. Didn’t mean it at first. Then said it again. I said it aloud ten, fifteen times, and that got the juices of grace going in my life, and I began the process and I began to feel free, and I began to be healed. So it is with you.

And here’s one last thing that I have discovered in my life. I don’t have the power to forgive anybody else until I feel forgiven myself. When I know, and when I feel that nothing I have ever done will get God to love me less, and nothing I will ever do will get God to love me less, I know that he surrenders any right that he has to get even with me, and I know that he looks at me and feels about me as if I were his friend, and he blots out the memory. When I know that that’s what has happened to me, I gradually get the power to do it on other people. Feeling free to forgive because I feel freely forgiven.

When you forgive somebody who hurt you, you ride the crest of love’s great wave.

When you forgive somebody who hurt you, you walk in stride with God.

When you forgive somebody who hurt you, you set a prisoner free and then you discover that the prisoner you set free was you.

When you forgive somebody, you begin to heal the hurts you never deserved to have in the first place.