Life is full of sorrow only if you do not learn how to forgive.
Forgiving through Christ is the ultimate example of burying the weapons that Satan can use in his war against our souls.
What does "I forgive you” really mean? What it doesn’t mean is that I am somehow freeing the perpetrator from accountability or discounting the seriousness of their sin. Their personal forgiveness can only come from God on condition of their sincere repentance. What it does mean is that I am willing to turn the perpetrator over to the Lord, trusting that He alone knows how best to deal with them.
When all is said and done, our sin against those who hurt us is the sin that hurts us most (and consequently could be called the “greater” sin) because it can cause us to lose the Spirit and can stop our spiritual progress.
The Savior said, “Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him,” thus commanding us to resolve our differences early on, lest the passions of the moment escalate into physical or emotional cruelty, and we fall captive to our anger.
Now let me take a moment here to note that we must take care in our families not to cause spiritual or emotional snakebites in the first place! In much of today’s popular culture, the virtues of forgiveness and kindness are belittled, while ridicule, anger, and harsh criticism are encouraged. If we are not careful, we can fall prey to these habits within our own homes and families and soon find ourselves criticizing our spouse, our children, our extended family members. Let us not hurt the ones we love the most by selfish criticism!
In our families, small arguments and petty criticisms, if allowed to go unchecked, can poison relationships and escalate into estrangements, even abuse and divorce. Instead, just like we learned with the poisonous venom, we must “make full haste” to reduce arguments, eliminate ridicule, do away with criticism, and remove resentment and anger. We cannot afford to let such dangerous passions ruminate—not even one day.
A woman who is abused should not seek revenge, but neither should she feel that she cannot take steps to prevent further abuse. A businessperson treated unfairly in a transaction should not hate the person who was dishonest but could take appropriate steps to remedy the wrong.
Forgiveness does not require us to accept or tolerate evil. It does not require us to ignore the wrong that we see in the world around us or in our own lives. But as we fight against sin, we must not allow hatred or anger to control our thoughts or actions.
This is not to say that forgiveness is easy. When someone has hurt us or those we care about, that pain can almost be overwhelming. It can feel as if the pain or the injustice is the most important thing in the world and that we have no choice but to seek vengeance. But Christ, the Prince of Peace, teaches us a better way. It can be very difficult to forgive someone the harm they’ve done us, but when we do, we open ourselves up to a better future. No longer does someone else’s wrongdoing control our course. When we forgive others, it frees us to choose how we will live our own lives. Forgiveness means that problems of the past no longer dictate our destinies, and we can focus on the future with God’s love in our hearts.
Since we cannot wash someone clean with our forgiveness, the only thing we can do with our forgiveness is cast off the burden of anger we carry. Much is written about how to cast off the burden of anger. However, what if there was no anger in the first place? There is no burden to cast off if the burden was never picked up. We can avoid the need to forgive if we avoid the tendency to be offended.
Not being offended might seem much harder than being offended and then letting go of the anger, but I don’t think so. I think the longer we carry a grudge, the harder it is to let it go. It becomes our security blanket, our protection from ever being hurt again, our evidence that we were wronged, and our way of reminding the offender that he has offended us. It’s difficult to let go of that security blanket, once we become attached to it. It might just be easier, not to wrap ourselves in the grudge in the first place.
Man’s forgiveness means that we let go of our anger, refuse to hold a grudge, that we don’t try to punish the sinner with our emotions.
If we had different words for the two types of forgiveness the scripture that reads “I The Lord will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men,” could read, “I the Lord will absolve whom I will absolve, but of you it is required to relinquish bitter feelings towards all men.” When the Lord forgives, he absolves, when men forgive, they relinquish.
When men forgive it does not mean the offender’s sins are washed away. When man forgives, it means the offended no longer carries the burden produced by the sin. Man’s forgiveness means that we let go of our anger, refuse to hold a grudge, that we don’t try to punish the sinner with our emotions.
5 Ways to Avoid the Need To Forgive: 1. Remember the offender may not have meant to offend. Accidents are called accidents because they were unintentional. 2. Realize the offender knows not what he does. It may not even occur to him that his actions have grave ramifications. For example, parents who verbally or emotionally abuse their children may not even be capable of imagining the damage they are doing. 3. Understand that the offender, themselves, is hurting. Too often wicked people have been treated wickedly. ... “crazy” is often the inability to successfully deal with one’s own hurt. 4. Ask yourself, “Who am I not to be hurt?” Realize "This is my trial. It was bound to happen, let’s see how I handle it." 5. Trust that Christ will punish fairly. When When we carry a grudge, refusing to speak to someone, or excluding them from our associations, our motive is often to punish them...When the offender truly gets what he deserves, which he will since God is just, we might actually feel terrible for him.
When we remember, before an offense even occurs, that we are all human, we all make mistakes, most of them are unintentional, and Christ will make right those that are not, then we can spare ourselves even a moment of carrying a burden it is not ours to carry.
8 My disciples, in days of old, sought occasion against one another and forgave not one another in their hearts; and for this evil they were afflicted and sorely chastened. 9 Wherefore, I say unto you, that ye ought to forgive one another; for he that forgiveth not his brother his trespasses standeth condemned before the Lord; for there remaineth in him the greater sin. 10 I, the Lord, will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men.
...Melancholy and awful that so many are under the condemnation of the devil and going to perdition.... they should be cast out from this Society, yet we should woo them to return to God lest they escape not the damnation of hell!
“Come on, dear brother, since the war is past, For friends at first, are friends again at last.”
Faith cannot be nourished in a heart that has been made hard by continued cynicism, skepticism, and unforgiveness.
Until the abused woman can turn justice over to the Lord, she will likely continue to experience feelings of anger—which are a form of negative devotion toward her abuser—and this traps her in a recurring nightmare. President George Albert Smith referred to this as “cherish[ing] an improper influence.”12 With her husband having hurt her so deeply, why would the wife allow him to continue victimizing her by haunting her thoughts? Hasn’t she suffered enough? Not forgiving her abuser allows him to mentally torment her over and over and over. Forgiving him doesn’t set him free; it sets her free.
Part of understanding forgiveness is to understand what it is not: Forgiving her abusive husband does not excuse or condone his cruelty. Forgiving does not mean forgetting his brutality; you cannot unremember or erase a memory that is so traumatic. Forgiving does not mean that justice is being denied, because mercy cannot rob justice. Forgiving does not erase the injury he has caused, but it can begin to heal the wounds and ease the pain. Forgiving does not mean trusting him again and giving him yet another chance to abuse her and the children. While to forgive is a commandment, trust has to be earned and evidenced by good behavior over time, which he clearly has not demonstrated. Forgiving does not mean forgiveness of his sins. Only the Lord can do that, based upon sincere repentance.
These are things that forgiveness does not mean. What forgiveness does mean is to forgive the husband’s foolishness—even his stupidity—in succumbing to the impulses of the natural man and at the same time still hope that he will yet yield “to the enticings of the Holy Spirit” (Mosiah 3:19). Forgiveness does not mean giving him another chance to abuse, but it does mean giving him another chance at the plan of salvation.
It is also helpful if the wife understands “that we are punished by our sins and not for them.”13 She then recognizes that her abuser has inflicted far more eternal damage upon himself than temporal damage upon her. And even in the present, his true happiness and joy diminish in inverse proportion to his increased wickedness, because “wickedness never was happiness” (Alma 41:10). He is to be pitied for the sorrowful and precarious situation he is in. Knowing that he is sinking in spiritual quicksand might begin to change her desire for justice—which is already occurring—to a hope that he will repent before it is too late. With this understanding she might even begin to pray for the one who has despitefully abused her.
We should learn from our errors, but we ought to forget them as soon as we can. There may be some value in "instant replay" in order to learn what we can and then move on. But some of us engage in "constant replay," which can be enervative and destructive of our self-confidence.
It is strange that when one is remodeling a portion of his house, he expects visitors to be tolerant of improvements that are so obviously underway. Yet while one is remodeling his character, we often feel obligated to call attention to the messy signs of remodeling, or feel called upon to remember aloud things as they were. Forgetting is such a necessary part of forgiving.
The pressures of life in a family will mean that we shall be known as we are, that our frailties will be exposed and, hopefully, we shall then work on them. … It is an encounter with raw selfishness, with the need for civility and taking turns, of being hurt and yet forgiving, of being at the mercy of others’ moods and yet understanding, in part, why we sometimes inflict pain on each other. … The home gives us a great chance to align our public and private behavior, to reduce the hypocrisy in our lives, to be more congruent with Christ.
Consider that it really isn’t how other people treat us that determine our emotions and attitudes towards them. It is how we are treating them that reveals the quality of our hearts; that reveals whether we are inviters to forgiveness and peace, or provocateurs in fueling fires of hatred already smoldering.
If we insist that we cannot help how we feel because of how others have provoked us, we have given up seeing ourselves as moral agents. We have abandoned our capability of being forgiving and instead are seeing ourselves as being driven to harshness we cannot help experiencing.
Forgiveness is really an understanding that the only person you hurt when you’re upset (no matter how justified it may be) is yourself. Even if everything in you wants to blame someone else, consider giving yourself the gift of forgiving your expectations.
Forgiveness is the gift you give yourself, not a gift you give someone else.
Forgiveness is true freedom from stories of our past and from the pain, rage, and anger that can eat away at our mind and body.
I can tell you, it’s the people who give up the story of what happened to them and find a higher meaning who are the ones who lead, grow, give, and experience life’s deepest joy and fulfillment.
When did you forgive even before someone said they were sorry? When can you choose to forgive without requiring an apology, or any conditions, or even a change of heart? Where can you own a higher meaning and finally set yourself free? How can you just let it go? It all goes back to trading in those useless expectations. And one way to get in the habit of this is through activating gratitude. ... What’s interesting is that we are incapable of being angry and grateful simultaneously.
Nelson Mandela is often quoted as saying, “Forgiveness liberates the soul. It removes fear…Resentment is like drinking poison and hoping it will kill your enemies.” He said, “As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew that if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.”
The gift of repentance is an expression of God’s kindness toward His children, and it is a demonstration of His incomparable power to help us overcome the sins we commit. It is also an evidence of the patience and long-suffering our loving Father has for our mortal weakness and frailties. President Russell M. Nelson, our beloved prophet, referred to this gift as “the key to happiness and peace of mind.”
Doing an injury puts you below your enemy; revenging one makes you but even with him; forgiving... it sets you above him.
Talk to yourself like you would to someone you love.
You hold in your hand an invitation: to remember the transforming power of forgiveness and loving kindness. To remember that no matter where you are and what you face, within your heart peace is possible.
Life is full of sorrow only if you do not learn how to forgive.
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