Unforgiveness and the Power of PardonSample

 What Horizontal Forgiveness Looks Like

Joseph in the Old Testament gave us a vivid picture of what true horizontal forgiveness looks like. For one, it means not wanting to parade the sin of the one who offended you. Joseph extended forgiveness to his brothers who had treated him horribly, but he did so in private. If you genuinely forgive somebody, you won't feel compelled to tell others what that person did to you, for "love will cover a multitude of sins" (1 Peter 4:8).

Real forgiveness also means wanting to set the person who has wronged you at ease. Sometimes we'll say we have forgiven someone, but we still want to make them feel like a creep when they're in our presence. Joseph, on the other hand, assured his brothers that he didn't harbor any vengeance or bitterness against them.

When it came down to it, Joseph was able to forgive his brothers because he saw life with a vertical perspective. "As for you, you meant evil against me," he told them, "but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive" (Genesis 50:20). He recognized that behind their sin, God was sovereignly working all things together for good, as Romans 8:28 tells us.

I don't know what pain or suffering you have gone through or are going through because of others. But I do know God is able to take everything in your life—the good things as well as the poisonous, toxic things—and bring divine synergism to it all so the ultimate result is a supreme good as He defines it.

In the meantime, even if we never see that divine synergism on this side of Heaven, we are still called to forgive as Christ has forgiven us. And if Joseph shows us anything, it's that true forgiveness is a choice. If you base forgiveness on your feelings, you may never go through with it. "Well, I would forgive them if only they would" fill in the blank. That might never happen. So just forgive. It's possible only in Christ. You probably won't feel like it, but you can still do it. It can be divorced from how you feel.

As Corrie ten Boom wrote, "Forgiveness is not an emotion.... Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart."