Someone said, "it is when we are being sinned against that we are the most tempted to sin." This is so true.
When someone sins against us, regardless of the seriousness of the offence, Satan's primary tactic is to get us to REACT out of our unhealed wounds from the past and our sinful flesh of the moment.
But in those situations, Christ's calling for us is to RESPOND out of the overflowing of Christ's love and compassion from our hearts. How do we tell the two apart in our hearts? When someone sins against us, if we can get to a point that we can heartily say, "Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.", we know our hearts have passed the test. If we take situations when we are wronged as Litmus tests of our heart conditions: tests to reveal the spiritual reality of how much our hearts are filled and overflowed with Christ love, we would be more spiritually alert to sail through the storm in victory, and less likely to be fixated in the state of being victimized.
Reactions to the sins of others upon us, out of our unhealed wounds and sinful flesh, are internal focused and me-directed in nature. I want my rights and my justice settled now. I want to curse them over and over again. I want the offending parties to get what they deserved. I want them to pay for my hurts. I want to hurt them back so they know how I feel now. That's exactly what Satan wants us to react so that it will suck all parties into a downward, endless spiral of darkness.
Christ calls for a upward focused and others-directed response from us. Such response goes against human nature. It would not come from a heart that is empty or only partially filled with the compassion and love of Christ. Only when a heart is in a state of overflow of Christ love can it be in tune with the Holy Spirit, to see our offenders through the eyes of our Father in heaven. Our Father's concerns for our offenders are beyond their offensive acts. He takes pity on their fallen state of the soul and desires to redeem them from the darkness of their hearts. As we surrender our broken souls under Christ's lordship, like Christ, we start to take our Father's concerns as our own concerns. In our obedience, our nature according to the flesh is being transformed into the nature in the Spirit. As a result, our own human concerns from the flesh is displaced by godly concerns for our offenders. Our godly desire for the redemption of our offenders' soul drives us to godly responses that come natural in Spirit guided hearts.
Does that mean that we let people abuse us in whatever way without protecting ourselves? Does that mean that we let people lie to us, cheat on us without confronting them? That is absolutely not the case.
Jesus did not love the Pharisees any less than He loved the Samaritan woman. Every time when faced with the evil scheming of the hypocritical Pharisees, Jesus always responded with TOUGH LOVE. His responses were never about Jesus' feelings being hurt. Of course these evil intentions always dampen one's spirit, and the incarnated Christ as human had feelings too. While Jesus did respond with strong emotions, it was not about his emotional wounds. His strong emotions were always great sadness about their hardened hearts, their worshipping by the lips but not by their hearts.
Jesus always called out the issues of the heart of the Pharisees for what they were, not to embarrass them, but out of His love for their souls. Such confrontations are necessary in the hope that they would come to the realization of the deceitfulness of their hearts and would come out of darkness where sins gain strength. Such demonstrations of TOUGH LOVE by Jesus give us a good examples to follow in the balancing between grace and truth; mercy and holiness.
Jesus also gave the Pharisees freedom to respond. Jesus did not force reconciliation upon the Pharisees after confronting them in Truth and Light. They have freedom to choose. Their choices determined their relationships with Jesus. Jesus respected that. They responded by plotting to kill Jesus. However, the prodigal son responded by repenting. When his sins brought him to such a depraved state, that even when he asked for the pods that the pigs ate to fill the stomach and was refused, that he started to come to his senses and willingly returned to his father's love. While the father forgave willingly, the father never sent his servants out to force him home. He waited, and he waited eagerly.
Forgiveness is a process. It can be an extremely long process. At the point of injury, when the wound is fresh, deep and real. The pain is sharp. We may have to check ourselves into the ICU for dampen souls. Accepting this state is important for healthy healing. Denial of it only builds up a bomb that will explode down the road when we are the most off guard. It is when we are still in the emotional ICU that the battle of the flesh against the Spirit is the most fierce. Being in ICU does not give us the excuse not to respond by the Spirit by the yielding of our flesh.
No one wants to stay in the ICU for long. Over time, our hearts become willing to replace the wounds with the filling of the compassion and the love of Christ. On the other hand, if we develop unhealthy attachment to stay in the ICU, we become unwilling to be healed by Christ's touch of compassion, then our hearts will remain empty of Christ's great love and as a result, we cannot start to forgive.
The heart is the place where the reality of forgiveness is experienced. In this process:
- Our past unhealed wounds have to be dealt with so that one can gradually start to forsake the victim's position of "it's all about me and my hurts". When our past wounds started to heal, we start to find new capacity to forgive that was not there before.
- Our sins of the flesh and the battle of who's the boss of our lives have to be settled definitively. Unless Christ is truly the Lord of our lives, unless we realize how much He has forgiven us, there is no worthy reason to forgive, there is no room in our hearts to forgive.
- When our hearts are filled by the love and compassion of Christ to the point that it is overflowing, to such extent that we can no longer hold such love only to ourselves, but compelled to bless others with it, our souls are set free. Only a soul set free is a soul that is no longer in the bondage of a victim of others' sins. A satisfied soul is the only kind that is willing to yield from the fixation on the perspective of being a victim, and start to embrace a perspective of God towards the perpetrator.
- Then we begin to be able to see the perpetrators as fallen souls, sinful human beings just like us. If we can get to this point, the seed of our compassion for them start being planted and grow. Before long, we start to develop a sadness of their fallen state, and start praying to our Father, and say, "Forgive them, in their fallen nature, they do not know what they are doing."
- We started to practice tough love. Tough love says we love too much to let them indulge in sins without a loving response. Like Jesus, we confront but also give them freedom to choose by setting boundary for the relationships.With this freedom to choose, they can reflect and hopefully be awakened. We start to pray in the Spirit that the Holy Spirit will soften their hearts, and come to a point to confess and repent and turn around.
