The Power of My Forgiveness and Unforgiveness, Revisited

My forgiveness or unforgiveness of you has real power. If I hold onto a grudge against you, or you hold onto a grudge against me, it binds both of us, limits the Body of Christ, and affects the whole world, until it is released. So we must properly deal with grudges.

My forgiveness or unforgiveness of you has real power. If I hold onto a grudge against you, or you hold onto a grudge against me, it binds both of us, limits the Body of Christ, and affects the whole world, until it is released. Therefore, if I am aware that you hold something against me, it is my duty to go to you, to seek reconciliation. I am not to wait for you to come to me, and neither of us is to wait for the other to “apologize.” This is true even if the matter which occasioned the grudge was not a real “sin” against God, or even was a purely imaginary offense. The matter has effects far beyond us.

Introduction

This series will amplify and expand the theme of a post I wrote several years ago, Do We Want the Peace and Restoration of Unity and Mutual Forgiveness, or the “Torturers” of Mental Illness?, with discussion of additional supporting passages. Jesus takes offenses, and the resulting grudges, between believers VERY seriously.

It is commonly thought that the grudge I may hold against you is none of your business, so long as I take no outward, physical actions to harm you as a result of it. After all, the argument goes, my unexpressed grudge does not affect you in any way, and, by holding it, I am only harming myself.

However, there are four problems with this common belief:

1. Even ignoring the spiritual dimensions of the question, it is quite unlikely that my grudge is completely unexpressed, not revealed in any of my words or other behavior. Even avoidance is a behavior–if I start being cooler toward you, that affects you. The tone of my words to third persons about you, and about other people, ideas and projects with which you associate, also expresses my attitude toward you. All of these things can have a direct effect on the decisions others make about you, hence, on your life. But even if my grudge has absolutely no outward expression, the three spiritual dimensions identified below will remain.
2. As Jesus himself indicates in some of the passages discussed in this series, when I hold a grudge against you, this grudge binds you and limits you, in the spiritual realm, until I release you. My grudge need not even involve an “offense” that is a “sin” against God, for it to bind you. It may have arisen from something innocent, something you did that was, in fact, absolutely good but offended me, or even something I merely imagined. As long as I hold a grudge against you, for any reason, it affects you.
3. My grudge also affects me–turning me over to the “torturers” until I forgive you. And my “torture” affects others around me, even if the outwardly traceable consequences of those effects never reach you directly.
4. Finally, my grudge impinges upon the unity of the Body of Christ, weakening its ministry to us all and its outreach to the world.

Unfortunately, human church organizations have generally sought to justify their collective grudges against their collective enemies–for instance, other church organizations, members of other world religions collectively, or ethnic groups or whole nationalities that they perceive to oppose them. And our local churches, denominational and other “Christian” organizations have often joined in promoting political or nationalistic grudges as part of the quid pro quo for secular official support–grudges which they then insist their members must hold and act upon in certain ritualized ways. Obviously, these “necessary” collective grudges have led to many negative outward effects in the world–wars, genocides, persecutions, simple acts of meanness and a perennially weak testimony of Christ–but all of these are thought justified, at the time, as institutionally “necessary.”

This is not to say that our human church organizations do not generally teach that we should forgive our own individual grudges, to the extent that they do not flow from officially justified collective grudges. Still, justifying the “necessary” collective grudges has forced church teaching over the centuries to systematically misinterpret all that the New Testament says about offenses and grudges–both individual and collective (the same teachings really apply identically to both). This series of posts will attempt to summarize that teaching correctly.

NEXT (for now): Paul’s Mourning over those who have Not Repented, 2 Corinthians 12:21 (a past post in a different series)

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