A Classic Holiness Sermon

“Have I To Forgive My Enemies?”

By Oswald Chambers

You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you
(Matthew 5:43-44).

Did Jesus Christ mean it when He said, “Love your enemies”? If He did, we must come to the conclusion either that He was a madman or that there is a meaning underneath His words that we do not at first see. It is impossible to do what our Lord says if we imagine we can do it of ourselves, and we soon discover our ignorance. Jesus Christ bases all His teaching on the fundamental fact that God can do for people what people cannot do for themselves. It is an easy business to say I love my enemies when I haven’t any, but when I have an enemy, when someone has done me or those who belong to me a desperate wrong, what is my attitude, as a Christian, to be? Does Jesus Christ mean that I have to ignore the rugged sense of justice that is in everyone and be a sentimentalist and say, “Oh, yes, I forgive you”? What we are up against just now is the danger of not making the basis of forgiveness and peace the right kind. If it is not the basis of perfect justice, it will fail. We may succeed in calling a truce, but that is not peace, and before long we will be at it again.

1. The Matter of Forgiveness: Repentance

In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace (Ephesians 1:17).
Forgiveness is the great message of the Gospel, and it satisfies a person’s sense of justice completely. The fundamental factor of Christianity is the forgiveness of sins. But what about those who do not care whether they are forgiven or not? That is the case with us all to begin with, we do not care whether Jesus Christ lived or died or did anything at all, and to hear about God forgiving us, why, there is nothing in it. But when people get convicted of sin (which is the most direct way of knowing that at the basis of life there is a problem too big for them to solve), they know that God dare not forgive them; if He did, then the human race has a bigger sense of justice than God. The majority of us know nothing about the Redemption or forgiveness until we are enmeshed by the personal problem—something happens that stabs us wide awake and we get our indifferent hides pierced; we come up against things, and our consciences begin to be roused. When once a person’s conscience is roused he or she knows God dare not forgive, and it awakens a sense of hopelessness. Forgiveness is a revelation—hope for the hopeless—that is the message of the Gospel.

According to the Bible, the basis of things is tragic, and the way out is the way Jesus Christ made in the Redemption. We all, whether Cain or Judas or you or I, can receive absolute forgiveness from God the moment we know we need it, but God cannot forgive someone unless that one repents. Repentance means that we recognize the need for forgiveness—“hands up, I know it.” Jesus Christ did not come to fling forgiveness broadcast; He did not come to the Pharisees, who withstood Him and said He was possessed with a devil, and say “I forgive you”; He said, “Serpents, brood of vipers! How can you escape the condemnation of hell?” (Matthew 23:33). We may talk as much as we like about forgiveness, but it will never make any difference to us unless we realize that we need it. God can never forgive the one who does not want to be forgiven. As long as we live in the “tenth story” we either talk sentimental stuff or else we remain indifferent to the fact of forgiveness; only when we strike bottom morally do we begin to realize what the New Testament means by forgiveness. As soon as anyone turns to God, the Redemption is such that forgiveness is complete.

“In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins.” The background of the forgiveness of God is His holiness. If God were not holy, there would be nothing in His forgiveness. The conscience of God means that He has to completely forgive and finally redeem the whole human race. Everyone knows by the way she or he is made that there is such a thing as justice, and God forgives on the basis of His justice, namely, on the ground of Redemption. We are apt to say glibly that God will forgive us, but when we come up against the thing, we know He dare not; if He did, He would cease to be God. There is no such thing as God overlooking sin. That is where people make a great mistake with regard to God’s love; they say “God is love and of course He will forgive sin”; God is holy love and of course He cannot forgive sin. Therefore if God does forgive, there must be a reason that justifies Him in doing it. Unless there is a possibility of forgiveness establishing an order of holiness and rectitude in a person, it would be a mean and abominable thing to be forgiven. If I am forgiven without being altered by the forgiveness, forgiveness is a damage to me and a sign of unmitigated weakness on the part of God. A person has to clear God’s character in forgiving. The revelation of forgiveness in the Bible is not that God puts snow over a rubbish heap but that He turns a person into the standard of Himself, the Forgiver. If I receive forgiveness yet go on being bad, I prove that God is not justified in forgiving me. When God forgives someone He gives that person the heredity of His own Son, and there is no one on earth who cannot be presented “perfect in Christ Jesus” (Colossians 1:28). Then on the ground of the Redemption, it is up to me to live as a child of God. The reason my sins are forgiven so easily is because the Redemption cost God so much.

2. The Method of Forgiveness: Reaction

Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors . . . If you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses (Matthew 6:12, 15).

Jesus Christ taught His disciples to pray “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors,” that is, He taught them to recognize that God’s method of forgiveness is the same as our own. Jesus Christ did not say because we forgive our debtors, but as we forgive our debtors, that is, as children of God we are forgiven not on the ground of Redemption but on the ground that we show the same forgiveness to others that God has shown to us. “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” God’s method in forgiveness is exactly the method of our forgiveness and is according to our human sense of justice.
Peter seemed to stand on tiptoe once and try to reach to God’s forgiveness: “‘Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven’” (Matthew 18:22). Yet when a person has deliberately done you a wrong, it is according to the teaching of Jesus that you must not say you forgive unless he or she turns; if the person turns, forgiveness is to be complete. We may forgive easily because we are shallow, but when we are deeply roused, we cannot forgive unless our sense of justice is satisfied. The most marvelous ingredient in the forgiveness of God is that He also forgets, the one thing a human being can never do. Forgetting with God is a divine attribute; God’s forgiveness forgets. We can never forget except by the sovereign grace of God. God exhausts metaphors to show what His forgiveness means: “As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12); “For You have cast all my sins behind Your back” (Isaiah 38:17); “I, even I, am He who blots out your transgressions for My own sake; and I will not remember your sins” (43:25); “I have blotted out, like a thick cloud, your transgressions, and like a cloud, your sins” (44:22); “For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin will remember no more” (Jeremiah 31:34).

When the prodigal son came back with words that meant, I am sorry to the backbone for what I have done and am ashamed of myself, the father never said a word about the far country, about the harlots and the riotous living (the elder brother reminded him of all that); he did not cast up at him one thing he had done—sufficient for him that his son had returned. Is it conceivable to us that God will forget what we have done? He says He will, but the forgiveness of God does not work unless we turn; it cannot, anymore than it does according to human justice. When we turn to God and say we are sorry, Jesus Christ has pledged His word that we will be forgiven, but the forgiveness is not operative unless we turn, because our turning is the proof that we know we need forgiveness.

3. The Message of Forgiveness: Retaliation versus Retribution

Moreover if your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he hears you, you have gained your brother (Matthew 18:15).

It would be an immoral thing to forgive people who did not say they were sorry. If anyone sins against you and you go to him or to her and point out what was done wrong—if the individual hears you, then you can forgive, but if the person is obstinate you can do nothing; you cannot say “I forgive you,” you must bring the person to a sense of justice. Jesus Christ said, “I say to you, Love your enemies,” but He also said the most appallingly stern things that were ever uttered, for example, “If you do not forgive . . . neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” I cannot forgive my enemies and remain just unless they cease to be my enemies and give proof of their sorrow, which must be expressed in repentance. I have to remain steadfastly true to God’s justice. There are times when it would be easier to say “Oh, well, it does not matter, I forgive you,” but Jesus insists that the uttermost farthing must be paid. The love of God is based on justice and holiness, and I must forgive on the same basis.

There is a difference between retaliation and retribution. The basis of life is retribution: “For with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged; and with the measure you use, it shall be measured back to you” (Matthew 7:2). This statement of our Lord’s is not a haphazard guess; it is an eternal law, and it works from God’s throne right down. Life serves back in the coin you pay. You are paid back what you give—not necessarily by the same person—and this holds with regard to good as well as evil. If you have been generous, you will meet generosity again through someone else; if you have been shrewd in finding out the defects of others, that is the way people will judge you. Jesus Christ never allows retaliation, but He says that the basis of life is retribution. If my enemies turn and give proof of their sorrow, I am not to meet them with retaliation. Christianity is not a set of principles but relationship to a person, Jesus Christ, while the Holy Spirit works in us a spontaneous relationship to things on the basis of God’s forgiveness of us.

The distinctive thing about Christianity is forgiveness—not sanctification or my holiness, but forgiveness—the greatest miracle God ever performs through the Redemption. Forgiveness means not merely that I am saved from sin and made right for heaven—no one would accept forgiveness on such a level; forgiveness means that I am saved from sinning and put into the Redeemer to grow up into His image. I am forgiven into a re-created relationship; that is, into identification with God in Christ, so that the forgiven one is the holy one. The basis of human life is Redemption. There is nothing more certain in time or eternity than what Jesus Christ did on the Cross. He switched the whole of the human race back into right relationship to God, and any one of us can get into touch with God now, not presently.

Forgiveness is the miracle of grace; it is impossible for human beings to forgive, and it is because we do not see this that we misunderstand the revelation of forgiveness. The great characteristic of God is not that He says He will pay no more attention to what I have done but that He forgives me, and in forgiving He is able to deal with my past, with my present, and my future. Do I believe that God can deal with my yesterday and make it as though it had never been? By means of the Redemption God undertakes to deal with a person’s past, and He does it in two ways: first, He forgives it, and then He makes it a wonderful culture for the future. When God says, Don’t do that anymore, and the power comes by right of what Jesus Christ did on the Cross. That is the unspeakable wonder of the forgiveness of God, and when we become rightly related to God, we are to have the same relationship to other people that God has to us. “And be kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32).