Wm. Paul Young took us on quite a journey last Saturday night with lots of stories, sidetracks-within-stories, hard-won wisdom and beautiful insights. You can listen to the podcast here.
I was deeply moved by what Paul shared about unforgiveness, forgiveness, and reconciliation. His wisdom felt solid - both empowering and freeing.
Breaks in relationships and issues of unforgiveness touch most of us deeply — and all too frequently. Offense is taken over something, and then someone finds themselves feeling distanced or even “cut off” from a relative, neighbor, friend, or fellow member of an organization.
Often this is because we’ve leapt to assumptions about the other person’s intentions. We can build whole court cases in our minds against someone that are based upon misperceptions and misinformation. I believe these are examples of “vain imaginations” or “arguments” (the Greek word logismos) which the apostle Paul names in 2 Cor 10:4-5 “For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ,” (NKJV)
As we look to God’s Spirit to help us identify and disempower these assumptions and “cases” we make against each other, we become more and more freed to walk in koinonia - a Greek word meaning to share together in a valued reality greater than ourselves.
And yet, sometimes, the wounds and pain caused by someone’s actions are very deep and truly damaging. What do we do then?
Here is empowering wisdom from Paul Young:
- People often seem to confuse forgiveness and reconciliation. And, as a result they can find themselves stuck in revolving cycles of abuse.
- Forgiving someone means we let go of their throat. This is mostly for our own sake - freeing us from staying in bitterness. Yet, in a mysterious way, it is often felt by the other person. We don’t need to wait until the other person asks for forgiveness in order to forgive them. Indeed, many times they aren’t alive anymore or just don’t care about us.
- Unforgiveness is like a having a dead body chained to our back - poisoning every relationship.
- When we decide we want freedom from unforgiveness, it is good to invite God into a conversation about it. And it can help a lot to also include a few close people in our community in this conversation.
- Forgiving someone is often impossible to do by ourselves. But we can trust God to empower us as we lean on Him to help. Indeed, Paul Young notes that the passage about the faith of a mustard seed in the Gospel of Luke is tied to receiving the strength to forgive - to uproot something as strongly rooted as a mulberry tree and cast it away! Luke chapter 17:3-6 (ESV): “Pay attention to yourselves! If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him, and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, saying, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.” The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” And the Lord said, “If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.”
- Forgiving ourselves is often the hardest to do.
- Forgiveness is a process. Paul Young shared about a time earlier this year when he became aware of anger towards his now 90 year old mother for not protecting Paul when he was a young boy from his angry father’s beatings. Paul was surprised by the anger that came up in him, but the process of forgiveness now goes much more quickly than it used to - instead of taking 6 months, it is now more like 6 minutes to 6 hours.
- Forgiving someone does not mean you have to automatically trust the person or have a close relationship with them. Good, strong boundaries are often still necessary! If we believe that forgiveness also means we must reconcile — even with a person who has little or no value for us, and continues try to bully/control us — this keeps us in cycles of abusive relationships.
I’ve seen instances where someone repeatedly bullied another person and then repeatedly demanded they forgive him. “God says you have to forgive”. A predator was using Bible verses to abuse and manipulate a friend of mine. Jesus did not say “you have to instantly trust whoever hurt you.” No. Instead we can have wise, healthy boundaries without holding on to bitterness. Jesus frees us and empowers us to live and love like him.
Reconciliation
Most of the time, reconciliation for smaller relational “breaks” can be accomplished by opening our hearts, remembering the love we have for each other, and seeking to understand each other. Families usually have some kind of "reconciliation model” - how we got back to being "OK" with each other. I encourage you ponder how that worked (or really didn’t work) in your family of origin - and then invite Father God to teach you the reconciliation processes of His family.
Sometimes the damage done to a relationship is severe: betrayal, adultery, repeated bullying, serious manipulation and control, embezzlement, destruction of someone you love, etc. - where bridges of trust have been burned. The pain in these cases is real and deep, and a slow process is needed to truly reconcile.
Here is Paul Young’s wisdom for seeking reconciliation after a major relational break:
Reconciliation is about reestablishing trust once it’s been lost. It is always up to the person who has been hurt whether they choose to move toward reconciliation. For Paul Young and his wife Kim, it was an 11-year process and for most of the time, Paul did not know if they’d ever be fully reconciled.
For deep reconciliation to have a chance to work, the person who caused the damage to the relationship will need to:
- Really own what they did
- Be specific about what they did and the damage they caused
- Ask for forgiveness for those specific behaviors and the damage they caused (not generalities)
- Show real change over time.
Paul Young still deeply regrets the pain and damage he caused his wife Kim and others. But through the love of the Trinity for Paul, the shame has been taken away and only a godly grief remains - in a space where Jesus is with him.
I can vouch for these points personally. As I’ve shared before, I did a lot of emotional damage to my wife Susan in the early years of our marriage by acting in angry, threatening, controlling ways. Our reconciliation process took many years. I needed to be patient, own my stuff, have a shared reality with Susan about how I acted and how this hurt her. And, Susan needed to see real change in me over time.
Because of God’s work in my heart, Susan has been able to see real change in the ways I respond to “triggers” and the ways I treat her. And our marriage has become a life-giving blessing to both of us.
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