True forgiveness is to remove the offense out of your consideration. While the story is there, it has no power. You will never do this by continuing to focus on the offense. Your grace comes from focusing on the forgiveness granted to you which allows you to humbly forgive others in the same way.
Forgiveness is removing the Stinger, not the Bee
The power of holding on to the pain of being offended is a destructive power.
Unforgiveness is like holding a torch. At first, it is very powerful. You have a source of light and a weapon in your hand. Over time, it becomes a heavy burden that you must constantly think about. If you do not attend to it
and keep it in control, it becomes very dangerous to you and those around you. You become a bitter person and start imbittering those around you. You become a hateful person and refuse to be around people who do not share your hate.
Unforgiveness is not a healthy human emotion. The bitterness that grows from it spreads from its original target to everyone who is close to you. Eventually, you run the risk of isolating yourself from those you love because you tend to generalize your anger.
Unforgiveness is maintained with effort. You may not realize it, but you will have to spend increasing levels of time maintaining the same level of unforgiveness. You can do it. However, it blocks out your energy and time from more productive and exciting endeavors.
It is only after you have let the pain go that you will allow the memory of the offence out of your active thoughts. You will naturally forget and have to remember the offense when it does not have a painful emotion attached to it.
Forgiveness starts with letting go of the right to continue holding on to the pain.
You can never truly forget something significant that has happened. If that were the answer, we would look at brain technology to wipe out parts of your memory. The offense is a part of your story and always will be. However, it does not have to have power over you and your life. True forgiveness is when you take the power out of the offense. Yes, it happened, but it is forgiven and replaced with the wonderful life that you now have been afforded. It does not factor into my emotions, calculations or thoughts and attitudes. It has no power.
William P Young in The Shack said it quite well. “Forgiveness is not about forgetting. It is about letting go of another person’s throat.” In order to forgive someone, we must release them. We cannot wait until we have forgotten the entire experience. However, we do have to give up the power we hold over them. When we really do that, the memory will start to fade as it should.
For a man who has never drank alcohol, alcohol does not have any power over him. He never has to stop drinking. He can hold a drink in my hand, pour a drink for someone else, hang around people who are drinking and never want to take a drink. It has no power over him. That is how an offence is when it is truly forgiven. It is there, but powerless. The offence transforms from something very ugly to something clean. God put it this way, “Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool” (Isaiah 1:18). Sin has no power over the one who is forgiven. We also do not allow an offense to have any power when it is forgiven.
Even just letting go of the pain is costly and takes some time.
Forgiveness is to pay someone else’s debt which they cannot pay. You must come up with the means to pay it and that may take some time. It is not easy, and it is not free when the offence is real, personal and significant.
For God to forgive your sins was not instantaneous. He could not just wave His hand and say it did not happen or it was not so bad or that He did not care. It did happen; it is that bad; and He does care. The only way that He could forgive our sin was to pay the price of our sin for us. He had to send His son to live among us and literally die a hellish death. That is what our forgiveness rests on. It was not cheap, easy, fast, or free.
Trust is not restored immediately with forgiveness. Trust is rebuilt organically.
Trust and forgiveness are two different things. In order to build back the trust that you had before, you have to work through the process that got you where you are. I can forgive you and take the debt and pain out of our relationship, but that does not restore the trust that you built up over time.
If you rob me blind, I can intentionally forgive you and not hold that offence against you. You may still need the punishment of your wrongdoing. Your punishment is not necessarily or always dependent on my forgiveness.
Trust is never automatically restored or granted. I also may choose not to let you date my daughter. Simply because I do not hold an offence against you does not mean that you are automatically qualified for special privileges. There are plenty who want that privilege who will not receive it.
The process of building trust begins with a blank slate after forgiveness is extended and received. The offence is not held against you, but neither is the previous cache of trust held for you. Forgiveness allows our relationship to be restored and now we can start rebuilding trust.
God's forgiveness of us is a model of forgiveness. His forgiveness is complete and sufficient.
God did not just say that He forgives us. He paid a significant price to secure that forgiveness. John 3:16 makes that clear, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). The cost to God the Father was the sacrifice of His only son.
Because of the price that He paid, He can forgive us of all of our sins in the past and the future, remove the penalty of death completely and allow us into His own family. He does not just forgive a sin, but a sinner. We walk out of that prayer completely clean.
This new state that we are in is vividly described by Paul, “He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins (Colossians 1:13-14).
God’s unique and special forgiveness is the motivation for all Christian forgiveness. Paul tells the church in Ephesus, “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32). He also tells the church in Colossi, “Bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive” (Colossians 3:13).
When you remove the pain associated with an offense, the offence loses its power in your memory as well. Thus, you have “forgotten” it.
We do not need to concentrate on forgetting things. Our attention must be on truly forgiving and working to the point where the offenses against us are forgiven and carry no pain. At this point, they will find their way to the back of our memory where they belong.