Lesson 6: Forgiven Forgivers
Questions 3 and 4
Next, let’s consider what forgiveness is not and answer some of the questions mentioned at the beginning of the lesson.
Forgiveness does not mean that we are okay with the sin.
God was not okay with our sin. He was filled with righteous anger and wrath. To His praise, Jesus stood in our place and drank the full cup of God’s wrath against our sin (Matthew 26:39) so that we might drink the cup of fellowship with God and each other (1 John 1:3).
Because we are made in the image of God, we too will be angry at sin, but we must be careful.
Ephesians 4:26-27 guides us to “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger and give no opportunity to the devil.”
If we sin in our anger over the sin our spouse has committed, then we add insult to injury and are now in need of repentance ourselves. Instead of giving the devil an opportunity, we want to harness our righteous anger and use it to fuel our efforts to help our spouse overcome the devil’s snares of lust and impurity.
Question 3. According to Ephesians 4:26-27, if we are sinfully angry toward our spouse, what are we doing?
Forgiveness does not mean that we forget what happened.
When God forgives, He does not forget our sin; rather, He chooses to remember our sins no more (Hebrews 8:12). Instead of God remembering our sin, God remembers the perfect life Jesus lived for us in our place and the perfect sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross to pay for our sins. On this basis, He accepts us in Christ (Ephesians 1:6).
As much as we’d like to forget the sins we have committed or our spouse has committed, we cannot. But we can consciously choose not to remember the sins, not to dwell on them, and not talk with others about them in a vindictive way. We can overwhelm our negative thoughts about the sin with the good news of the gospel and the hope we have for our spouse's repentance and restoration. We will discuss this in more detail in future lessons.