What I Learnt From The Holy Spirit About Forgiveness

A little over a decade ago, one of my friends owed me one thousand US ($1000) dollars and did not pay back because he was bankrupt. About the same time, while I was expecting my friend to pay me back, I also borrowed about 200 dollars from one of my other friends to run a business. The business ran at a loss.

Now, I needed to pay back the $200. I made payment appointments on about two different occasions with my friend that borrowed me the $200 but I could not meet up with the payment. 

One day, while inside a BRT bus in one of the popular Lagos bus terminus, heading to a destination and waiting for the bus to be filled up, I called the friend I owed $200 to beg him for another payment plan. To my surprise, he told me, he forgave me the money and that I should not pay it again. He said we were best friends and that he believed, I would have paid back the money, if I had. That was a very great relief to me and I was happy.

While, I was still inside the same bus, happy that my debt had been waived, the Spirit of God told me that I have just been forgiven my debt, that I should pick my phone and call my other friend that owed me $1000 and also forgive him his debt. In obedience, I picked the phone and called him not to pay the $1000 debt again. He was happy as well.

Now, that would not have made so much sense to me just as it would not have made much sense to most people. Why should the Holy Spirit asked me to waive a debt of $1000 to another person because someone waived a debt of $200 to me? It would have made more sense to me, as a human being, if the Holy Spirit had financially blessed my debtor so that he could pay me back my $1000 debt and then I would take $200 from it and pay my own debt and then still had a whole $800 to cater for my family and still had some money to fill my pocket.

But guess what? The way of God is different. I believed that God wanted to teach me forgiveness and that I could not fully understand the gravity of forgiveness unless he taught me to forgive things that are painful to me. By so doing, I would have been used to forgiving 'perceived' painful offences and then to forgive ‘perceived’ little offences will not be so difficult.

Also, the Holy Spirit was teaching me that the face value or weight or gravity of offence does not matter to when God when in to comes to forgiveness but that what matters to God is whether forgiveness is granted or not. To the Holy Spirit, someone had forgiven me my debt and so I should forgive another person, his debt. He was concerned that forgiveness was done and not how much was forgiven. If I were to consider that how much was involved, I could have even gotten my debtor arrested, retrieve my money and then pay my own debtor. But the Holy Spirit was interested in something much more important. The way of God is truly different and unsearchable.

Can you remember the parable of the Lord Jesus Christ in Luke 15:3-5 that if a man had a hundred sheep, and one is lost, that man is supposed to leave the ninety-nine behind and go to look for the single one that was lost? Now, to most human being, that will not make sense. They will ask, 'Supposing something bad happen to the ninety-nine before I come back?' Let me just leave that one sheep to get lost like that’. But God is interested in every single sheep like the other.

If your boss at the office forgave your coming late to office, then you forgive the bus conductor that abused you in the bus. Forgiveness is forgiveness; it has nothing to do with weight or gravity of offence. If your friend could forgive you the lies you told him, then you should forgive your wife of her adultery.

It is like that.  If anyone can forgive you any offence, no matter how little you perceived the offence to be, then you must forgive your offender of any offence that is committed against you, no matter, how big you perceived the offence to be, including adultery.

This is similar to how masses frown when court sentenced citizens that stole a supposed minor items into prison. You often hear statements like ‘why should they sentence someone to prison for stealing ten thousand naira when there are many government officials stealing billions? But rather than viewing the two stealings as being punishable offences, they are try to ascribe punishability of offence to the weight of what was stolen. 

Jesus is coming.

Stay ready in absolute repentance, watchfulness and holiness.