Forgiveness Is Possible

FORGIVENESS IS POSSIBLE

When Joseph’s brothers came and bowed before him with their faces to the ground he had the power to help them or harm them. More than twenty years earlier they had sold him into slavery. No doubt he was tempted to use his power against them. But he knew that would not honor God. He chose forgiveness. God gave him the strength. Thousands of years later, after somehow surviving time in a Nazi concentration camp, God gave Corrie ten Boom the same strength.

She was in a church service in Munich and had just spoken a message that God forgives. “When we confess our sins,” she said, “God casts them into the deepest ocean, gone forever. And even though I cannot find a Scripture for it, I believe God then places a sign out there that says, NO FISHING ALLOWED.”

After the service ended and the people stood in silence and quietly began to leave the room, she saw a man working his way through the crowd toward her. He was a balding, heavy-set man wearing a gray overcoat and clinching a brown felt hat between his hands. The sight of him instantly took her mind back to the concentration camp. He had been a guard there—one of the most cruel.

“A fine message, Fraulein! How good it is to know that, as you say, all our sins are at the bottom of the sea!”

At first she believed he did not remember her. But then he said something that almost stopped her heart cold. “You mentioned Ravensbruck in your talk. I was a guard there. But since that time I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well. Fraulein, will you forgive me?”

Corrie knew she had to forgive him because the Lord says, “If you will not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses.” Since the war had ended she had established a home in Holland for victims of Nazi brutality and there she had seen that those who would forgive were able to rebuild their lives, but those who nursed bitterness remained invalids. But knowing you should forgive and actually forgiving are two different things. She prayed for Jesus to help her—and he did. “I forgive you, brother! With all my heart.” For several moments Corrie and the former guard held each other’s hands. “I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then,” she said. “But even so, I realized it was not my love. I had tried, and did not have the power. It was the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Going Deeper

The person I need to forgive is…                                                                                    

One way I can show forgiveness is by…