Don't Wait For Someday: Asking for Forgiveness

If you knew the end was near, what unfinished conversation would suddenly feel urgent?

Maybe you would acknowledge a wrong you have avoided, take back words you regret, forgive someone who hurt you, or ask forgiveness from someone you hurt. If the end would make that conversation urgent, why wait?

Joseph’s family knew the damage unresolved pain can cause. Their father’s favoritism wounded Joseph’s brothers, but instead of dealing honestly with their pain, they turned it against Joseph. They attacked him, threw him into a pit, sold him into slavery, and built their family around a lie (Genesis 37-50).

Their pain was real—but pain does not excuse our actions. It's far too easy to justify our hurtful behaviors toward others because we have experienced hurt. And hence the saying goes..."Hurt people hurt people." But being wounded never gives us permission to wound someone else.

More than 20 years later, the brothers still remembered Joseph pleading for his life (a detail I've missed my entire life). Time had changed their circumstances, but it had not cleared their consciences. Time can be helpful in providing a bit of emotional distance, or perspective, but it doesn't heal wounds. 

When someone sins against us, something is taken: trust, dignity, peace, time,  reputation, etc. The response, therefore, is to try and take back what was robbed from us. And the cycle simply continues. What we often miss in the scriptures regarding forgiveness is its connection to financial debt. To forgive literally means "to cancel payment". When someone owes you a debt that cannot be repaid, the only way forward is to forgive...to cancel payment. Joseph’s brothers could not return the years he spent enslaved and imprisoned due to their sin against him.

Eventually, however, they asked the words they had avoided for decades: “Please forgive us.” Those words were more than an expression of regret. They acknowledged the pain they had caused, yet were asking for Joseph to release them from the relational payment they could never repay.  

And that's what is so powerful about forgiveness. It brings freedom. It requires humility. It produces reconciliation. Not only that, it's a picture of what Christ has done for us. We seek his forgiveness because of the debt of our sin...an eternal debt we can't possibly repay. Yet Jesus, in his great mercy, forgives us. He took our sin upon himself and paid the debt we owed. By his perfect life and death on our behalf, he has effectively canceled our debt. This is the gospel and now the same message of forgiveness is entrusted to us. 

If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin[b] for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. 2 Corinthians 5:17-21

Jesus teaches us not to postpone reconciliation. Offer forgiveness. Ask for forgiveness. Do not wait until someday to say the words that need to be said today.