Healing In Forgiveness
It's truly amazing that Christ chose to demonstrate His forgiveness with healing. Even though the healing in this story was for the forgiven, we've seen and experienced this healing time and time again for the forgiver, and I believe these two things—forgiveness and healing—were meant to flow together. We’ve talked already about so many issues that require forgiveness for healing—trauma, unmet expectations, addictions, anger—and while we’ve talked so much about different practical and spiritual exercises to assist in healing from these things, I believe the real key to all of it is forgiveness.
You see, with each offense, and each unforgiven act, it’s as if we’ve been bound by another chain. Picture Jacob Marley from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. If you’ve ever seen a movie version of the story, perhaps you remember the scene where Marley’s ghost is hovering over Ebenezer Scrooge, telling him that he will be visited by three spirits. Marley is covered in chains, each link representing a different misdeed from his life, and he warns Scrooge that his fate will be far worse, if he doesn’t make some immediate changes in his life.
And so it is with unforgiveness. We bear down under the weight of these chains, and they hold us captive from the freedom God intends for us. And the funny thing is (or the truly annoying thing, depending on how you look at it), the people we refuse to forgive don’t bear any of those chains. Sure, they may be affected by our bad attitudes toward them or by unforgiveness of their own, but most of the time, the people we can’t forgive don’t even believe they’ve done us wrong.
But when we forgive, there is an immediate weight lifted off of us, and an almost indescribable freedom that comes over us, because healing is the demonstration of forgiveness.
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