Forgiving Without Forgetting

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.
–Ephesians 4:31

Dwight Eisenhower once described his unique method of forgiving those who had wronged him. He said, “If someone has been guilty of despicable actions, especially toward me, I try to forget him. I used to follow a practice–somewhat contrived, I admit–to write the man’s name on a piece of scrap paper, drop it into the lowest drawer of my desk, and say to myself: ‘That finishes the incident, and so as far as I’m concerned, that fellow.’ The drawer became over the years a sort of private wastebasket for crumbled-up spite and discarded personalities.”

Eisenhower may have been a successful leader, but he didn’t understand forgiveness. Forgiving somebody is not the same as trying to forget what that person has done. As we’ll discover this week, forgetting is neither the means of forgiveness nor the test of whether we have genuinely forgiven somebody.

There are two dangers of confusing forgiving with forgetting. First of all, it can short-circuit the healing process. Let’s say I have a knot on my arm that’s really bothering me. Instead of going to the doctor, I just pop some aspirin to manage the pain. Months later, I finally get it checked out. The doctor says, “I’m sorry to tell you that it’s cancer, and it has spread. If only you had come in sooner.” I used aspirin to dull the pain when I needed to deal with the source of the pain.

It’s the same way with offenses committed against us. We try to dull the pain by forgetting instead of dealing with it through the surgical process called forgiveness. Hebrews 12:15 warns against letting bitterness spring up in our lives. If we don’t take care of the root cause of bitterness, it will metastasize in our lives and destroy everything important to us.

The second danger of confusing forgiving with forgetting is that it causes unnecessary guilt. We think, If I’ve really forgiven my offender, then why do I keep remembering the painful words they said to me? Or if we’re the wrongdoer, we wonder, If God has really forgiven me for what I did years ago, then why do I keep remembering it? Is this a sign that I haven’t really been forgiven? When we confuse forgiving with forgetting, we often experience unnecessary guilt.

Today’s devotion is adapted from “Forgiving Without Forgetting,” by Dr. Robert Jeffress, 2015.

Dwight Eisenhower, as quoted in Matthew F. Holland, Eisenhower Between the Wars (Greenwood, 2001), 32.

Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.lockman.org.