As part of TFW’s 40 Days of Renewal, I’ll be posting each week on the theme of the week – which to start with is on Forgiveness. I’ve also done a video on this which was sent out with the Tuesday Daily Devotional.

This is the transcript.

I’ve been reading through the book of Hebrews recently. And one of the things the writer talks about is the Old Testament, how the Old Covenant is not as good as the New Covenant. And how the New Covenant is foretold in the Old Testament – there’s a famous passage in Jeremiah, where the Prophet says ‘here’s a new covenant I’m going to make for my people’, and it ends with this phrase, ‘and I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sins no more’. 

And that phrase ‘I will remember their sins no more’ crops up twice in the book of Hebrews, which kind of indicates it’s probably quite significant. The idea of God not remembering. 

Some people think that maybe God forgets sins – but God doesn’t forget things, otherwise that would mean that God is not omniscient if there’s things he doesn’t know. Rather it says that he chooses not to remember our sins. And I think it gives us a few responses for us as we live our lives. 

The first one is obviously one of thankfulness that God has chosen to remove our sins from us. We have the burden of sin removed – that great weight is taken off us, and that came at a big price. It came at the price of Jesus and His death on the cross. 

I think another response is that of faith – just to believe that. We may not actually feel forgiven. 

And in many ways how we feel about it is not the point. The point is, God has promised to forgive us. This verse 1 John 1:9 “if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness”. And if we believe that, then we believe that God, in forgiving our sins, has chosen not to remember them. So it’s not really very good for us to start dragging them up again, saying ‘well I can still remember it’.

We just need to believe that God has put them away, and has chosen not to remember – not to bring them to mind. And we need to do the same.

But the big thing I think is that we also need to learn how to forgive. There’s a verse in Ephesians, which talks about how we are to be together, ‘to be kind to one another, tender hearted’ and it finishes with ‘forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you’. 

And when we forgive other people, we have to do it in the same way God has forgiven us, which is to choose not to remember the sin or the offence that they’ve caused. And, of course, that’s really difficult if someone has offended us. Often when we see them, or even think of them, all we can see is that offence. As though that offence sits between us and them. And yet we’re to choose not to remember it. 

I think in that verse there’s a clue as to how we might do that, because it says that ‘God in Christ forgave you’. So in the same way that Christ is our substitute, in the sense of being the payment, the sacrifice for our sins, he’s also a kind of substitute in the way that we see other people. When God sees us, he looks, as it were, through Christ. He looks at Christ’s sacrifice and says that person is forgiven; the sin has gone away. ‘And I will not bring it to mind anymore, because I don’t need to’. 

And in the same way I think this is how we should see someone who’s offended us. (Because that will happen, we’re a bunch of sinners trying to live together, aren’t we? We are going to offend one another. Probably on a fairly regular basis. Sometimes, but very rarely, intentionally, but often unintentionally – we offend one another.)

How do we put that aside, how do we choose not to remember it? The key is that we substitute Christ – we put Christ in the way. We can pray for the other person – we can recognise that the way God sees that other person is that he’s forgiven them, and he’s not bringing their offences to mind. And therefore, neither should we. 

So rather than dwell on the offence – because if we do that, we’ll never be able to put it away –  if we dwell on the individual but mostly we dwell on Christ, who died for that individual, as well as for us, and has forgiven them, then I think we can start to grow in learning how to forgive. 

So that was just very quick – with that ‘I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sins no more’. And that drives thankfulness; it drives faith; and it drives a pattern of forgiveness that we can offer to other people.