God is love (see 1 John 4:16). That is a major truth that we all nod our head up and down to when we hear it. And then we go merrily on our way.
Until we run into someone who is not so merry. Or maybe we grew up in a home filled with constant backbiting and barb throwing behavior. So we expect to get that from others in our life – and amazingly, we keep finding it. Or we have been deeply hurt by someone we loved.
These events can harden our hearts as a defense against further pain, says Henry Blackaby in his devotional book. So how frustrating is it when we are called by God to love others?
Look at 1 Thessalonians 4:9 (About brotherly love: You don’t need me to write you because you yourselves are taught by God to love one another.) And yes, up comes the great commandments – Love God and Love each other. Matthew 22:37-40.
You know the retort I have…and maybe you are right alongside me – “Well, I’m NOT God!” How can you expect me to love THAT person? Don’t you know what they did to me? Don’t you know EVERYONE has trouble with them? No way!
So what audiobook did I just finish? The Watchmaker’s Daughter by Larry Loftis. It is the true story of World War II heroine Corrie ten Boom. She was not a Jew but was a Dutch watchmaker tutored by her father, the master watchmaker and the strongest Christian influence ever for the family, neighbors and strangers they sheltered . They hid and saved hundreds of Jews during WWII – and the cost was Corrie losing her family and being sent to a concentration camp.
She and her sister Betsie, who died in the concentration camp, showed the most amazing grace, courage and faith throughout and provide me with a major catalyst to reflect upon God’s presence in my life and bring me to my knees, spiritually. My complaints, worries and frustration shrink to miniscule size when I try to imagine how I could possibly face all that those brave people did.
And yet, there are difficult people in our lives along with difficult circumstances. How can I translate the humble but powerful mindset and behavior of the ten Booms into my situations?
Yep, Blackaby is a great help here. And I know Corrie would agree with him. He says that as Paul wrote to the Thessalonian church, God Himself would teach them how to love one another. God would give them His love, and as they followed Him, He would cause that love to multiply.
Sounds good to me, but “how”? Blackaby does get specific. He says Paul taught them that if they found someone who was difficult to love, God would enable them to love through His Holy Spirit. The all-knowing God we serve made provision for our human weakness – and He can teach us if we have eyes to see and ears to hear, i.e., if we are teachable.
Of course, Blackaby makes a tough point for me – there are NO exceptions to God’s commandment to love one another. As I learned of the horrors the Dutch, Jews and the ten Booms lived through as the Germans occupied their country and wreaked horrible violence upon them, I so want to make an exception to that “love” rule God gave us.
A part of their story I had not known was that as Betsie and Corrie were in the concentration camp, in horrible conditions, they had smuggled sections of a Bible into the camp and held evening worship times garnering more and more women attending and being ministered to in the most horrendous setting ever.
But the most powerful piece that was new to me was Betsie’s sharing with Corrie her vision for after the war of taking a message to the world of forgiveness – at first it was hard for Corrie to accept Betsie’s insistence on praying for the Germans as well as all the others who filled their prayers, but Betsie explained how much the Germans (along with others) would need it. And she cast the vision for Corrie – perhaps knowing that she, Betsie, had a weaker constitution and could not make it. That turned out to be true – the hard work, starvation diet, and horrible living conditions were too much for her.
And the cruelness of certain guards was unbelievable as she gave the details. Along with physical violence was humiliation and degradation that I can’t imagine experiencing.
But the story I had heard told somewhere in my past came out and punctuates our topic today. After Betsie died (and their father had died early on in captivity as he was infirm and older), Corrie was released due to a clerical error and soon the war was over. In her book The Hiding Place, as well as The Watchmaker’s Daughter, Corrie recounts her path to freedom through forgiveness and her beginning to tour many countries and share her message that God forgives. And she tells this story – our illustration for today’s topic.
The synopsis of her message was that when we confess our sins, God casts them into the deepest ocean, gone forever.
In 1947, Corrie was in a church in Munich, Germany, and having shared her message of forgiveness, people were filing out of the room. She saw a balding man in a gray overcoat working his way toward her – she flashed back to a blue uniform and a visored cap with its skull and crossbones. It came back with a rush, a huge room with harsh lights, a pathetic pile of dresses and shoes in the center of the floor, the shame of walking naked past this man. She could see her sister Betsie’s frail form ahead of her, so very thin. This man was a guard at Ravensbruck concentration camp.
Now he was in front of her, hand thrust out: “A fine message, fraulein! How good it is to know that, as you say, all our sins are at the bottom of the sea!” And she said she, who so glibly spoke of forgiveness, fumbled in her pocketbook rather than take that hand. He would not remember her, she knew, but she remembered him and the leather crop swinging from his belt. Sure enough, he told her she mentioned Ravensbruck and he was a guard there – that meant he didn’t remember her. But he told her that since that time, he had become a Christian. He knew that God has forgiven him for the cruel things he did there, but he would like to hear it from her lips as well. Again, his hand came out and he asked “will you forgive me?”
She said she stood there – she whose sins had every day to be forgiven – and she could not forgive him. As she hesitated, probably only seconds but it seemed hours to her, she wrestled with the “most difficult thing I had ever had to do.” But she realized she had to – the message God forgives has a prior condition – that we forgive those who have injured us. If we don’t forgive men their trespasses, neither will our Father in heaven forgive ours – she knew the commandment. But since the end of the war, she had a home for victims of Nazi brutality.
Yet she knew, and spoke of the fact, that those who were able to forgive their former enemies were able to return to the outside world and rebuild their lives, but those who nursed their bitterness remained invalids. Simple and horrible as that.
She also knew that forgiveness is not an emotion – it is an act of will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.
“Jesus, help me!” she prayed silently. “I can lift my hand. I can do that much. You supply the feeling.” And so woodenly, mechanically, she thrust her hand into his stretched out to her. And she says an incredible thing took place – current started in her shoulder, raced down her arm, sprang into their joined hands and then this healing warmth seemed to flood her whole being, bringing tears to her eyes.
“I forgive you, brother!” she cried. “With all my heart!”
She shared that she had never known God’s love so intensely as she did then. And having learned to forgive in this hardest of situations, she would like to have said she never again had difficulty in forgiving – but that was not true. And her next words are priceless – “If there’s one thing I’ve learned at 80 years of age, it’s that I can’t store up good feelings and behavior – but only draw them fresh from God each day.
Blackaby ends his sharing on this topic at the same place as Corrie. He says the following:
“If you do not know how to express your love in a meaningful way, God will teach you how to do this. God is the authority on love. Ask Him to make His love overflow to others through your life.”
I certainly needed this reminder and in such a vivid way that I expect it to stay with me and be easily called up when I need to remember my need to forgive in difficult situations. May this bless you as well.
