A few weeks ago, I posted an article entitled The Harvest of Unforgiveness. It was a bleak
picture of what happens in a relationship when forgiveness is not applied.
If a lack of forgiveness is so damaging to a relationship,
why don’t people just forgive? Why do
spouses refuse to forgive each other, even though forgiveness can be profoundly
beneficial to their marriage? The answer
is not pretty. The unfortunate fact is
that there appears to be “benefits” to not forgiving. As Paul David Tripp explains in What Did
You Expect?, these “benefits” are dark and ugly, but for some provide just
enough reason to keep them from forgiving their spouse.
Debt is Power: The first “benefit” to unforgiveness is that
putting someone in debt means we have power over that person. As one Christian financial counselor has
repeatedly noted, the debtor is a slave to the lender. In a similar way, when we choose not to
forgive our spouse, we have something to hold over their head, some weakness or
failure to use against them if we need it.
And in those times when things in our marriage are not going our way, it
appears to be useful to one of our spouse’s past wrongs or failures to use as a
trump card to get our way.
Debt is Identity: People can get their identity and bolster
their self-worth through unforgiveness.
After all, if we have a spouse that has failed us, perhaps repeatedly,
holding onto those failures makes us feel superior. By dwelling on the times our spouse has
failed, we can convince ourselves that we are really the righteous one or the
mature one in the marriage. The result
is that we get our sense of self-worth from comparing ourselves to our spouse,
rather than from what has God called us to be.
Debt is Entitlement: When our spouse wrongs us and we hold onto
those wrongs, we can convince ourselves that they owe us. Entitlement makes us feel deserving and
comfortable with being self-focused and demanding. We start to think – “if I have to put up with
you, don’t I deserve…..” Personally I
have seen this type of thinking played out in how money or time is handled in a
marriage. When a spouse is wronged and
refuses to forgive, entitlement seems to give them justification to spend money
on themselves or frequent the trout stream or the golf course more often
because, as the one who is “owed,” they “deserve” it.
Debt is a Weapon: When we choose not to forgive, the wrongs of
our spouse are like a weapon we can carry around with us everywhere. As time goes on and the unresolved wrongs
mount in a marriage, that loaded gun becomes easier and easier to put out and
use against our spouse. After all, when
we are hurt, it is easy to hurt them back with some past evidence of
selfishness or immaturity.
Debt Puts us in God’s
Position: Out of all of these “benefits”,
this is the scariest one. When we choose
not to forgive, we set ourselves out to be God, to be judge over the sin of our
spouse. In fact, we set ourselves up as
being more righteous than God, because when we do not forgive, we apply a
standard of forgiveness to our spouse that is even higher than God’s own
standard. As human beings, it is not our
job to dispense consequences for our spouse’s sin or to make sure that they
feel the appropriate amount of guilt. It
is always tempting for us to ascend to God’s throne, the very place we should
never be.
This is a nasty list.
These so-called “benefits” of not forgiving are selfish, they are ugly,
they are unloving, and they are all about pleasing ourselves and not God. They also make us blind to our own
situation. We become so focused on our
spouse and their failures that those things blind us to our own failures, our
own struggles, and those times when we wronged our spouse. They blind us to the fact that we desperately
need God’s grace continually applied to our lives and that we should offer the
same kind of grace to our spouse.
