The Wisdom Of Forgiving

A person’s wisdom yields patience; it is to one’s glory to overlook an offense.

Proverbs 19:11 (NIV)

Wisdom is the product of spending time and gaining experience with the Lord. It grows and deepens with the years. I know young adults who are wise beyond their years, but I also know that their wisdom is not in full bloom and that time and experience will season them and cause their wisdom to flower.

One of wisdom’s most telling characteristics as it blossoms is patience with others’ faults, especially when those faults offend you. This is not to say that we should never correct others or encourage them to grow out of a weakness. But we should be patient when the problem is that you are offended. We are quick to come to our own defense, and it takes maturity and grace to let offenses go unanswered.

God promises that it is to our own benefit and for the polishing of our characters when we can let an offense go by. Many times what offends us is not really something someone did wrong but rather something we took the wrong way. I find that discovering what offends me personally is often a window into my own personality. I try to ask myself, What did I find offensive in that? And usually I find that some lurking quirk or unhealed wound in my soul has been poked and that the other person had not set out to offend me.

What if someone intends to offend you—really means it? Well, what if that person could not offend you because you refuse to take offense? What if you say to yourself, I have my own weaknesses and struggles. I can certainly overlook hers. Or his. Or theirs. You could live in such freedom! You would be the one who benefits from overlooking an offense, just as God promised.

Father, I can be so sensitive to offenses and slights. Rescue me from being alert to offenses in order that I can be alert to opportunities to pour out your love.

The person who is living by grace sees this vast contrast between his own sins against God and the offenses of others against him. He forgives others because he himself has been so graciously forgiven. He realizes that, by receiving God’s forgiveness through Christ, he has forfeited the right to be offended when others hurt him.

Jerry Bridges(1929–), American author and conference speaker