I’m not going to try to sugarcoat this one, gentlemen. Forgiveness can be a tough pill for most of us to swallow. When someone hurts us in any way, our natural reaction is to hurt them back. At least that’s what we want to do. Possibly even up the ante and hurt them worse than they hurt us. The idea of forgiving a wound can even seem like surrender. Like we let the other guy win. And when the “other guy” is our dad, that forgiveness pill can become even harder to swallow.
For better or worse, our fathers played a considerable role in shaping the men we became. Your dad might have been fantastic, and he might have been a monster. He might not even have been around at all. Either way, he left a mark on you, and sometimes those marks need to be forgiven. It won’t be easy, but if we don’t want the relationship with our father to interfere with all our other relationships, including the one with our Heavenly Father, we have to forgive the old man. Here are some steps that might help.
Start with prayer.
It’s hard to pray for someone and stay angry at them. There’s something about bringing another person’s name to the LORD that softens us to them. It could be one of the reasons Jesus told us to pray for our enemies (Matthew 5:44). He knew it was the fastest route to peace.
If you have any hard feelings towards your dad, pray for him. Ask God to forgive him and help you do the same.
Understand that forgiveness is never deserved.
Forgiveness does not mean forgetting about what was done to you. And it doesn’t mean being okay with whatever pain was inflicted on you. Forgiving someone means not giving that person what he deserves. If someone hurts you, that person deserves to be hurt. Not repaying him with the grief he gave you, that’s forgiveness.
Because you are on this site, you probably know a little something about undeserved forgiveness. You’ve probably experienced it from the Good Father above. Our thoughts, words, and actions break the heart of God every day. And every day, He offers us forgiveness. We don’t’ deserve it; we can’t deserve it. But He still gives it. He set the perfect example for us to follow, which leads us to the next point.
Forgive your father because God forgives.
The Bible commands us to forgive others just as Christ forgave us (Ephesians 4:32). And He’s not asking us to do something He wasn’t willing to do Himself. In reality, forgiving your father won’t be easy. As Jesus was being nailed to the cross, He actually asked God to forgive the men crucifying Him (Luke 23:34). In the middle of His execution, Jesus forgave His executioners. It’s crazy. Makes no sense. And that’s forgiveness in a nutshell. It doesn’t make sense from a worldly point of view. But we don’t belong to this world.
Forgiveness is for your benefit.
Dads have the remarkable ability to leave behind the kind of scars that never fade. I can’t pretend to understand anything about how you were raised under your father’s presence/absence. But I do know If we can’t find a way to let go of past wounds and forgive the man who put them there, we’ll never heal. We’ll live the rest of our lives in a fractured relationship with our earthly dad and our heavenly One.
Forgiveness won’t erase the pain, but it can bring peace. It can bring healing.
Forgiveness is hard.
Don’t try to do it all by yourself. Ask God to help you. Pray for a heart that is open to forgiveness. Pray for God’s love because love covers a multitude of sins (1 Peter 4:8). And never give up.
