In Search Of A Better Tomorrow

Forgiveness Christian Quotes

Lewis B. Smedes – Forgive & Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve

“Forgiveness is God’s invention for coming to terms with a world in which, despite their best intentions, people are unfair to each other and hurt each other deeply. He began by forgiving us. And he invites us all to forgive each other.”

Lewis B. Smedes – Forgive & Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve

“None of us wants to admit that we hate someone…When we deny our hate we detour around the crisis of forgiveness. We suppress our spite, make adjustments, and make believe we are too good to be hateful. But the truth is that we do not dare to risk admitting the hate we feel because we do not dare to risk forgiving the person we hate.”

Lewis B. Smedes – Forgive & Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve

“You can forgive someone almost anything. But you cannot tolerate everything…We don’t have to tolerate what people do just because we forgive them for doing it. Forgiving heals us personally. To tolerate everything only hurts us all in the long run.”

Lewis B. Smedes – Forgive & Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve

“When we forgive evil we do not excuse it, we do not tolerate it, we do not smother it. We look the evil full in the face, call it what it is, let its horror shock and stun and enrage us, and only then do we forgive it.”

Lewis B. Smedes – Forgive & Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve

“If we say that monsters [people who do terrible evil] are beyond forgiving, we give them a power they should never have…they are given the power to keep their evil alive in the hearts of those who suffered most. We give them power to condemn their victims to live forever with the hurting memory of their painful pasts. We give the monsters the last word.”

Lewis B. Smedes – Forgive & Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve

“Gandhi was right: if we all live by ‘an eye for an eye’ the whole world will be blind. The only way out is forgiveness.”

Lewis B. Smedes – Forgive & Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve

“We forgive freely or we do not really forgive at all.”

Lewis B. Smedes – The Art of Forgiving: When You Need To Forgive And Don’t Know How

“When you give up vengeance, make sure you are not giving up on justice. The line between the two is faint, unsteady, and fine…Vengeance is our own pleasure of seeing someone who hurt us getting it back and then some. Justice, on the other hand, is secure when someone pays a fair penalty for wronging another even if the injured person takes no pleasure in the transaction. Vengeance is personal satisfaction. Justice is moral accounting…Human forgiveness does not do away with human justice.”

Lewis B. Smedes – The Art of Forgiving: When You Need To Forgive And Don’t Know How

“I have discovered that most people who tell me that they cannot forgive a person who wronged them are handicapped by a mistaken understanding of what forgiving is.”

Lewis B. Smedes – The Art of Forgiving: When You Need To Forgive And Don’t Know How

“God is the original, master forgiver. Each time we grope our reluctant way through the minor miracle of forgiving, we are imitating his style. I am not at all sure that any of us would have had imagination enough to see the possibilities in this way to heal the wrongs of this life had he not done it first.”

Lewis B. Smedes – The Art of Forgiving: When You Need To Forgive And Don’t Know How

“It takes one person to forgive, it takes two people to be reunited.”