📖 Radical Christianity: The Ten Commandments of Jesus — Unit 6: Be Forgiving

1. New Wine in Old Wineskins

Few commands of Jesus are as searching as this one, because He ties our being forgiven to our forgiving. This is not because forgiveness can be earned, but because a heart that has truly received God's mercy cannot hold tightly to its own grudges; refusing to forgive is the sign of a heart that has not yet grasped how much it has been forgiven. To be a Christian is, among other things, to become a forgiving person.

Jesus once said you cannot pour new wine into old wineskins. The old skins of the natural heart are bitterness, the appetite for revenge, and cold indifference toward those who wrong us. The new wine is a forgiveness that flows from grace — and it cannot be contained in the brittle old skins of resentment. This unit follows three movements of that new wine, all drawn straight from Jesus' own teaching: forgiving our enemies, praying for our enemies, and turning the other cheek.

2. What Forgiveness Is — and Is Not

Before we follow those three movements, we should be clear about what forgiveness actually means, because the word is badly misunderstood. To forgive is to release a debt — to give up our claim to repayment and revenge, and to hand the matter over to God, who judges justly. It does not mean pretending the wrong never happened, calling evil good, or feeling a warm rush of affection toward someone who has hurt us. Those misunderstandings make forgiveness sound dishonest or impossible, and so people refuse it.

Real forgiveness is more honest than that. It looks the wrong full in the face, names it as wrong, and then chooses not to repay it. It is something we do before we feel it, an act of the will rooted in grace rather than a feeling we must wait for. And it is finally a matter of obedience and freedom: the bitterness we nurse against another person harms us far more than it harms them, and forgiveness is how we are set free from that poison.

3. The New Wine of Forgiving Our Enemies

The first movement is the hardest: we are to forgive even our enemies. The old wine said love your neighbor and hate your enemy, and that still feels like simple justice to the natural heart. But Jesus pours new wine: love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you. This is not weakness; it is the supernatural mark of a child of God, who makes His sun rise on the evil and the good alike.

That is the power of the new wine. Revenge only multiplies the wound; forgiveness alone can actually end the cycle. We see the same lesson in General Robert E. Lee after the Civil War, who told a bitter widow that it was better to forget the injustices of the past than to let them poison the rest of her life — "cut it down and forget it." Bitterness clung to becomes a poison we drink ourselves.

4. The Witness of Those Who Forgave

This new wine is not a modern sentiment; it runs all through Scripture, in people who forgave when they had every earthly right to retaliate. Joseph, sold into slavery by his own brothers, told them, "you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good," and provided for them instead of avenging himself (Genesis 50). Stephen, while being stoned to death, prayed, "Lord, do not charge them with this sin" (Acts 7). David, with King Saul hunting his life, twice held the power to kill him and twice spared him (1 Samuel 24). Paul and Silas, beaten and jailed, stayed to lead their jailer to Christ rather than escape (Acts 16).

Above all of them stands the Lord Himself, who prayed from the cross, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do" (Luke 23:34). This is the deepest reason we forgive: we are only passing on what we ourselves have received. The Christian forgives an enemy not because the enemy deserves it, but because Christ forgave us when we did not deserve it. Forgiveness is grace flowing downhill.

5. The New Wine of Praying for Our Enemies

The second movement turns forgiveness into something active. Jesus does not merely tell us to stop cursing those who wrong us; He tells us to pray for them. The old wine is gossip, muttered curses, and silent resentment that rehearses the offense again and again. The new wine is intercession — actually carrying the person who hurt us before God and asking for their good.

There is deep wisdom in this command, for it is nearly impossible to keep hating someone you are sincerely praying for. Prayer slowly changes the one who prays. As we lift an enemy to God, our own heart begins to soften, and the person we resented becomes, in our eyes, another struggling soul whom God loves. Praying for an enemy is how forgiveness takes root and grows rather than remaining a one-time decision we soon forget.

6. The New Wine of Turning the Other Cheek

The third movement is the most misread. To grasp it we have to picture the scene Jesus described. A blow to the right cheek, delivered by a right-handed person, is a backhand — and in that culture a backhand was not how you fought an equal but how a superior insulted an inferior, a master striking a servant. To turn the other cheek is not cowering passivity; it is to stand and offer the left cheek, which can only be struck with an open hand, the way one strikes an equal. It quietly forces the aggressor to confront the humanity of the person he is abusing. Turning the other cheek is dignified, nonviolent resistance — refusing both to retaliate and to be degraded.

7. Not a Doormat: The Guardrail

Here we must guard against a serious misunderstanding, because this teaching has often been twisted to keep victims silent. Turning the other cheek does not mean becoming a doormat for endless abuse. Jesus Himself, when struck unjustly at His trial, did not silently offer another blow; He challenged the man: "If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil; but if well, why do you strike Me?" (John 18:23). Setting a boundary, removing oneself from danger, or seeking justice through proper means is not the same as taking revenge.

So forgiveness and boundaries are not enemies. We forgive fully, releasing the debt and the desire for revenge, while still acting wisely to stop ongoing harm. Ending unjust treatment is not vengeance; refusing to nurse bitterness is not the same as pretending nothing happened. The new wine frees us both from the urge to retaliate and from the lie that love requires us to be destroyed.

8. Practical Tools for a Forgiving Heart

Scripture also gives down-to-earth help for living this out in the heat of the moment. First, the gentle answer: "a soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger" (Proverbs 15:1) — as Abigail's gentle words turned David from violence (1 Samuel 25). Second, delay your reaction: "let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath" (James 1:19); when Jesus was asked to condemn the woman caught in sin, He paused and stooped to write before answering (John 8). The pause is often where grace gets its foothold.

Third, learn to overlook the small things: "the discretion of a man makes him slow to anger, and it is to his glory to overlook a transgression" (Proverbs 19:11). Not every slight needs a response; much of peace is simply letting little offenses go. There is an old story of President Lincoln counseling an angry colleague to write out his furious letter in full — and then to put it in the stove and never send it. The writing relieved the anger; the stove prevented the damage.

9. A New Creation

All of this comes back to the wineskins. "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new" (2 Corinthians 5:17). You cannot pour the new wine of forgiveness into the old wineskins of resentment and revenge; the old skins must go. Becoming a forgiving person is not a matter of trying harder to be nice. It is the overflow of a heart remade by grace, that has tasted God's mercy and can no longer hoard its grudges.

So the command stands, and it turns out to be a gift: forgive, and you will be forgiven; pray for those who wrong you, and watch your own bitterness dissolve; refuse both revenge and degradation, and walk free. The same Lord who prayed "Father, forgive them" pours His own new wine into every heart that will receive it, and makes us, at last, people who forgive.

Submit Exam & Check Pass Reset Unit