What do you you mean when you say “I forgive you”? What commitments should you be making to the other person?

In Chapter 10 of The Peacemaker: A Biblical Guide to Resolving Personal Conflict, Ken Sande outlines four promises you should have in mind when you forgive someone. And his wife, Corlette Sande, suggests a rhyme to help you remember them.

Combing the two and tweaking a few things for clarity,1 here’s what you get:

  1. Good Thought: I will not dwell on this incident. I will ask God to forgive you.
  2. Hurt Not: I will not use this incident to hurt you. I will not take revenge, but trust God to make things right in his way and time.
  3. Gossip Never: I will not gossip about this incident.
  4. Friends Forever: I will not let this incident become a wall in our personal relationship. I will let love be genuine and seek to live in peace with you, as much as it depends on me.

Applying these promises requires wisdom and wise counsel. Sande notes,

the four promises are a human attempt to summarize the key elements of God’s marvelous forgiveness of us. As a human device, they are limited and imperfect and should not be used in a rigid or mechanical fashion.

But any difficulty in applying them, does not mean we should neglect them.

  1. I’ve made a few minor changes to the original “Four Promises” as suggested by Sande. For example, the second sentence on #2 and the second sentence on #4 are helpful things Sande suggests elsewhere that I think are best to state up front. The most significant modification is the first part of #2. In the chapter, Sande originally suggests: “I will not bring up this incident again and use it against you.” Later, he addresses the question, “Can you ever mention sin again?” by saying, “the commitment not to bring up the offense again and use it against the offender should not be used to prevent you from dealing honestly and realistically with a recurring pattern of sin.” Rather than setting a rule and the offering exceptions, I think it’s better to more strictly follow Corlette’s gloss and state the promise this way: “I will not use this incident to hurt you.” Framing the decision to bring up the incident—or not—in terms of how to uphold the rule, rather than when it’s appropriate to break it, reduces confusion and strengthens the commitment. ↩︎