“Make a clean break with all cutting, backbiting, profane talk. Be gentle with one another, sensitive. Forgive one another as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave you.” Ephesians 4:31-32 MSG
“Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you. with all malice: And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” Ephesians 4: 31-32 KJV

Forgiveness is such a hard thing for me, and even when I forgive someone it’s super hard for me to let go of the pain I’m feeling and to truly move on from the incident. But these versions of Ephesians 4: 31-32 clearly explain and show what true forgiveness looks like.

God demonstrates the ultimate ability to forgive everyday in my life. He is constantly forgiving me for big things and even small things (although in my mind there’s a weight of big and small sin but it’s all the same to Him). He forgives my new sins and the recurring ones and forgets about them instantly and I feel like that’s what this verse is ultimately trying to tell us. We need to let the bitterness, backbiting, profane and evil speaking go and we need to forgive.

It seems so simple in black and white, to forgive. But it’s so hard to forgive others as Christ forgives us, because we feel all that hurt and pain and selfishly can’t look past that. But the thing we, or at least I, don’t think about is that when we sin God hurts too. He doesn’t want us to sin, and when we do He gets upset just like we do.

This verse is more than just looking at what God does when we sin and strive to do the same, this verse made me think about how God feels when we sin and if God can forgive me over and over again then I should be able to forgive a friend who betrayed me, or even the guy who cut me off on 1960 and not live with bitterness.