God Is Greater Than Our Heart, Which Is an Odd Comfort

There is a sentence people say to me that I have learned not to argue with straight away.

They say: I know God has forgiven me. I cannot forgive myself.

The instinct in a lot of Christian rooms is to correct that immediately, and the correction usually goes something like this: if God has forgiven you then it is arrogant not to forgive yourself, because who are you to hold a higher standard than He does.

I understand the logic and I have never seen it help one person.

Partly because it adds a fresh accusation to a person who is already drowning in them, and now they are guilty of arrogance as well. And partly because it is answering a legal question when the thing in the room is not legal at all.

A person who cannot forgive themselves is not disputing the verdict. They believe the verdict. They can quote it. What they have is something that will not stop running, in the middle of the night, in a court that keeps reconvening in a room that has already been cleared.

The verse written for exactly this

John writes a letter to people who are anxious about whether they are genuinely His, and in the middle of it he says something that is odd on first reading.

For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things. (1 John 3:20, King James Version)

Notice what he does not say. He does not say your heart is wrong. He does not say stop condemning yourself. He does not offer any instruction to the person at all.

He says God is greater than that heart.

Which is to say: there is a higher court, and it has already sat, and its ruling stands above the one going on inside you at two in the morning.

And then the clause that people read past. And knoweth all things.

That is usually heard as a threat, as though it means He knows everything you did. In this sentence it is doing the opposite. He knows all of it, including the parts your heart is not weighing correctly, including the context and the fear and the years, and He has ruled anyway.

You have a verdict from a higher court than the one you are sitting in tonight, and it was handed down knowing everything (1 John 3:20). That work is the Spirit's, and He applies a ruling like that to somebody who cannot stop hearing the lower one.

Forgiving yourself is not the instruction

I want to say something that will sound like a relief to a lot of people, and it took me years to be willing to say it.

There is no verse anywhere that instructs a person to forgive themselves.

The whole vocabulary is modern. It is not in Scripture, and the reason it is not there is that in the Bible's frame, forgiveness is something a wronged party grants, and a person is not in a position to grant it to themselves for the same reason nobody can lend themselves money.

What Scripture does instead is put the ruling somewhere else and tell you to look at it.

Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth. (Romans 8:33)

Who shall lay any thing. That question includes you. Paul is not making an exception for the accused.

You were never assigned the task of forgiving yourself, and the absence of that instruction is a mercy rather than an oversight (Romans 8:33), and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a person's attention off their own court and onto a bench they are not sitting on.

That is a very different assignment from the one most people have been given. It is not stop condemning yourself, which nobody has ever managed by trying. It is there is a higher ruling, and here is what it says.

You have been handed an assignment God never gave, and putting it down is obedience rather than escape (Romans 8:33). The same Spirit is the one who redirects a person to a bench instead of leaving them arguing in an empty room.

What the higher ruling actually says

If a person is going to look at a ruling instead of arguing with themselves, they need to know what it says, and it is worth being specific rather than general.

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us. (Psalm 103:12)

East from west. Not north from south, which is a measurable distance with two poles in it. East and west have no meeting point, and whoever wrote that chose the axis on purpose.

Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. (Isaiah 1:18)

Come now and let us reason together. That is an invitation into a conversation rather than a summons, and it is issued by the offended party, which nobody would expect.

You are being invited to reason rather than being called to account, and the invitation comes from the one with the standing to accuse (Isaiah 1:18), and it is the Spirit who makes that a conversation a person can enter rather than a verse they can recite.

One more thing belongs here and it is not a footnote. If what you are carrying has taken you somewhere darker than this, where being here at all has come into question, that is beyond what an article can hold. Tell somebody tonight: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line if you are in the United States. Making that call is strength.