Forgiveness from the heart?

Although I've often heard people express confidence that forgiving someone is easy, I know that forgiving someone who's acted to hurt you is easier said than done.

Just look at all the relationship conflicts between families, neighbors, and even church members.   If forgiveness is easy, we'd spend more time caring for each other and less time addressing our grievances.

In the parable of the Unforgiving Servant, Jesus warns: 

So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.  Matthew 18:35

That's scary, especially "from your heart."  And what does it mean to forgive your brother "from your heart?"  How do you do that?

Maybe a better question is, "What does it mean to not forgive your brother from your heart?"  

When I don't forgive someone, I not only continue in a broken relationship, I also poison my own soul.  I might brood on the hurt, debate it in my mind, and continue to look for faults in the other person.

Unforgiveness is not pretty, productive, or right...period.

Still...how do we forgive "from the heart?"

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?  Jeremiah 17:9

This I know...I can't do it, I can't forgive from the heart...because forgiveness doesn't come from me.  

I have to go back to that parable of the Unforgiving Servant.  

I am that servant, the servant who has a mountain of grievous debt.  All of my sins, all of them, are sins against God.  Others may be harmed and hurt along the way.  But, like Adam's sin, my sins all amount to idolatry - to my desire to be my own god.

God's forgiveness of us is different and hard for us to grasp.  And, because God's the one offended by my sin, He's the only one with the power and the ability to forgive my sin.

My forgiveness wasn't easy and it wasn't cheap.  But Jesus took care of it with His life, death, and resurrection.  Because of Him, I'm forgiven.  

So how does that relate to forgiving others from the heart?

I've found that when I "bask" in His forgiveness and His mercy to me, it overflows...my heart is softened...and I love and forgive those who've hurt me because He first loved me.  

Forgiveness of sins comes from Him, and my ability to forgive is also from Him.  

It's not logical; it's not an act of my will.  But it's reality that I know and experience.  And it comes to me and it happens in the place that everything in the Christian's life, everything that truly matters, actually happens - at the foot of the cross and the door of the empty tomb.

Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.  Ephesians 4:32