"Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. 2 And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God."
Ephesians 5:1-2
The injunction 'Be ye followers of God, as dear children' in 1 is clearly linked with the last words in 4:32, 'Be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another ....' Therefore, 'forgiving one another' is one aspect of 'walking in love' (2), and included in it. Forgiveness and love are common enough words in our everyday Christian vocabulary, but they have become debased in value and their real challenge is often lost. They very much need to be re-valued in our thinking. The exhortation in 4:32 is to 'forgive even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you'. How does God forgive? Freely, fully, and finally. That is the testimony of Scripture. We may understand this from the parable of the creditor and the two debtors in Luke 7:41, 42: 'When they had nothing to pay, he frankly forgave them both.' This is as true in the Old Testament as in the New: in Micah 7:19 we read 'Thou wilt cast all their sins into the depth of the sea'; and Hebrews 10:17, quoting from the Old Testament, says, 'Their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more'. When we lay this alongside what we are sometimes pleased to call forgiveness, we see what a hollow sham ours often is. We sometimes say, 'I'll forgive him, but I could never forget what he did to me'. Do we not see that this is a form of self-deception, and that it is something that comes from the devil? He is the accuser of the brethren, and it is he who casts up sin to us, and when we do it to others, we are of our father the devil, and not of God! Ah, we are to forgive as God for Christ's sake has forgiven us - fully, freely, unconditionally.