Forgiveness:
Chances are if you live in the real world someone has hurt you. They may have hurt you or a family member by saying something mean or acting in an offensive way. So what do you do when all these offensives build up?
Forgive.
Forgiveness it means to:
1. To excuse for a fault or an offense; pardon.
2. To renounce anger or resentment against.
3. To absolve from payment of (a debt, for example).
I know what it means to be utterly used, rejected and hurt. And I am sure you do too, and I know forgiveness is one of the hardest things to do but keep in mind; we don’t forgive because someone deserves it but because we want to be completely free of them. When we don’t forgive it’s as if that person stands in our past and reaches into our present and controls our future. If you don’t want that person to control you, then you have to let them go. If you want to be in control of you your own life then you forgive.
You may be thinking, ‘Yeah, but you don’t know what they did to me or my family, or you don’t know the pain I have, you just don’t understand how much it hurts.’ The more pain the person caused you and the more you hold on to it and make an offense out of it the more control you give that person over your life and your future. I heard once that unforgiveness is like drinking poison and hoping the other person will die; when you chose to hold on to what other’s have done to you, you damage yourself and ultimately other around you.
Maybe your biggest problem isn’t forgiving other but forgiving yourself, I think that sometimes because we live in us we think we have the full right to hold us to unattainable standards and put ourselves down when we don’t meet them. We sometimes think because it’s us we allowed to put ourselves down and there is nothing anyone can say. If that’s you, have you ever wondered why other around can never seem to truly love you, even though you want them to?
It’s because you don’t let other love you more then you love yourself. So all the intimacy in your life is cut short, people never seem to say the right things or no one is truly in your heart, even though you would like them to be. By not forgiving ourselves we keep others out of our lives and we close them off completely and then we sit there at the end of the day and wonder if anyone truly loves us.
You may think it is nobody’s business how you treat yourself or how you view you, but having unforgiveness towards yourself is hurting everyone around you, who just want to love you. You may think that what you have done is beyond forgiving, that you just can’t stand you because of what has happened and how you have hurt others. When you inflict pain on yourself it like setting off a grenade and hoping it would affect anyone else.
My friend said the other day that when affairs happen we more often than not point our finger at the person who cheated and feel so much pity for the other person, but ONE of the reasons that people could have affairs is to show love to someone. Their spouse might be so closed off that they never get to illustrate love to them. Unforgiveness is killing people, family, marriages, churches, cities, and in the end set-up failure for the next generation. When will we wake-up and see that?
If our heart are like a garden then think of hurt as a seed and unforgiveness as a root, when those things finally come up in your life, (and they surly will because like plants hurt only grow one way, up and out into the open). The hurt of our life fertilizes the seed and the unforgiveness makes it grow. The branches of unforgiveness are: anger, depression, fear, anxiety, control, manipulation, hate, bitterness, envy and strife; and those are only to mention a few. You may think that you have your hurt under control and that it sits in the back of your garden and doesn’t touch anything else, but in fact, like a weed it will multiply and choke everything good in your life. It will poison the soil of your WHOLE heart. So be careful to hold on to hurt.
The power of forgiveness in a person life is as powerful as Jesus death on the cross, it will set the captives free, mend the broken hearted, release the prisoners, and heal the sick. You will find that when you forgive someone for an offenses you set a prisoner free and find out it was you. People have been healed from sickness from just letting the hated and unforgiveness go. I don’t think that our human bodies were meant to kept hatred in it, Proverbs 17:22 say that “A merry heart does good, like medicine, but a broken spirit dries the bones.” By keeping negative emotion in us they affect us physical health.
If you have been forgiven by Father God for everything that you have done then guess what? You are not allowed to not forgive others after receiving such unhindered forgiveness. (See Matthew 18: 26-35). You don’t have a right to hold on to a grudge or an offense because it is your duty to forgive after you have been so utterly forgiven; by not forgiving yourself or others you say to God, ‘What you did on the cross was good enough for my sins but it wasn’t enough to cover the sin of -blank-’.
No more standing on the fence about forgiving and letting go, we have a radical God who is calling us to be a radical people. They will know use by our love for one for another, instead today the world knows us by our unforgiveness one for another.
All this being said I don’t want you to think that I have no mercy, and I know that forgiveness takes time, and healing is a long process sometimes, but I don’t think we should hold on to things longer then we need to. And if you forgive someone, or yourself, you may have to do it again tomorrow and the day after that day, until something in your heart changes, but each time forgiveness is realize it has power to free up your present and ultimately it frees you into your destiny in your future.
Picture found at:
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