How can I forgive?

The life and death battle I was going through was very real. We had been badly hurt by people we trusted. After God delivered us from that danger, I found myself in an even harder battle I had not expected. My bitterness was destroying me. And one day the Lord spoke to me that if I did not resolve this, I would do more damage to myself than what had been done by others to me and my family.

The first time I heard my mentor and spiritual father, Duane Harder, make the following statement, I could not have disagreed more: “A woman who has been raped will damage herself more through unforgiveness than through anything the rapist did to her.” How could he say that? All I heard was what seemed like a minimizing of the rape. But what I really missed was the fact that I was minimizing the reality and power of forgiveness.

I should have got it. After all, Jesus said a person who refuses to forgive will be handed over to the tormentors (Matthew 18:34).  Let’s be clear: Jesus was not addressing the person who committed the act, but the victim.

The reason for this is simple: you were forgiven an infinite debt. Therefore, you must forgive others who owe you a finite debt. Your debt is infinite because it was paid by One who was sinless, whereas you, already a sinner, have been sinned against by other sinners.

If we can’t truly forgive, we are letting ourselves in for a lot of trouble. So why is it so hard for us to forgive?

I believe the answer is in our failure to understand what forgiveness is. We live in the deluded belief that forgiveness somehow involves the idea that we have to forget or deny what was done to us. And that we find it understandably impossible to do.

Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Forgiveness cannot in fact take place without the blunt acknowledgement of the wrong that was done. After all, God, our perfect Creator, is more violated when wrong is done to us than we are. It is God’s standards and God’s law which are being violated.

The Bible paints a very clear picture that God hates sin. When a woman is raped, God hates that even more than the woman does.

So forgiveness begins by putting on the table the wrong that was done to us. Being open about it before trusted friends and mentors also makes us accountable for how we may have had a share in the wrong that was done. The fault is very rarely one hundred per cent on one side.

As we put the wrong on the table, we also declare alongside those with us how much greater God was wronged than we were, and how much more even than us he hates the sin that was committed.

But here is the key. The God who was offended is the only one who has the right to judge. And so in the declaring of the wrong, we hand the person over to God for him to deal with as he chooses.

This, I am convinced, is the key to forgiveness: I renounce my attempt to be the judge, and hand that right over to God, to whom it alone belongs.

If I take the place of judgment, I hand myself over to Satan, the greatest legalist of all, who knows I have no right to it.

And handing the person over to God does not mean I have the right to petition God to do anything other than act in the same mercy he showed toward me. Prayers for God to visit judgment on my enemy are not heard by God, but they are heard by the devil. That is why Jesus commands us to bless those who harm us, not curse them.

Over the years, my wife and I have had more than enough things to forgive. We have been through some truly awful situations. The hardest thing to accept is the fact it has most often been professing Christians who have been the perpetrators. In the end, we came to realize some of these folk were not really Christians at all. The hurt at the time, no matter who the perpetrators were, was very real.

But our story is this. When we forgave, we were free! The burden of hate and hurt lifted. We were no longer controlled and dominated by those who had hurt us and what they did to us. When you refuse to forgive, you allow the wrong that was done to be replayed and re-enacted in your mind every single day of your life. What will that do to you?

Let me give you some advice. Time does not heal. It only allows the wounds to fester.

There is only one way to freedom. Hand those people over to God. Let him be the judge. And move on.

And know this: his Spirit will set you free.

The greatest battle you'll ever fight

There’s lots of battles you will face in life. Let me tell you what I think is the greatest.

To do it, I’ll turn to one of my greatest Biblical heroes. Joseph faced a cavalcade of terrible circumstances. He was betrayed by his brothers, sold into slavery, unjustly imprisoned for a long period of time, and then forgotten by Pharaoh’s butler who should have appealed for his freedom. Yet his greatest battle was not the fight for freedom, it was the fight for a right response to the injustice done to him.

Joseph had lost a lot. He had no freedom, no money, no wife, no family, no job. When we are denied what we want out of life – job, money, relationship, health and so on – we often become bitter, either at those who have stood in our way, cheated us or treated us wrongly, or at God himself.

From a human perspective, Joseph had reason to be angry with God. It was God who had got him into this mess by giving him these dreams. It was God who got his hopes up. Where was God when his brothers sold him into slavery? Even after that, he continued to honour God by refusing the advances of Potiphar’s wife – and where did that get him? He had that incredible prophetic word over the butler and it led to nothing. Even if Joseph got over those hurdles by acknowledging that the God who had twice saved his life should not be blamed for his circumstances, there were still his brothers, Potiphar’s wife and the butler. He had every reason in the world to hate them.

The greatest battle you’ll ever face is the battle against bitterness. The presence of bitterness means the absence of forgiveness. Why is forgiveness such an issue? Because it stands at the heart of the Gospel. The cross is all about forgiveness.  Salvation is all about forgiveness. The Christian life is all about forgiveness. Forgiveness is the cornerstone of everything we have in Christ. If we refuse to walk in the mercy that Jesus has showered on us, we will find ourselves back in prison. That’s what the story of the two debtors in Matthew 18 is all about.

The bitterness of unforgiveness is a deadly virus which captures our thoughts and infects our attitudes. It so warps our bow of intercession that we even find ourselves praying that negative things will happen to others. It magnifies the faults of others and minimizes our own weaknesses. Worst of all, it separates us from the God who is the source of all forgiveness. It makes us toxic to the body of Christ, which is why Scripture warns us to let no “root of bitterness” spring up in our midst. Bitter people pollute the church. Whatever anyone has done to you, the harm you do to yourself through the bitterness of unforgiveness will damage you more than what they did, no matter how awful it was.

But Joseph did not fall into this trap. How do we know? Bitter people have no interest in serving others, or in the fact that there is a bigger reality out there than the world of their own suffering. But Joseph, even in his dungeon, so impressed the prison warden with his serving spirit that he put him in charge of the prison. Bitter people could not care less about the needs of others, but when his two fellow prisoners had a need, Joseph was immediately sensitive to it: “Why are your faces so sad?” he said to them. Bitter people do not have a healthy relationship with the God they blame for their troubles, but Joseph immediately reached out to God to find an answer for his friends. In the midst of hardship most of us cannot imagine, Joseph fought and won a battle which saved him from spiritual, and probably physical death, and made him a source of life to others. His attitude enabled God to turn suffering into blessing.

Some people wind up in a spiritual prison of their own making. Joseph turned his literal prison into a place of freedom. Joseph’s biggest battle was not won the day he was brought from jail to the highest office in the land. His battle was won in the depths of that dungeon when he chose the way of forgiveness and found peace.

You too, by God’s grace, can win that battle. It’s a battle worth fighting -- your life depends on it.