Forgive To Be Forgiven

October 22, 2011 “Whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him.” (Mark 11:25) Sin destroys! The “thief,” Satan, has come to destroy us any way he can. God is a holy God and cannot have fellowship with anyone who continues in sin. Approaching our holy God in prayer we must come with clean hands and a pure heart, if we want our prayers heard (Ps.66:18). Unforgiveness is a cancerous sin of the soul, it not only breaks our relationship with one another and breaks our fellowship with God but it brings bitterness into our heart and chains us to that person we are not forgiving. I read about a most horrible punishment in a pagan country that if a person committed murder the dead body would be fastened to the back of the guilty and made to carry the corrupting body until the corruption from the dead body infected and killed the murderer. This is a terrible picture but shows how unforgiveness will affect us if we persist in carrying it in our heart. Unforgiveness permeates all of our thinking and grows like a cancer that corrupts our soul (mind, will and emotions). The unforgiven person may never know the grudge we are holding against them. But that dead body of unforgiveness is corrupting our entire life, making us into a critical, bitter person. Psychiatrists say that the progression of a bitter spirit leads to paranoia. When we are paranoid we think everyone is against us, we can’t accept love but see an ulterior motive behind every kind act done to us. Unforgiveness destroys relationships, homes, jobs and even our dreams. It is a load too heavy for anyone to carry. When we come to God in prayer we must first forgive anything we are holding against anyone. In the Lord’s Prayer (Matt.6:15) it says if we don’t forgive we can’t be forgiven by God. God can’t forgive a sin of which we will not let go. Forgiveness is very simple but most difficult to do because it involves our pride and our stubborn will. It is simply “letting go” of whatever we feel justified in holding on to “because they did me wrong.” The longer we hold onto our justification the closer to “death” we come – death to peace, joy, that relationship, freedom in our spirit, a healthy mind, and fellowship with our Father. We must ask ourselves, “What is this unforgiveness costing me?” “How much am I willing to pay to hold onto to this "death"? It is hard to forgive someone who has hurt us so badly. We feel they have a great debt they owe us – an apology and restitution for their disloyalty, unfaithfulness, slander, hypocrisy, etc. The first step toward forgiveness is to examine carefully all for which Christ has forgiven and will continue to forgive me. I must weigh all for which He has forgiven me on one side of His scales and put the things for which I need to forgive someone else on the other side of the scales. The debt owed me will be way up in the air while my debt to Christ of all my sins will be on the ground. Matthew 18:21-35 is the perfect scenario of how my unforgiveness compares with the Father’s forgiveness.

Whether that person, who we feel has wronged us, will ever ask for forgiveness, we must, for the sake of our relationship with others, with Jesus Who has forgiven us so much and for being forgiven by the Father, we must choose to forgive. Forgiveness is a choice. When we choose to forgive, our healing process begins – first of all, it begins with the Father forgiving us of our sin of unforgiveness, and that old body of corruption falls off our back. “Unforgiveness says, ‘you wronged me and you owe me.’ Forgiveness says, ‘I will no longer hold against you what you have done against me.'” You may say, “I just can’t forgive nor forget!” The truth is you don’t want to forgive. You would rather nurse your “sore of entitlement to be hurt” and continue to carry that corrupting body. “Get a life” by letting go, that you can “stand before God to pray” because you have forgiven; now He can forgive you! Satan will work in your mind to dredge up that old body of unforgiveness, but just take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ (II Cor.10:5), submit yourself to God and resist the devil and he will flee from you (James 4:7). O the joy of sins forgiven, where the healing waters flow.