Forgiveness:
Breaking the Chains & Setting you Free
I believe that God allows us to have problems, trials and
issues for our growth, benefit and learning. Our thoughts and emotions drive
our physiology. When we experience strong emotions, hormones are released that
trigger the body to respond accordingly. Feeling of love and gratitude bring
forth a response of healing, better digestion and relaxation. Feelings of fear, worry and anxiety bring
tension, inflammation and pain.
When someone hurts, abuses, humiliates, falsely accuses,
betrays, abandons, lies about or makes you feel unworthy, it often leads us to
feelings of bitterness. Bitterness gets
a foothold. You begin to mentally keep a
record of how you were wronged. You
think about, recount and remember the experience. You think on all the wrong things that have been
done to you and every time that person’s face comes to mind, a high octane
‘ping’ goes off inside of you. Un-forgiveness has entered your heart.
This un-forgiveness leads to resentment as you meditate
(think about over and over) the wrongs and offenses against you. You fume and
steam over it internally. Chemicals are
secreted in response to your emotions can put your body in to a state of
dis-ease. These chemicals, carried by
negative emotions, give you that bad feeling in your gut every time that person
comes to mind. Resentment keeps the un-forgiveness
in place. Your unhappy state can result in damage to your body as health
problems are manifest in the areas where you are individually prone based on
your inherited or genetic profile.
Un-forgiveness and resentment can progress to feelings of retaliation,
anger, hatred, violence and even murder (even if it’s ‘only’ the assassination
of the persons character). You will not
be able to remove bitterness from your life until you deal with un-forgiveness
and resentment. If you engage in
negative speaking, gossip, slander or character trashing, you are not over your
bitterness and un-forgiveness.
You can choose to forgive and overcome evil with good. God
will forgive Whom He will forgive, but it is required of us to forgive
everyone. By forgiving, you open the way for God’s wrath and you allow Him to
repay the evil that was done to you and to be your vindicator. God has said “Vengeance is mine” – not yours.
In the end everything will be balanced and fair (actually when you repent and
forgive, you will be blessed MORE than you deserve – and I’m not talking about
some distant time in the eternities, but here and now).
Without mastering the issue of forgiveness, you will keep
spinning your wheels in your efforts to get well from your physical and
mental/emotional problems. Forgiveness
is a big missing link in healing.
Forgiveness is a prerequisite to all healing. There is just no way around it. God’s promise of health can be yours, however
with every promise God has a condition. You can’t claim His promises without
being prepared to meet His conditions.
We like to think that we can stay angry with other people and
yet go to God and receive forgiveness for our sins. But the scriptures teach us that God’s
forgiveness to you is in direct relationship to your willingness to forgive
your brother. In other words, you will
not get anything from Heaven (ie. Forgiveness) that you are not prepared to
give to others (and that includes forgiving yourself and God – more on that
later). Un-forgiveness is a luxury you
cannot afford to have. Unforgiveness can literally eat away at your soul,
corroding it like battery acid that slowly eats away at your spirit and self
identity, resulting in ugliness and roughness physically, mentally, emotionally
and spiritually.
Your Healing Hinges
on Your Forgiveness
It makes no difference who was right or wrong. What is important is that you are the
forgiver. It is important that you get your own heart right with God. You don’t
have to prove that you are right, you have to prove that you are willing to
forgive. Listen to me, it does not matter who was right. Stop trying to justify
your anger, hurt, and pain. The only thing that matters is that YOU are the
forgiver. You are the one who lets go of the pain and the poison. Drop it. Let
it go. Let Go and Let God, as they teach
in Alcoholics Anonymous.
You don’t have to carry
someone else’s sin inside of you. That is their sin. God will be their judge.
Your job is to release and forgive them. Your freedom, spirituality and
physicality does not depend on their resolution – it depends on your
resolution between you and God. Mother
Teresa taught, “In the final
analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them
anyway.” Please
understand that this issue of hanging on to hurt (un-forgiveness) is perhaps a
divinely sanctioned opportunity for you to rise above pain and prove to God
that you are willing to truly follow Him by forgiving. Let go and completely give your pain, burden,
and injury to God with the full faith, trust and confidence that He will handle
it and do what is best and right taking everything in to consideration. That is
what real FAITH is about.
If it is possible for you to go and make peace with that
person, do so. But if it is not possible because the person is not willing to
restore the relationship or even talk to you, the person has died or you don’t
know where the person is, never mind – what is important is that you get your
own heart right with God. Understand that you do not have to resolve a single
issue with somebody that has victimized you in order for God to heal you, so
long as you have resolved that issue between you and God concerning them. You
don’t have to wait for resolution between that person and you before you get
healed. Feeling you need confrontation and resolution to a harmful perpetrator
binds you to the tragedy and victimization, which is not what God expects or
wants from you.
If you have something from your past and it is not possible
for you to make right with the other person, you just need to make it right
with God. It is dealt with because God judges it by the integrity of your
heart. You don’t have to carry the guilt any longer. If somebody is holding a
sin against you, it is their problem, not yours. They have to get right with
God just as you do. Whether they do or don’t, it doesn’t have anything to do
with you because you stand alone before God in the integrity of your heart. You
don’t have to have it resolved with that person in order to be free.
Forgiveness is Not a
Feeling, it is a Decision – An Act of Your Will
When you forgive others, you are not letting them off the
hook, but you are giving them to God. Now you are off the hook. When you forgive someone, you have got to
separate the person from their sin, just as God separated you from your sin in
His heart when He saved you. To forgive, you don’t have to condone their sin.
You continue to hate the sin (the abuse, betrayal, hurt, harm and injustice),
but you are commanded to love the person.
Try to work into your heart separating the person from the deed. Just as
we do not desire to be judged and measured based on a single event or phase of
our life, so too try not to define someone by their interaction with you. Now
for those who are truly evil and selfish, understand that you are collateral
damage in a devilish and destructive life. Those people for sure need to be
given to God! Don’t even try to fix or justify their behavior.
Jesus doesn’t stop with forgiveness. Christ commands us to
love our enemies, bless those that curse you and pray for those who revile or
abuse you. Ouch! How can I do that? We
are instructed to love and bless them, or in other words to speak well of them.
It is not enough to merely say that we forgive others; you must be careful not
to curse them or speak evil of them even if you think they deserve it. We’ve
all been taught “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all”.
But I may add, this can also be the time to say a quick prayer. “Heavenly Father please bless this person as
you know what they need in their life.” (Please don’t add ‘and give them what
they deserve’.)
To work through the process of forgiveness and enjoy the
peace and wholeness in health that you seek, you must do what God tells you to
do, which is not only to forgive, but to go beyond that: Jesus challenges us to
pray for them, bless them, speak well of them and love them. WHY? Because by
doing so, you bless not only them, but yourself too! Your reward for your
obedience in this area will be great, rich, strong, intense and abundant. As
Luke says “Give, and it shall be given
unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over,
shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal
it shall be measured to you again.” (Luke 6:38)
Hating those who hurt you is like drinking poison, and hoping
that your enemy will die. Why spend your
life angry at people who probably do not even know or care that you are angry?
These people are going on enjoying their lives while you are thoroughly
miserable. You don’t have to allow somebody else’s sin or past behavior to ruin
your life. Release them, forgive them, let the offense go, let it drop. Have
the same attitude that Jesus had toward His enemies. By doing this, you will
experience wonderful freedom, peace and good health. Give it to God, who will show Himself strong
as your Vindicator. Remember, once you
give it to God, it is not your job to monitor His response and keep track of
how He is handling things. Let Go and Let God.
Before you go to God to repent of the sin behind your
disease, you need to forgive everybody who has ever hurt or wronged you. You
may need to repent of your participation in the sin – even though you may have
been the innocent victim of an abusive predator. Remember, God’s forgiveness and
releasing you from the poisonous infection of bitterness, resentment and un-forgiveness
is conditional. God cannot forgive you until you have forgiven.
I recommend that you do an exercise where you forgive
everybody who has hurt or wronged you, whether living or dead. Take a moment
and ask God to reveal to you everyone you need to forgive. Who is it that when you think of them, that
‘ping’ goes off twisting your heart or stomach and making the hairs on the back
of your neck stand up? Release them and
let them go. All the verbal abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, physical
abuse, legal entanglements, control, rejection and betrayal you have suffered …
let it all go.
Say a prayer something like this: “Heavenly Father, I pray in the name of your
son, Jesus Christ, that Your Holy Spirit will minister into my life right now.
Look into the depths of my heart and reveal to me where there is hardness, un-forgiveness,
bitterness and resentment or anything against anybody. Please bring their names
to my heart right now by the power of Your Holy Spirit. I repent to You Father
for sometimes repaying evil with evil and feeling justified by it. I thought I
was protecting myself when in fact I was behaving no different than the person
that did evil to me. Father I repent for
participating with the sin of bitterness and un-forgiveness. As an act of my
will in obedience to you, I choose to forgive
_______________________ (name the person and what they did). I am
trusting you to make my forgiveness heartfelt – to forgive completely just like
You do, without looking back. Please take the hardness of my heart and soften
it with Your love. I pray that Your forgiveness will flow through me. Thank You
for the work that You are doing in my heart right now. In Christ’s name. Amen.”
Most of us also have the need to forgive ourselves. Bitterness is not always about others. We can
feel condemnation, guilt and shame about ourselves. Do you hold on to guilt for an issue from the
past? Often that negative self-talk of not
being good enough (self-rejection) and less than (self-hatred) is not even
coming from you. Our thoughts can be
influenced by an accusing evil spirit (Revelation 12:10). You must forgive yourself. Say this out loud,
“I am not guilty!”. Come on, say it - don't just read these words, say them out loud. "I am not guilty.".Some people are so deep into guilt and self-hatred that the
accusing spirit attached to them will not allow them to say it because the
minute they get it out and say, “I am not guilty” that lying spirit is
defeated.
Say this to yourself, “I am not guilty. I have bought in with the sin of
blaming myself and have been bitter against myself all these years. I have felt
guilty, unworthy, ashamed and inferior and have compared myself to others. I
understand now that I was designed to make mistakes so that I can learn from
them. I repent Heavenly Father, for the bitterness and un-forgiveness towards
myself and I forgive myself. I command, in the name of Jesus Christ, the
accusing spirit that continually puts the negative thoughts of self-hatred,
self-rejection and guilt into my heart and mind to be cast out from me. I ask
for Your angels of light and love to tie up and carry away this dark spirit never
to return. In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.”
Are you angry with God? (Boy, I struggled with this for several years
after my parents untimely deaths.)
The devils wants you to blame God because He wants to create a rift and
a separation in your relationship with Him.
This will steal your joy, love and passion for Him, and it opens the
door to the devil in your life. If you
have anger, un-forgiveness and bitterness in your heart against God, give it up
and let it go. Say a prayer like this: “Heavenly Father, I have held
anger against You. I know that You have done nothing wrong, and I am in need of
Your forgiveness. But I believe that my saying, “I forgive You” will help me to
let go of un-forgiveness that I have misdirected towards You. I forgive You. My
problems are not Your fault. You are my answer. Please forgive me. In Christ’s
name. Amen.”
You have got to come to the place where you forgive God,
yourself and others before you ever go to God to repent and ask for healing of
a disease or affliction. Understand that
the healing blessing from God of removing the angst, poison and bitterness from
your heart is a gift that comes through the Atonement of Christ. Just saying the words will do nothing, unless
it truly comes from the heart. That is
why it is a process. For me, I have had
to pray and work within my heart to truly overcome my un-forgiveness. Like me,
you may have to repeat these prayers many times. Change is rarely instantaneous. Persistence
is often required. Forgiveness must become not only a practice but an
attitude. Forgiveness (Letting Go) as
well as repentance (Changing your Heart) are what is required for each of us as
we progress through our mortal sojourn.
The object of our endeavor is transformation, even a mighty change or
being born anew. This is a gift that can only come from God, but you must do
the preparatory work. I promise you, peace and healing will come.
So what is the often overlooked key to healing from heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and depression?
Perhaps it is Forgiveness.
So what is the often overlooked key to healing from heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and depression?
Perhaps it is Forgiveness.
Blessings,
Dr Kyle Christensen
October 2017
Revised from Dr Michelle Strydom’s book Healing begins
with Sanctification of the Heart pp 630-639
