Archive for the ‘Forgiveness’ Category
Here’s the Bottom Line about Forgiveness
We’ve covered some powerful ground on the subject of forgiveness, but I don’t want to leave without saying this. The bottom line for you and your family is: There are no enduring relationships without forgiveness. I’m sure that you have a lot of dreams for your family. You will never see those dreams realized without forgiveness. There’s no way around it. If you want to make it to your golden wedding anniversary, it’s going to require several major forgivenesses and a truckload of minor ones. If you can’t deal in the forgiveness environment, then you will have a lot of pain in your family’s future. But here’s the good news: You can forgive. And God wants to help you. Never are we more like Christ than when we choose to forgive.
The time to forgive is now, and it starts with a decision. You can’t succeed in the process of forgiveness until you come to the crisis. Who is the person whose face has been in your mind’s eye as you’ve been reading this today? Is it a parent? A brother or sister? Maybe your child has hurt you and hardly knows it. Make a choice to forgive. Maybe you need to write a letter this week. Maybe you need to make a phone call.
Make a choice to forgive. Tell the person, “I choose to release you from the pain that resulted when you injured me. You don’t owe me anything. I forgive you.”
One of the things that I’ve learned in more than twenty years of ministering to people (and I have seen it in my own life as well) is that my capacity for forgiveness is directly related to my comprehension of how much God loves me. When my concept of God’s love is very small, my capacity to love others is very small as well. Paul said, “Christ’s love compels us” (2 Corinthians 5:14 NIV). So often I see that the Lord’s people need to have a breakthrough in their understanding. God doesn’t love like our parents. God doesn’t love according to our human experiences. God loves fully and unconditionally. That’s what we’re after.
Have the Funeral: I Choose to Forgive
Are you serious about sin? Because God is. And the people of Harvest Bible Chapel did some serious soul-searching and sin confession to put unforgiveness to death. Take a look at this video of the funeral we held at the Elgin Campus for those sins.
“Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” Ephesians 4:31-32
How Do Families Forgive?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about forgiveness. The past two weekends at Harvest, I preached a series on forgiveness that God used in a powerful way. Find below a summary of what we have been learning together. If you apply some of the things we have been teaching you can get your heart to a much better place very quickly.
Forgiveness comes in two parts. It begins with a decision, an act of my will. We call this the crisis of forgiveness. When I make the choice to release a person from the obligation that resulted when he or she injured me, I am completing the crisis of forgiveness. I am not looking for vengeance; I am not trying to get even; I am not wishing for bad things to happen to them; and I am not focused on their failure. In fact, I am not thinking about them at all. I’ve release them from all obligation that resulted when they hurt me.
Maybe you remember completing a crisis of forgiveness in the past, only to retract that act of grace and begin again to nurse and nurture the injury of someone else’s sin. Maybe you have responded publicly in a church service and committed yourself to forgiveness, or knelt alone and promised God that you would forgive but fell into your old patterns of hate or resentment when you crossed paths with the one you had chosen to forgive. If that is your experience, you need to understand the difference between the crisis and the process of forgiveness. Beyond the crisis is the process of forgiveness, without which you will never experience the healing that forgiveness can bring. In the crisis of forgiveness we say, “I choose to forgive,” but in the process we say, “I will treat you as though it never happened.” Here is how that process works:
1. I won’t bring the offense up to the person, except for his benefit;
2. I won’t bring the offense up to others; and (hardest of all)
3. I won’t bring the offense up to myself. I will not go over it and think about it and dwell upon it.
When you are doing that effectively, you are succeeding in the process of forgiveness. This is a lesson that I am learning little by little in my own life. I could share several acts of forgiveness that I have been working on for ten or fifteen years. I am still in the process. Praise God, I am doing a lot better than I was ten years ago. But here is the key: When I fail in the process, I have to go back to the crisis. If you do that faithfully, you will get free.
“Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” Ephesians 4:31-32
To listen to the whole message, please follow this link.
