PART THREE

BREAKING THE CURSE OF REJECTION

 

VI.       FORGIVENESS AS AN ACT OF THE WILL

 

Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves also forgive every one who is indebted to us - who has offended us or done wrong to us.

(Luke 11:4 Amp)

 

And whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against any one, forgive him and let it drop - leave it, let it go - in order that your Father who is in heaven may also forgive you your own failings and shortcomings and let them drop.

But if you do not forgive, neither will your Father in heaven forgive your failings and shortcomings.

(Mark 11:25 Amp)

 It is clear from these two passages that forgiveness is of paramount importance in the kingdom of heaven, so much so that God appears to make forgiveness for all our sins and shortcomings conditional upon our forgiving others of theirs.  Consequently,  when we have not forgiven others for what we have against them, we build a wall between our prayers and the assurance that they will be answered.

 

People who have lived their lives bound up by rejection have much that they need forgiveness for.  We have been stubborn, rebellious children, denying God and indulging ourselves in the pleasures of the moment; many times we have gotten exactly what we deserved.  Still today the flesh, with its old self-gratifying habits, its ingrained responses - first action, then thought, then guilt - rears itself up in constant battle.    It's as though the further renewal takes us, the more acutely we become aware that we can never earn worthiness.  We need God's grace.  We need forgiveness.

 

But it is also most certainly true that people who have lived so long under rejection have much to forgive.  We have borne much, beyond what the human soul can absorb unscarred.  And it is upon this forgiveness that God's promises are built.

 

Failure to forgive is idolatry, placing yourself above God.  Should you not have compassion on your fellow servant, even as I had pity on you? the Lord asks in the parable (Matthew 19:32).  We must realize the danger in not forgiving.  God is not giving us suggestions:  He doesn't say we should forgive if we feel like it or even that we should forgive if we can.  He says that we must forgive.  And we must forgive them all, everyone who trespassed against us, who violated our territory and stole from us, who tempted us and provoked us to recklessness, who mocked and wounded us, who kicked us while we were down, who ignored us or forgot about us or never knew we existed. 

 

He requires us to forgive. 

 

Do not say that you are not able to forgive, for God would not require you to do anything that is impossible.  You certainly may not feel like forgiving.  God allows for our feelings - as long as they don't get in the way of what He requires us to do.  God will always empower us to do what He requires us to do.  To activate that power, we must put feet to our good intentions.  God knows our hearts; He sits back and waits on that first step.

 

In the final analysis, unforgiveness is not worth the price it extracts from us.  As much as we were wounded by the wrongful or careless actions of others, still more are we wounded daily by their continued presence.  Unforgiveness is "an invisible predator" we drag around, whose chains imprison us.  Bitterness, the fruit of unforgiveness, devours whoever holds it in his heart.

 

Most people who carry unforgiveness are entitled to feel the way they do.  Life is not fair; some lives are appallingly unfair.  Anger is a legitimate emotion.  It signals injustice, informing us of those conditions that we perceive to be wrong.  Anger itself is not a sin, for Paul tells us in Ephesians:  Be ye angry, and sin not (Ephesians 4:26).  How we process the anger determines whether we sin.  If we forgive the injustice, we go free. 

 

If we do not forgive, the anger is not allowed to flow into the channels God has prepared for it.  Therefore, it rises to the surface as sin.  We seek revenge.  We not only compound the sins of others, but we pass them on to the next generation - and for what?  To obtain the momentary satisfaction of a well-placed kick, rejection's knee-jerk.  The deed done unto others returns as guilt, or as the unacknowledged guilt that convulses our rights-driven society.  Or instead of getting even, we might just brood about it, an internal knee-jerk that eventually consumes us in resentment or self pity.

Let not the sun go down upon your wrath, we are also told in the fourth verse of Ephesians.  Many people allow darkness to cover their anger by denying themselves the right to feel as they do.  Injustice, real or imagined, always needs to be acknowledged, grieved, and forgiven.  For self-protection, we often deny anger against those who have treated us badly, particularly our parents.  Not only do we hesitate to criticize those who do the best they can, but we have also been told all our lives that we, not they, were to blame.  The result of this misperception, which forms a pattern in childhood abuse, is internal anger.  Unacknowledged anger always results in sin, sometimes displaced or passed down through generations.   Denial is a condition that cripples and binds; because it harbors unforgiveness, it also condemns us to separation from God.

 

Equally important are the effects of unforgiveness.  The hardness of heart that is created when we will not forgive harms us more than the violation.  Paul tells us that by locking transgressions against us away in our heart unforgiven, we make God's judgment inevitable.  He writes:

 

But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God's judgment will be revealed.  (Romans 2:5 RSV)

 

"There are all kinds of ways into bondage, but there's only one way out of it."  Forgiveness is the one incomparable divine principle that turns all keys to the kingdom.  Symbolizing the relationship between an omnipotent God and errant man, it is so crucial that God felt it worth the sacrifice He had to pay.  Father, forgive them,  He cried from the Cross,  for they know not what they do (Luke 23:34).  It is worth the sacrifice we must make to do it also.  Forgiveness is the way of reconciliation that Jesus came to earth to bring us, teach us, and exemplify for us.  That's why He taught us to pray:

 

Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves also forgive every one who is indebted to us - who has offended us or done wrong to us. (Luke 11:4 Amp)

 

Unforgiveness is a human emotion.  Forgiveness is a spiritual antidote.  God wants us to forgive, not for the sake of the one who wounded us, but for our own sake.  Dr. Neil Anderson states it this way:

 

"Why should I let them off the hook?" you may ask.  That is precisely the problem - you are still hooked to them, still bound by your past.^[i]

 

Unforgiveness, then, affects identity, causing brokenness.  Abuse, on any level, is a violation of trust.  It is theft, violence upon the sense of self, that results in the destruction of boundaries between the violator and the violated.  We are bound to our abusers spiritually, linked in a manner that makes boundaries between us indistinguishable.  Whoever is partner with a thief hates his own soul, the Bible tells us (Proverbs 29:24).

 

Scripture also tells us:  When you say they are wicked and should be punished, you are talking about yourselves, for you do these very same things (Romans 2:1 TLB).  In the timeless world of spiritual laws, the violated person falls under the curse which he pronounces upon the thief.  The curse, frequently unremembered and locked into the heart, manifests in the same outward behaviors that were condemned.  The child grows up to repeat the behaviors never forgiven in the parent.

 

Furthermore, the one who was abused has no rule over his own spirit, like a city that is broken down and without walls (Proverbs 25:28 Amp).  To compensate for the lack of a solid sense of self, the person under rejection builds walls instead, his own false boundaries that condemn him to loneliness and suspicion.  A brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city:  whose contentions are like the bars of a castle (Proverbs 18:19 KJ).

 

When we forgive, we acknowledge the need to change.  We acknowledge the need to tear down the walls we built for our own protection, to allow the Lord to protect us.  He becomes the builder of our house, which is both our individual identity and His temple.  He has given us a guarantee:

 

The Name of the Lord is a strong tower; the righteous man - upright and in right standing with God - runs into it and is safe, high above evil, and strong.  (Proverbs 18:10 Amp)

 

The strong, healthy boundaries each individual requires can only exist if we are not threatened by the memories of past, unforgiven violations.  When we forgive our abusers, we change, we grow.  We allow for the formation of boundaries, thus of character and true identity.

 

Though they appear to us to have changed, the people who hurt us don't change when we forgive them.  Quite likely they don't even realize they needed to be forgiven.  Alicia, raised by a hard, mean stepfather in the rural South, told how, after she had found the Lord, she sought him out at a family reunion to tell him she had forgiven him.  This man, to whose cruelty she had been bound for most of her life, long after she had left the South and grown to adulthood, greeted her pronouncement with a laugh: 

"Forgiven me for what!  If anything, you're the one who needs to be forgiven."

And so, because her heart was no longer hard, she laughed too.  She was free to ask his forgiveness.  And in doing this, she saw him for the first time as he saw himself, a man who had worked hard all his life under a system that forced him to stay dirt poor, who had saddled himself with the responsibility for a large family of children not his own, out of love and duty to a woman.  Nothing in his upbringing had taught him anything about love, women, or children; but duty he understood.  "People do what they have to do," she said.  "Most of the time they do their best.  Many things in life are not fair."

 

If we want to obey God, we must forgive those who have hurt us.  Forgiveness is not healing; it will not make the pain go away.  But forgiving those who have hurt us will remove from our shoulders the weight of a great burden heaped there by bitterness, anger, and resentment.  Some of this weight we have carried all our lives.  Forgiveness is a necessary prelude to healing.  Healing cannot take place in a bitter heart.

 

Secular psychology sometimes has little tolerance for this premise.  A leading self-help book maintains:  "Forgiveness is not essential for healing. . . . If you hold the belief survivors must forgive the abuser in order to heal, you should not be working with survivors."^[ii]  That's how rejection talks, basking its victims in self-righteousness.  Of course, forgiveness cannot be forced on someone.  Lip service is not forgiveness and would not accomplish anything.  Forgiveness must be desired, even as restoration is desired.  Restoration begins with restoration to God, as the wounded and weary, locked for so long in their shells, reclaim their innocence to enter His kingdom as children.  Forgiveness unlocks the door. 

 

Secular psychology holds out no such promise of restoration; in fact, it shuns the notion of reliance on anyone or anything.  It builds up egos to be tough.  But the walls it builds are artificial; God can only work when the ego is gone.

 

On the other hand, forgiving is not forgetting either. Some things will never be forgotten, and in any case, God will not let you forget what he intends to transform for His glory.  What you endured was a result of sin in a fallen world, the curse of the law brought into this world through sin.  You are no longer under the law but are under grace.  When God promises us that we overcome the destroyer by the Blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony, He redeems us from the law.  He gives our testimony power to overcome sin in the lives of others like ourselves.  God needs us to shine through.  The purpose that comes out of suffering turns the curse into a blessing. 

 

 Paul tells us how we can achieve peace.  He writes:

 

Become useful and helpful and kind to one another, tenderhearted (compassionate, understanding, lovinghearted), forgiving one another (readily and freely), as God in Christ forgave you.                                                     (Ephesians 4:32 Amp)

 

Surely, you haven't read this far, in search of a way out from under the rejection you have been crushed by all your life, to be thwarted by the justifiable emotions you feel toward those who have wronged you.  Remember that the real battle is in the spirit realm.  Forgiveness is a spiritual truth, not a natural inclination.  It works in accordance with spiritual laws.  The hard part, nevertheless, is that we mere flesh-bound mortals must do the forgiving.

 

Forgiveness is the first and often the most difficult step God requires of you in order to be healed.  Once you have released your rejectors from their guilt, healing becomes possible.  But how do you muster your will to do what all your pain cries out against?  

 

Forgiveness goes against your entire sense of fairness.  It goes against everything you perceive fairness to be.  Your instinct is toward self pity; you get even in your thoughts and by visualizing revenge.  Maybe you even over-achieve through spite.  "Living well," you tell yourself, "is the best revenge."  Your instinct is to stay angry.  However, your will is stronger than your instincts.  And if your will is to obey God, which it is, you will not let your instincts stand in your way.

 

First of all, you need to know that God reserves the right of revenge for Himself.  In the Old Testament law, He states:  You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge  (Leviticus 19:18).  He also says explicitly:  Vengeance is mine (Deuteronomy 32:35).  It's true that the Old Testament dictates  an eye for an eye (Leviticus 24:20), but this measure of satisfaction is not a call to personal revenge but is a function of the law God gave to Moses to order life in the best interests of society.   He also instructed Moses to inform the people of the consequences inherent in our daily decisions to obey or not obey.  Blessings follow from obedience; curses, from disobedience.  God reserves the right to all judgement.  Disobedience invites just but often horrible consequences. 

 

Our pursuit of personal vengeance is putting ourselves between God and the method He has ordained to work justice in all circumstances.  In the New Testament, Paul writes:

 

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God; for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.  No "if your enemy is hungry feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink. . ."  Do not overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.  (Romans 12:19 RSV)

 

If justice were left up to human judgement, we would mess it up.  One reason God reserves judgment for Himself is that we simply can't see the situation clearly.  Rejection always causes misperception.  Because our perceptions of fairness are colored by emotions generated by rejection, we don't understand what justice is.  God has the only total and correct picture.  If there is sin, His justice takes care of it.  Sometimes the consequences emanate from the court system, as punishment.  Sometimes they are visited upon the body in disease.  Sometimes they are "just plain bad luck."  But there are no coincidences in the kingdom of heaven.  No sin is committed without the sinner suffering its consequences, one way or the other, in this lifetime or the next, through countless generations.

 

Unfortunately, we all bear the consequences of others' sins.  We suffer from the sins of our ancestors.  We suffer from the bondages others have been cursed with; we suffer also from the wrong choices others have made.  Nevertheless, inflicting others with the consequences of our sins - whether by malicious thought, angry word, or vengeful action - does not bring justice.  It simply escalates the cycle of injustice.  Satan wins; rejection triumphs.  But we have the power to reverse the curse.  When we became adopted into the family of God, we obtained the right to have our Father work justice for us.  As He says:  The Lord will see His people righted (Deuteronomy 32:35 TLB). 

 

Whenever you surrender your will to God, He begins to work on your behalf.  He breaks the cycle of evil in your family when you let the evil drop, leave it, and let it go.  Although the people in your family might not change when you forgive them, you change.  You let the dead bury the dead.  And as for your family, at the very least, you can be in the same room with them without having to be at war.  Through your forgiveness, with the passage of time, relationships come to be healed.  As you change, they change.

 

We must obey the Lord by forgiving those who have wronged us.  We must do it regardless of the magnitude of hurt suffered.  We must do it even though we don't feel like doing it.  We must do it even if we think we can't do it.  When we obey, God will give us the strength to accomplish His will.

By now it should be apparent that forgiveness is an act of the will.  It's that same will that brought us to Christ.  It's that same will that we daily struggle with, to bring it into submission to the eternal at the expense of the flesh.  In the will the battle rages to forgive or not forgive.

 

As soon as I was saved, I began struggling with the issue of forgiveness.  I knew that the first person I had to forgive was my father.  And yet, my life had revolved around rebellion against my father.  How could I forgive him - for never validating my right to exist; for never acknowledging the beauty that, like every living child, I had within me; for crushing what he should have nurtured; for blaming me and not himself when I turned out the way I did.  I was filled with resentment, and I had a right to be.  About this time, I was drawn to begin reading The Hiding Place, by Corrie ten Boom. 

Corrie was born into a strong Christian family.  Living in the Netherlands during the early days of the German occupation, they soon began hiding Jewish people in a cleverly concealed room behind Corrie's bed.  Nearly a dozen refugees remained there in safety until the end of the war.  However, a raid in the early days of the occupation consigned Corrie, with her father and sister, to concentration camps.  There her father and sister died, in what is a remarkable story of the kingdom of God:  how a family's faith, spiritual growth, and evangelistic mission transcended the outward conditions designed to reduce mankind to its basest level.  When self-survival, for prisoner and guard alike, became the sole purpose of existence, Corrie and her sister not only preached peace but lived it by radiating God's love outward as the essence of life.

 

After the war, Corrie held evangelical crusades across a Germany scarred and pitted by destruction, misery, and guilt.  She ministered God's healing power and forgiveness to a ravaged land struggling with the after-effects of total war and the black legacy of unspeakable atrocities. She wrote:

 

It was at a church in Munich that I saw him, the former S.S. man who had stood guard at the shower room door in the processing center at Ravensbruck.  He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time.  And suddenly it was all there - the roomful of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, Betsie's pain-blanched face.

He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing.  "How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein." he said.  "To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins away!"

His hand was thrust out to shake mine.  And I, who had preached so often to the people in Bloemendaal the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side.

Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled though my mind, I saw the sin of them.  Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more?  Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him.

I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand.  I could not.  I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity.  And so again I breathed a silent prayer.  Jesus, I cannot forgive him.  Give me Your forgiveness.

As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened.  From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me.

And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on His.  When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.^[iii]

 

Forgiveness is of the Lord.  We are but conduits through which it flows when we will to obey.  This realization is necessary for forgiveness, for otherwise the words can easily get stuck at our lips, never making it into the heart where the power of forgiveness works.  When in obedience I spoke the words, in my heart I forgave my father.  I felt tremendous relief - the soul expanding with spiritual growth.

 

I had a friend in Florida who had forgiven her mother with her mouth many times.  She stayed estranged from her, she maintained, because she didn't want to expose her children to that woman's critical nature.  When her third child was born with a cleft palate, she refused to even take him to see her, unable to face the thought of her condemning words. 

 

When I called her just recently, her first words were:  "I've forgiven my mother."  The pastor had preached on forgiveness, had led them through a prayer that had freed up her will from her emotions, that had taken her by surprise, actually, as the power of God snapped the bands on her heart and let His forgiving virtue flood her.  As she released her mother from the consequences of her sins against her, she released herself from bitterness.  It was not long before she began working to restore their relationship, astonishing her kids by packing them up to go see Grandma.  Now the love of family is melting an old lady's heart.

 

THE ROOT OF BITTERNESS

 

Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord; looking diligently lest any man fail of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled.(Hebrews 13:15 KJ)

 

After we forgive, we must carefully work to eliminate any residue of bitterness, which is after all a habit of the mind, fed by emotions and kept in place by a determined will.  It is easy to harbor bitterness, especially in the midst of an ongoing situation, such as mine was.  For the cleansing and renewing of the mind, God gives us His Word.  But because we do not will to release the one who has hurt us from our thoughts of bitterness, we all too often do not accept the help that God has provided.

 

Is the bitterness you have spent a lifetime lugging about - raging against, wallowing in, and indulging priceless thoughts of revenge in - worth the price you have to pay for it in separation from God's love?  For surely you cannot receive love, when there is this blackness in your heart.  I lived this separation for a long time, before I realized that bitterness nullified my ongoing efforts to forgive my husband.  What an impossible task to get rid of it!  The bitterness was so deep, so legitimate, that it had taken on a shape of its own, a bubbling black sort of presence that attacked me at all times of day or night.  Forgiveness never quite touched the depths of my rage against the wrongs that were done to me.

Then, one morning in prayer I saw that Paul addressed the feelings bred by victimization in his letter to the Ephesians, when he wrote:

 

Let all bitterness and indignation and wrath, passion, rage, bad temper and resentment, anger, animosity, and quarreling, brawling, clamor, contention and slander, evil speaking, abusive or blasphemous language be banished from you, with all malice, spite, ill will or baseness of any kind.  (Ephesians 4:31 Amp)

 

That became my prayer. I read it twice a day, putting in "I" or "me" instead of "you."  The splendid thing about God's Word is that it never returns to Him void (Isaiah 55:11).  As this prayer penetrated my heart, I began to know the peace that forgiveness brings.  I have no doubt that it saved my life, that I could not have lived much longer embroiled in the black helpless rage of a victim.  Although it was many more years before I was able to see my husband with the eyes of the spirit, this forgiveness paved the way for me to begin loving him again, because it opened my heart to the love of God. 

 

Bitterness cripples our ability to love.  However, Jesus tells us to love our enemies.  He managed to love his enemies, going to the Cross for them along with His friends.  The emotions of creatures of the flesh are easily polluted by the bitter roots within us.  Even if we have forgiven those who wounded us, even if we have ceased to harbor bitterness, wouldn't the damage that they did to us take us a long ways from love?

It is even harder to love an enemy in an ongoing situation.  My husband was still my enemy.  How could I love him?  You cannot feel love for that person who fills you with such revulsion, who uses and abuses you, keeps you up all night, night after night, makes your life so hard.  Your only recourse is to dissociate and deny the pain.  You might feel, as I did for so long, a blank wall where feeling used to be - while the violence within keeps growing. 

 

Then I discovered a truth:  love is not a feeling.  Agape love is not what the world calls love, an emotional meshing of identities that eats you up and spits out heartbreak.  Agape is a sacrificial love; therefore, it is an act of the will.  Agape is the love Jesus had for us when He went to the cross, the love that He requires of us for others.  Could I sacrifice myself for my husband?  That was simple, since I already had.  Everything I had, everything I was - he had destroyed it.  Would I let him destroy the children he had given me?  Or could I bring the love of Christ into that family through obedience to God?  Perhaps God had only one way to reach him:  through me.  Could I love him sacrificially? 

 

I remember the moment well.  I was driving my car, turning the corner.  I said, "Lord, I can do that."  I saw the meaning of the cross.  God is love.  After that, things began to change.  By willing to forgive and to love, I untangled my identity from my husband's.  As I began to love God more than I loved my children, I untangled my identity from theirs.  The true blessing of this renewal was that in putting God first, His love gave me more love to give.  I began to see my husband with the eyes of my spirit, to feel for him a compassion that only the Holy Spirit living in me could have given.  And as He loves through me, He loves through you.  Think about it:  that person who hurt you - he may never know God except through you.

 

Those you need to forgive are maybe far in the past; or you may have talked to them only yesterday.  Stop blaming them.  Their violation of you was the inevitable consequence of sin, driven by rejection, engineered by Satan to keep you from the kingdom of God.  The weapons we use against Satan are found through acceptance of the sacrificial love of Jesus for us.  The only way we can turn the curse into a blessing is through an act of the will that prepares the way for His love. 

 

God has claimed your life for His kingdom.  Your abuser may be long dead, he may be inaccessible, he may be unapproachable.  God does not require you to approach him, merely to see him through the eyes of the One who died for him, as He died for you.  He will empower you for what you have to do, to forgive and, ultimately, to be a channel for His love.  God's love can be defined as:  "the free gift that voluntarily cancels the debt in order to free the debtor to become what he might be if he experiences the joy of restoration."^[iv]  

 

Finally, your relationship to the person who wronged you will change as you change; therefore, you may find that person also changing.  You need to be prepared to speak the words when he asks for your forgiveness.  But even if no renewed relationship is possible with the person, who might be dead to help in this world, you still have come into your own boundaries, fortified by God.

 

You know who you need to forgive the most.  Are you ready to do it?  First, writes Dr. Neil Anderson,

 

you acknowledge the hurt and the hate.  If your forgiveness doesn't visit the emotional core of your life, it will be incomplete.  Many feel the pain of interpersonal offenses but they won't acknowledge it.  Let God bring the pain to the surface so He can deal with it.  This is where the healing takes place.  . . . Feelings take time to heal after the choice is made and Satan has lost his place (Ephesians 4:26-27).  Freedom is what is to be gained.^[v]

 

It is helpful to make a list of those you need to forgive.  Everyone can call to mind the ones who go at the top of the list, whether parents, siblings, spouses, lovers, teachers, neighbors, people you went to grade school with.  But it is especially necessary to put on your list those whose offenses against you may have been repressed or forgotten.  Ask God to call to mind other people who need forgiving.  Go to Him in intense, prayerful self-examination, to bring up the painful, repressed memories hidden in your heart.  Then you can sever the invisible bondage in which they have held you.

Leanne Payne tells of a man named Johnny who had lived with a "brutalizing father, and with older brothers who practiced homosexuality as part of the pecking order syndrome at work in the home."  She realized that before any healing could come, he would have to forgive.  She writes:

 

Praying that his will be strengthened, and insisting that he picture his father, I asked him to will to stretch up his hand and take the hand of his father.  His head still bent, he slowly lifted his arm up as if to take the hand of his father, sobbing, "I will to forgive you, Dad.  I will to forgive you."  I asked him to look up into his father's face and say, "Father, I do forgive you."  Then, to my astonishment, torrents of repressed love began to pour out.  Johnny cried over and over and over, "Daddy, I love you.  Daddy, I love you.  I do forgive you.  Jesus, forgive me for hating him.  Jesus, forgive me."^[vi]

 

Rejection is the doorway to bondage.  Forgiveness is the doorway to healing.

Now, you, as though the person were before you, speak to that one who hurt you, saying simply:

 

 

HINDRANCES TO FORGIVENESS

 

There are several additional hindrances to forgiveness.  Though you may be hindered, forgiveness must be pursued until it is obtained.  Keeping your will moving you in the right direction will enable you to finish the task.

 

1.         Not realizing forgiveness is a process

 

The first hindrance comes in not realizing that forgiving is a cleansing process rather than a single event.  Done as an act of the will, the progress is completed only when it reaches into the heart.  Stormie Omartin writes:

 

Unforgiveness as deeply rooted as mine toward my mother must be unraveled, one layer at a time.  This was especially true for me since my mother's verbal abuse continued to increase in intensity as time went on.  Whenever I felt anger, hatred, or unforgiveness toward her, I had to take charge of my will and deliberately say, "Lord, my desire is to forgive my mother.  Help me to forgive her completely."

 

Over the next couple of years, I did this more often that I can begin to count.  One day as I was again asking God to give me a forgiving heart, I felt led to pray, "Lord, help me to have a heart like Yours for my mother."

Almost immediately I had a vision of her I had never seen before.  She was beautiful, fun loving, gifted, a woman who bore no resemblance to the person I knew.  My understanding told me I was seeing her the way God had made her to be and not the way she had become.  What an amazing revelation!  I couldn't have conjured it up myself.  Nothing surpassed my hatred for my mother, except perhaps the depth of my own emptiness.  Yet now I felt compassion and sympathy for her.

 

In an instant I put together the pieces of her past - the tragic and sudden death of her mother when she was eleven, the suicide of her beloved uncle and foster father a few years later, her feelings of abandonment, guilt, bitterness, and unforgiveness which contributed to her emotional and mental illness.  I could see how her life, like mine, had been twisted and deformed by circumstances beyond her control.  Suddenly I no longer hated her for it.  I felt sorry for her instead. . . .

Although her mental illness and irrational behavior had continued to worsen, which kept us from any kind of reconciled relationship, I harbored no bitterness, and I have none to this day.  In fact, the more I forgave her, the more the Lord brought to mind good memories.  I was amazed that there were any at all.^[vii]

 

2.         Blaming yourself

 

Another hindrance, denying the pain you went through, comes from a negative self-image, the tendency of people who grow up in dysfunctional families to blame themselves for the shame that they feel.  For them, the most difficult step in the process is forgiving those whom they do not blame for the wrongs they did. Shame-based people must come to grips with the fact that if they feel hurt, the reality is that they have been hurt.  It may be an irrational hurt, but that's because the spirit of rejection is not a rational being, even if you are.

 

One woman I know refused to blame her parents for anything.  They were perfect parents, and her life of rebellion and alcoholism brought an unhappiness that had been in her estimation wholly her own fault.  It was she who was not able to measure up to the expectations that had been set for her.  Saddled with the curse of perfectionism that surfaced after her deliverance from alcohol, she was as nearly perfect in her dress, her habits, her exercise programs, and her possessions as any human could be.  But she still felt unworthy.   "No one ever rejected me, can't you see?" she tearfully maintained.  Because she insisted on always being right in her judgments about herself, she could not forgive her parents.  In Proverbs we read:  Train up a child in the way [she] should go: and when [she] is old [she] will not depart from it  (Proverbs 22:6 KJ).

 

Mandy's perfect parents did not bring her up in the way that was right for her, in the way that she should go.  They set standards she could not live up to and instilled in her the belief that what she did or did not do was what gave her worth and identity.  In Jesus Christ she met someone who loved her for herself.  But she is still cursed by the nagging urge to prove herself worthy of His love by doing more for Him.  Most of all, she is still bound by the unforgiveness of hurts she refuses to acknowledge. 

 

By failing to recognize past hurts we suffered, by trying to explain them away or rationalize them, or by bearing the blame for them, we store them up in our heart.  God doesn't care about the reality of what happened so much as He cares about our personal spiritual reality.  It is there that unforgiveness leaves its mark of bitterness.  It is there that forgiveness cleanses.

 

3.         Not forgiving God

 

In addition, we are hindered because we blame God for what happened to us.  It is necessary to forgive God.  Many of us have harbored great anger against Him for what we judge that He did to us, or what He permitted to happen.  Even as Christians we have sometimes suffered incomprehensible losses.  How could a just God have allowed such things to happen?  We can process it intellectually, and we can explain it Biblically; we can realize it is a matter of Satan's authority over this world and of our parents' God-given authority over us.  But the unfairness of it sits deeper than our intellect.  We can never be reconciled if we permit these feelings to continue.  We must acknowledge them, and we must forgive them. 

            

Until we forgive God, we can never know peace.  We maybe can never in this lifetime understand why God permits some people to bear such sorrow.  Nor is it our job to do so.  It's our job to trust Him.  By forgiving Him, we can begin to trust.  We then permit Him to give us the strength to bear what needs to be borne, to turn us from empty ritual, legalism, or wishful thinking to a living faith.