Don't Wait! Forgive

Dannah Gresh: How do you normally respond when you've been hurt deeply? Here's how a woman named Kathy felt after suffering a terrible attack.

Kathy: I wanted revenge so badly that I honestly think I could have killed, if I could have gotten away with it.

Dannah: Today we're going to hear Kathy's story. This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Choosing Forgiveness, for July 13, 2022. I’m Dannah Gresh. 

Let's join Nancy as she continues in a series called, "Freedom Through Forgiveness."

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: We've been talking about this whole matter of bitterness and forgiveness; how do we deal with the hurts and wounds of our pasts. We don't want to be debt collectors because we realizing that when we hold others hostage, who have sinned against us, we end up becoming imprisoned ourselves.

Someone has said that bitterness is like an acid; it destroys the container in which it's held. And we reap in our lives the consequences even sometimes physically and emotionally and relationally and then consequences even in our children and grandchildren of a refusal to forgive.

 

We see from God's Word that forgiveness is a serious matter to God. And He has said that if we won't forgive others, then we will not be able to experience God's love and forgiveness in our lives. In fact, the apostle Paul said in 2 Corinthians, chapter 2:11 that when we refuse to forgive, we actually end up giving Satan a toehold, a foothold in our lives. We open up our lives to greater influence and attack from Satan himself when we refuse to forgive.

Now I want us to address this question: If we need to forgive, how can we choose to forgive? How should we respond to those who have sinned against us? I want to suggest several steps here.

We'll take some of them today and then pick up the others in the next session. But I believe it's important first to identify the people who have wronged us.

When I talk about hurts, wounds, offenses, in most of our minds there is a name that comes to mind, there's a face, there's a situation, there's a circumstance, something you experienced. When I say, "hurt," your mind goes to that circumstance or that person.

I want to suggest that you take time to identify who those people are that have hurt you. In fact, you might want to take a piece of paper and draw two lines down that piece of paper so that you have three columns.

On the left-hand column, list the people who have sinned against you. Now if that person is sitting next to you, you may want to be a little careful how you write this, perhaps initials or very small writing.

But write down who are the people who have sinned against you. That's on the left-hand column, then in the middle column, next to each of those names, identify how have they sinned against you, what they did that was wrong. What was the offense? And you know what it is.

Now just let me say in all of this, I'm not suggesting that you go back and try and dredge up memories that you're not sure are there. I don't believe that's biblical. God has the capacity, the ability and sometimes He does choose to just erase some memories from our minds. He can do that. He doesn't always, but He can.

And if God has removed those memories from your mind, don't try to dredge them up. If these are issues that need to be dealt with, then they're there in your consciousness. I'm talking about the things that come to your mind, write those down, who are the people and how have they sinned against you?

You say, "I'm not sure I should be bringing these things up? I'm supposed to be forgetting them. Isn't that right?"

Well, forgiveness is not pretending that it never happened. God's not asking you to pretend that it never happened. And I think sometimes in our evangelical world, we talk about this matter of forgiveness and we think, If I identify who these people are or what they've done, then I'm on the wrong pathway. Shouldn't I just be trying to push it under the carpet, to bury the pain?

Listen, God is not asking us to bury the pain or pretend that it never happened. God is asking you to run head on into the pain by His grace and with Him to learn how to deal with this situation.

Some of us have pushed these things under the carpet for so long that the carpet has gotten to the point we can't even walk on it anymore.

We've been trying to bury it, thinking that was the Christian thing to do. Forgiveness is the not the same as burying the pain or forgetting or pretending that it ever happened.

God wants to meet with you in the midst of your pain. So first identify the people who have wronged you and how they have sinned against you.

And then you want to make sure that your conscience is clear toward those people who are on your list.

And that's where the third column comes in. You were wondering what we were going to do with that third column. In the left-hand column, identify the people who have sinned against you. In the middle column, how have they sinned against you.

And now here's what the right-hand column is for. Ask yourself and let God search your heart so that you can be honest. How have I responded to these people? Go down the list and look at each individual. Have I blessed that person, loved them, prayed for them, forgiven them, or have I withheld love? Have I resentful them? Slandered them? Spoken evil against them?

Have I spoken evil of that ex-mate to my children or that fellow employee to another employee? Have I retaliated in some way? Have I become angry and hateful toward that person? Write it down. How have I responded to that individual?

And then take responsibility for your responses. This is a freeing thing to realize that God does not hold you accountable for how others have sinned against you. But God does hold us accountable and responsible for how we have sinned against others.

If your response to the individual has not been Christlike, then you need to be willing to go back to that person and to seek their forgiveness for the ways that you have sinned against them.

You say, "Wait a minute, this person sinned against me and now you're telling me I have to go and ask them to forgive me for how I sinned against them?" If you sinned against that person in your responses, then you need to clear your conscience before God and before that individual asking their forgiveness.

Now God's not asking you to go and clear their conscience. By the way, if your response has not been a wrong one, don't go and ask forgiveness. But God is saying, "You take responsibility for your part."

We're so prone to attach percentages to all this. So the tendency is to think, and I hear so many wives express something along this line, I was only maybe 5 percent responsible for the breakup of our marriage and you should hear what he did. And often I do hear. Ninety-five percent is his responsibility is the implication.

The problem is if someone would go and talk to that man, chances are, he might be willing to claim 5 percent responsibility, but he's got his list of ways that his wife sinned against him that he feels provoked him to do whatever he did.

So he's saying, "I'm 5 percent responsible; she's 95 percent responsible." She's saying, "I have a little responsibility but he's mostly responsible." So really you only have 10 percent of the responsibility being claimed, her little 5 percent and his little 5 percent.

Who's responsible for all that 90 percent in the middle? You see it's pride that causes us to think, generally speaking, it's the other person who was more wrong.

 

Now I'm not saying that what that offender did was not wrong and some of you are in the process of already starting a mental list, maybe even starting to even write it down and there are some huge offenses on your list.

We've talked about some of them, about the matter of the husband abandoning his wife, leaving you with those children, about someone who molests the little girl who thinks that that man is her friend. These are huge offenses. And I'm not minimizing or trivializing these at all.

But I'm just saying, "We need to take responsibility for how we have responded to the offender and where possible go back and make sure that our conscience is clear. Seek their forgiveness for the ways that you have sinned against them."

Now when you go to seek their forgiveness, be careful how you do it. Don't go back to that ex-husband and say, "You know, I'm so sorry that I wasn't the wife I should have been. But it was really because you were such a louse of a husband that I was that kind of a wife."

Now I know no one would go and say that but sometimes we can ask forgiveness in a way that makes the other person feel like they're really getting the load down on them. Let God put the sense of responsibility, guilt where needed on the other person. You respond to the sense of responsibility that God is putting on you.

Now once you have identified these people who have hurt you, you've identified how they hurt you, and you have done everything that God has put on your heart to do, to clear your conscience toward those individuals; then you can take this step of choosing to fully forgive every person who has sinned against you.

Purpose in your heart to extend forgiveness to every person on your list, not because you feel like forgiving, not because they have come and ask you to forgive them, but as an act of your will. We forgive as an act of obedience. We forgive by faith.

And let me say this, "It's supernatural to forgive." We don't have that kind of capacity for true forgiveness within us. Only by the grace of God and the power of His Spirit can we forgive. It's not natural to forgive.

When you make this choice to forgive, watch how you say it. Watch your language. What do I mean by that? I've heard women say, "Lord, please help me to forgive so and so." Now I think I know what they mean. But let me suggest, that's not going far enough. You don't just need God to help you forgive so and so.

You need to say, "Lord, by Your grace and in obedience to You, I choose to forgive. To clear the record. To press the delete button. To let them go."

I've heard women say, "I know I need to forgive so and so."

But the enemy may use that way of thinking to keep you from going all the way to forgiveness. Don't just say, "I need to forgive so and so." Say to God, "I choose to forgive. I do forgive so and so."

A woman wrote to me and said,

I chose today to forgive my husband for his sexual relationship with his girlfriend before we met. I've been holding on to this hurt for four years. [She'd be a debt collector.] I'm excited now to embrace him and tell him he has been released.

Another woman said,

God has shown me my root of bitterness toward my husband because he doesn't live up to my expectations. I have been able to release him from that prison.

Are you holding a prisoner today? Someone on your list, who you’ve not forgiven? Are you seeing that when you choose to forgive, that you really become a prisoner? Now will you make the choice to say, “Oh, God, for Jesus’s sake and as You have forgiven me, I choose to forgive”?

Dannah: You’re listening to Revive Our Hearts, with our host, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. She’s been giving some practical counsel on how we can forgive those who have hurt us.

I’ll tell you later about Nancy’s book, Choosing Forgiveness, and how you can receive a copy of it. But next up, let’s hear from Kathy. Kathy was in the studio audience the day Nancy recorded what you’re listening to this week. If anyone might seem justified in harboring bitterness, it's Kathy. She was the victim of a horrible crime, but God has been doing something special in her life. Let's listen to Kathy's story about the power of forgiveness.  

Kathy: When I was sixteen years old, I was sexually assaulted by three boys who I thought were my friends. I learned the meaning of hate. I wanted revenge so badly that I honestly think I could have killed, if I could have gotten away with it.

I never told anybody: my mother, my father, no one. But in my heart I knew that the boys had probably told everyone. Maybe I imagined the way people looked at me. My last year in high school was horrendous. As soon as I got out of school, I got out of that town. I never effectively went back to see anybody but my parents.

Over the years I have said that I have forgiven, but I don't think I really have because I think about it so much. None of their lives have been worth anything. One is gone; he's not alive anymore. And if I go to a high school reunion, I still have to still face one. I finally got up the nerve twenty years later to go one, and I was just in knots inside. I didn't enjoy anything because I had to face that one.

It's something I've carried in my heart so many years and I have buried it so long. I finally, three years ago, got up the courage to tell my husband. My husband had known it all along because I couldn't watch a program on TV about rape. I couldn't even talk about that, so my husband knew. But bless his heart and thank God for him, he never pressured me.

So I have so much to be thankful for because there have been so many hard issues in my life, medical issues, that God has spared my life. I felt like He had a greater work for me to do. I have really striven to be faithful to God and to try to do His work, but I know until I release all of those things, no matter how far past, that I won't be free.

And I say in front of you today, "I forgive those boys who are men now, older than me. I forgive them and I pray for them that they can have the forgiveness and receive it that I have had in my life." Thank you.

Nancy: Turn if you would to Isaiah chapter 61. God has shown Kathy something that most believers who have been through a similar experience never, ever realize. I don't want us to miss the point. This is not just about Kathy, but it's about the ways of God and God being glorified in our lives.

What happened to Kathy when she was sixteen years old is an unspeakable atrocity. It's wicked. It's heinous. And those boys, now men, have had to live with the consequences in some fashion of their sin.

There's no question that they sinned. But what most of us who have been sinned against in some way never get honest about are the ways that we have sinned in responding to those who sin against us.

And Kathy was so specific. She said, "I hated them. I wanted to take revenge. I thought in my mind that I would kill them, if I thought I could get away with it."

Now, any person who's listening to that story and has an ounce of mercy in their heart wants to say, "Kathy, I understand why you would feel that way. I'd feel the same way if I were in your shoes." But that's where, if we're really going to be instruments of mercy in each other's life, we need to bring each other back to the truth. And God has just done that for Kathy.

What He showed her is that her hatred, her desire for revenge, and her murderous heart are wicked. And you notice all these years she's been in bondage. She wasn't the one who did this. Why is she in bondage? She hasn't been in bondage all these years because of their sin—no one else's sin can put you in bondage. She's been in bondage because of her sin.

And it sounds incredibly unjust or imbalanced to point that out, but God pointed it out to Kathy and showed her that as a child of God she could not hate, that revenge is not hers, it's God's.

And that by thinking these thoughts in her heart, she had in effect committed murder. And she's in the process of getting set free because she was willing to say, "Lord, it's not those three young men, it's me in need of Your mercy."

Yes, they need God's mercy but they are not her responsibility. And don't you just sense in Kathy the first stages of release, the freedom that God wants to give to her. It reminds me of the passage we've got open before us.

Isaiah 61:1, the passage talking about Jesus before He ever got to earth and talking about what His ministry would be. This is not only what He did here on earth, this is what He does in times of revival.

The Spirit of the LORD God is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good new to the poor; He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.

Does that sound like what God has just been doing in Kathy's heart and in several of us in this room in different ways today, giving us good news about our poverty, healing broken hearts.

You get healing by dealing and letting God deal with your own heart and with your own sinfulness because that's how our hearts get broken ultimately. It's not by what others do to us, though that does wound us, but the deepest wounds of our lives are the result of our choices.

So God is healing the brokenhearted. He's proclaiming liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.

Verse 2, "To comfort all who mourn." Kathy is mourning but I think it is a good mourning. And, Kathy, there's comfort coming with that mourning. I think there is a whole new level of grace and comfort and peace and release and freedom that you are walking into today. It's only going to get more and more beautiful.

Verse 3, "To console those who mourn in Zion." This is the ministry of Jesus with the Holy Spirit in our lives. "To give them [oh, this is great] beauty for ashes." Think how the enemy thought he had Kathy at age sixteen and in some ways has kept her saying, "You're just a bunch of ashes." But look what God's doing; He's making beauty.

"To give the oil of joy for mourning." Kathy, I think you've never experienced joy to the extent that you will in the days ahead. I'm not saying there's not been any, I'm sure there has been, but probably not like there will be.

"The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness." It's like going to the mall and getting a whole new wardrobe and one that He makes, one we can never afford. I love it, "The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness."

And look at this, the end of verse 3. This is incredible, not only that He would redeem us, give us liberty, heal our broken hearts, comfort us, give us beauty for ashes, give us joy, give us praise—I mean that's already incredible enough—but then that He would want to use us. "That they may be called trees of righteousness; the planting of the LORD, that He may be glorified."

Kathy, you're a tree of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, a virtuous, clean, forgiven woman. And God has incredible plans for your life. I'm not saying none of those have been fulfilled to this point, but I bet there are a lot that you haven't even seen yet. And what's the goal for Kathy? That He may be glorified!

So He takes us, whether it's our own failures or the failures of others that have wounded us and then our failure in responding to that, and through confession, through repentance, makes something of great worth.

Dannah: Wow, those are such encouraging words from Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth! Now, I realize it’s possible that Kathy’s experience might be bringing up painful memories for you. Can I remind you again: Nancy’s not saying that when others sin against you, their sin is somehow your fault. Not at all! Abusers sometimes make us feel that way. Nor is Nancy saying that there shouldn’t be consequences, even legal ones, for people who have committed crimes against you. But her focus in this conversation was on Kathy’s heart, and how Kathy can be free of that bitterness welling up inside. It’s an important part of choosing forgiveness.

And that’s the title of Nancy’s book, Choosing Forgiveness: Moving from Hurt to Hope. This month when you donate any amount to Revive Our Hearts, we’ll say thank you by sending you a copy of Choosing Forgiveness. To make a donation, visit ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959. Ask about Choosing Forgiveness when you make your donation, and start your journey to freedom today.

We've all heard the saying "forgive and forget," but are these two words one and the same? Nancy will answer that tomorrow. I’m Dannah Gresh, inviting you back for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth wants to help you forgive, even in the most difficult situations. It’s part of freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.  

All Scripture is taken from the NIV84.

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