June 9, 2024 • 43 mins
Forgiveness is God's provision to heal.
In "Forgiving What You Can't Forget," Lysa TerKeurst shares how to stop reducing your life down to the limitations of living hurt and move toward the freedom found only through forgiveness.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, this is Stephen Ferdick.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
I'm the pastor of Elevation Church and this is our podcast.
I wanted to thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hope this inspires you. Hope it builds your faith.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hope it gives your perspective to see God has moving
in your life.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Enjoy the message. My message title is forgiving what you
can't forget. And I know the minute that I say forgiveness,
a lot of you are like, oh, please, not this today.
You don't know what I've been through this week, because
a minute I say forgiveness, you start to feel like
(00:34):
I'm going to attach this to the hardest thing that's
ever happened to me. And I am not in the
mood right. I understand that. That's why I'm going to
preach this message with great tenderness. Let's go to the Lord. Lord.
Thank you so much that you came and you died
for us so that we might have life and be
(00:58):
set free. Jesus, you are so well acquainted with the
hurts and the heaviness of what we walk through as humans.
You loved us so much, and Hebrews that you tell
us that you came to be a merciful and faithful
High Priest. And how true that is because you know
(01:19):
the grit and the grime and the gruesome heartbreak that
can happen when we are hurt, betrayed, overlooked, devalued, lied about,
cheated on. Lord. You know, right before you went to
(01:40):
the cross, Lord, you gave us these amazing words to
give us an insight into how much you understand. When
you cry out from the garden of Kosemite, my soul
is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. And then, Lord,
(02:00):
you prayed the same prayer I prayed so many times.
Everything is possible for you, God, take this cup from me.
But then, in your great mercy, because you are a
God of freedom, you reminded us at the end of
that prayer these nine glorious, health shaking, demon quaking, earth
(02:24):
shattering words. Yet not what I will, but what you will. God, Lord,
help us to trade our will for thy will, because
we are so confident you will. And all God's people said, amen,
you can have a seat. So my journey with forgiveness.
(02:54):
You know, it's kind of ironic that I'm preaching a
sermon today on forgiveness when this very week I have
struggled to forgive something hard that has happened. You know,
I feel like sometimes life is like whack a mole.
Did y'all ever play whack a mole? It's like, we
get one thing taken care of, and it's like kind
of calmed down, but then three more pop up, and
(03:15):
then those three you work as hard as you can
to get those to calm down, and then two more
pop up over here and one over here, and it
just feels like we're never going to get to the
place where life can be tied up in a neat,
nice bow and where things just all line up, the
birds sing, the sun shines, and you think, ain't nobody
hurt my feelings today? Wouldn't that be amazing? Right? So Yeah,
(03:41):
preaching a message on forgiveness in a very week that
I've struggled with being hurt. It's a tough thing. But
as I was praying about it, I thought, Lord, thank
you for bringing this hurt so fresh, so I can
preach this message with the deep tenderness that a message
(04:02):
on forgiveness deserves. You See, sometimes when we hear that
word forgiveness, like I said, we will attach it to
the hardest things that we have ever walked through, and
we will feel like some of us like forgiveness is
such an unfair gift that we now have to give
(04:23):
to the person who hurt us the most. Have you
ever felt that way about forgiveness? You see, I have
an attitude toward forgiveness. As a matter of fact, when
I set out to write my book Forgiving What you
Can't Forget, I did over a thousand hours with a
theologian studying in the Bible exactly what God's word says
(04:45):
about forgiveness. That is a lot of hours. But before
you get all impressed, I want you to know about
seven hundred and fifty of those hours I was looking
for the loophole. Surely, God does not mean we are
to forgive everyone, right, surely, But what I discovered is
(05:05):
that forgiveness is an absolute command by God. Forgiveness is
an absolute command by God. But here's the comfort. Reconciliation
is not a command that you always have to reconcile.
God would not put us in a position where we
(05:28):
have to stay close enough to someone who has used us,
abused us, and let that person keep doing it over
and over and over. Forgiveness is not their ticket to
keep hurting us. Absolutely not. So. While forgiveness is a
command by God, reconciliation is very conditional, and I think
(05:49):
we're going to see that as the message goes on.
Why did I even start studying forgiveness with an attitude
because I walked through some really hard stuff. A lot
of you know my story. You know it's inconvenient to
be a private person who lives a very public life,
(06:12):
and so when hard things happen, everybody knows about it.
And even if I chose not to tell the story,
the media would get a hold of it and they
would tell the story for me. So, for those of
you who don't know what my family and I have
walked through the past ten years, our family changed into
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something that I never thought it would be. I was
married almost twenty nine years, and my marriage ended in
an incredibly devastating way. I was heartbroken. I felt so
incredibly betrayed, and though I fought and begged God to
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save my marriage for years and years and years, I
would forgive, and then things would fall apart. I would forgive,
and then things would fall apart. I would forgive, and
then things would fall apart. And in the end, I
walked through the devastation of an unwanted divorce. It was hard,
(07:18):
it was awful, and it was something I never thought
my family would face. But I'm not unique with that story.
So many of you have a very similar story to me.
And you came to church this week and you were
just hoping that I would preach a message about how
(07:38):
bad people really are, you know, and then you walk
in here and you're like, dang, she's preaching on forgiveness. Great,
you know, But I just want you to know I
understand the hurt. And maybe your story is nothing like mine,
but here's what I know to be true about all
of us. We've either just been through so hurt, we're
(08:01):
in the middle of some hurt, or we're about to
go through some hurt. And you go, wow, that's not
very positive. No, I'm positive we've either been through some hurt,
we in some hurt, We've had to go through some hurt, right,
And so I think this is a message for all
of us. In the middle of one of the hardest
parts of my journey, I was in one of those
(08:23):
places where it was hard to get out of bed,
and I remember I had scheduled a counseling appointment, and
I drove up to the counselor's office and I remember
looking in the riover mirror and thinking, how long has
it actually been since I washed my hair. Now, you
with short hair, you will not understand this. But for
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those of you with hair that's more complicated like my hair,
you know, the top knot is God's gift to us, right,
because you can just have dirty hair whip it up
into a top knot. And so as I looked at
my reflection, I thought to myself, I look awful. And
then I was walking into the counselor's office and I
had a second thought, I can't remember if I put
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on deodorant today or not. And I thought, you know,
I can deal with dirty hair, but I'm not walking
in my counseling a point of stinking. And so I
went to the bathroom and I thought, I am a
resourceful girl, and so I opened up the bottom cabinet
and there was no deodorant in there, but there was
peach air freshener, and I thought that'll do, and so
(09:34):
I applied the peach air freshener to me, and I
walked into that counseling session, and I smelled like a
freshly baked peach cobbler. I really did. The counselor looked
at me. His name is Jim. Jim has been such
an incredible gift to me and my family, and so
I looked at Jim, and Jim looked at me and
(09:55):
he said, catch me up. How are you doing? And
I said not well at all. I said, I'm hurting
so bad. I just don't want to get out of
bed some days. And he said, huh, well, today is
a good day then for us to start working on forgiveness.
And I looked back at him and I said, are
you high, Mike? Truly? Like I just said, I am hurting,
(10:20):
and now you say we have to work on forgiveness. Yeah,
I'm not going to do that today. And he said, okay, okay,
why don't we start with your pain? And he handed
me a big stack of three by five cards and
I said, great, very well acquainted with my pain, I
(10:41):
will definitely be able to participate in this activity. And
so he handed me this stack of three by five
cards and he told me to write one thing on
each card of something that had been done that had
hurt me, something that had been said to me that
had hurt me. Just write down all the facts of
the trauma that you've experienced. And so I did. I
(11:02):
wrote card after card after card after card, and then
he told me to lay out the cards on the
floor of his office, and I did that, and before
too long, the entire office floor was full of those cards.
And as I turned and placed the last card and
I looked at all of that pain, I thought to myself,
(11:24):
no wonder, I feel so heavy inside. No wonder, I
don't want to get out of bed because look at
all I have been carrying. And so I looked up
at Jim, and Jim did the best thing that anybody
could do in a situation like that. He looked back
(11:46):
at me and he said, I believe you. What's been
done to you is terrible. It should have never happened.
And if no other human ever dares to say these words,
I'll say them to you. I am so sorry. I'm
(12:10):
so sorry. And in that moment, something in me softened,
and I realized I have been waiting all this time
for the person who hurt me to give me that gift,
to acknowledge how badly they've hurt me, to say that
(12:31):
they were sorry, to do some kind of repentance and
to promise they would never ever do it again. But
if I continue to wait for that person who hurt
me to say they're sorry before I can heal and
move forward, then I am allowing that person to hurt
me twice, because that's a choice they may never ever
(12:53):
make right. And I realized in that moment, I didn't
really need that person to say that they were sorry.
What I needed was for another human to bear witness
to the pain of what I'd walk through. And so
I want to do that for you today. Before we
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even get into the scriptures and the message, I want
to say to you, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.
I'm sorry that they said what they said. I'm sorry
that they didn't say what they should have said. I'm
sorry that they hurt you. I'm sorry that they stole
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from you. I'm sorry that they belittled you. I'm sorry
that they abused you. I'm so sorry for what you've
gone through. But friend, you deserve to stop suffering because
of what another person has done to you. Right, deserve
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to stop suffering because of what another person has done
to you. Forgiveness It's my choice. It's your choice. We
can take a stake and drive it in the ground today,
on this very day, and say I refuse to keep
suffering because of what they did to me. Forgiveness is
my choice, and I choose to receive this provision from
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God to help my human heart heal. That's what forgiveness
really is. Now here's the other thing about forgiveness that
can seem very very complicated forgiveness. It can seem if
we forgive that person, then that's us saying that what
they did is now okay, and it's not okay. So
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that's not what forgiveness means. Forgiveness can seem like, well, okay,
if I participate and I forgive, does that mean that
I can't ever process this Again, That's not what forgiveness means.
You can keep processing, you can keep healing. And also,
for a long time, I felt like a forgiveness failure
(15:08):
because I would say that I forgave that person, and
then a minute down the road or a week later,
all of a sudden, I would get triggered in my pain.
Do you know what a trigger is? Yes? Is so complicated, right,
don't you wish we could time triggers like Tuesday night
would be a good time for a trigger to hit,
and so let's schedule it. I'll be in the bathtub,
(15:28):
I'll be taking communion and I'll be listening to praise songs, right,
and then a trigger can hit me and I will
just cry it all out in the privacy of my
own bathtub. Right. But that's not how triggers happen. Triggers
just happen in the middle of our every day. And
have you ever been hit with a trigger. You've already
(15:49):
forgiven that person, but then a trigger hits and the
pain feels so fresh, and you think to yourself, I'm
bitter still. I must be a forgiveness failure. You're not
a frigid giveness failure. Every trauma is two parts. It's
fact an impact. Therefore, forgiveness can be two parts as well.
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We can forgive for the facts of what happened, and
that satisfies the command of God to forgive. At the
same time, we can also walk through the healing process
of healing from the impact and forgiving for the impact.
What that person did to us. It cost us something.
That's the impact, and that is going to take time.
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I used to think that triggers were such a curse,
But now I see it as God's mercy, because if
the full impact would have hit me at once, it
probably would have killed me. So how good of God
to let the impact leak into my life over time.
As I'm healing, I've already forgiven for the fact. But
then when an impact hits me, when a trigger hits me,
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and I realize an impact is nothing more than an indication.
There's a little more healing needed right here. There's a
little more forgiveness needed right here. So I had all
those cards laid out on Jim's office floor, and then
he handed me a stack of red felt squares and
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he looked at me and he said, Lisa, I think
you should just go card by card by card, and
you should make the choice to forgive. And I said,
that's great, except my mouth will say it, and my
feelings haven't signed up for it yet. So what do
I do about that?
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Right?
Speaker 1 (17:39):
And he said, why don't you say this? Out of
obedience to God, I am choosing to forgive this person
for the fact of what they did to me. And
then take a piece of redfelt and lay it on
top of that card. And then say, and whatever my
feelings will not yet allow, for the blood of Jesus
will surely cover it. Right, So I went card by
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card by card and said, I forgive this person for
this fact of how they've hurt me, and whatever my
feelings will not yet allow, for covered it with a
red card. The blood of Jesus will surely cover it.
And when I was done and I looked back, I
didn't have all that pain staring back at me. I
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saw the beautiful work of Jesus Christ. Jesus died so
that we could receive God's forgiveness. And as we receive
God's forgiveness, we simply must cooperate with his forgiveness as
his forgiveness flows to us, because we are not perfect,
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and we have also sinned and fallen short. But that
doesn't justify what they did at all. And maybe we
didn't participate in in in that situation where they hurt us,
but maybe we've been carrying some bitterness. And so as
we receive God's forgiveness as it flows to us, we
must cooperate with it and then let us flow through
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us to other people. We don't have to originate forgiveness.
I used to feel like I would just have to
grit my teeth like I forgive you and conjure up
some forgiveness from mimy. That's not forgiveness. Forgiveness originates from God,
flows to us, flows through us, and it goes to
other people. So what does God's word say about forgiveness?
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I want to start with Matthew chapter six, verses nine
through thirteen. I find it pretty amazing that when Jesus
was asked how should we pray, think about all the
things that could be taught in that moment of how
you can pray. This is Jesus and the people are
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asking him how do we pray? So if I was
put in charge of saying the ultimate Lord's prayer, I
probably would never have thought that forgiveness should be such
a big part of it. And yet Jesus knows the
human heart so well. He answers the people, this is then,
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how you should pray our Father in heaven, how it
would be your name, your kingdom, Come, Your will be
done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us
today our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as
we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not
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into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. And
then he goes on in verse fourteen and as another
little section, for if you forgive other people when they
sin against you, your heavenly father will also forgive you.
But if you do not forgive others their sins, your
father will not forgive your sins. Isn't it incredible that
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of all those words that we just study, that's in
the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray, that forgiveness
is one of the main subjects in that prayer. And
this is supposed to be a daily prayer. In other words,
each day when we wake up, we should pray something
similar to this. We should pray our Father in heaven,
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how would be your name, your kingdom? Con Your will
be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give
us today our daily bread, that daily provision. That's how
I know this is a daily prayer. And then make
forgiveness part of that prayer. How incredible would it be
if we laid in our beds before our feet ever
hit the floor, and we wake up and the day
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is fresh, and there's new opportunities, and we decided one
of the main things we're going to do before we
get out of bed, is that we are already going
to pre forgive the fools that hurt us that day. Right,
wouldn't that be so amazing? It would be so amazing.
You know where I got this idea years ago? Pastor
Steven preached a message on a fence, and he brought
up a fence up here was anybody else here? It
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was so amazing, right, And so I started doing this,
And how great is it that as I walk into
my day, inevitably it's like I'll be happy, happy, happy,
and then somebody bumps into my happy And it used
to be that they would hijack my day because of
their foolish situation whatever they were doing to me, right,
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But now I'm like, oh, you do, you boo? You
get all stirred up right here in the coffee line
because they frapaid your latte and waylaid your whole day. Okay,
I got it right. I mean, if that's the worst
thing that happened to me today, I would still have
a pretty good day. But you do, you boo, because
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you know what, You're the person I brak for this morning,
and I have already preforgiven you and Just because you
laid down on a fence does not mean I'm going
to pick it up, carry it with me, and let
it ruin my whole day. Right. It is incredible what
can happen when we make forgiveness part of our everyday routine, eating, sleeping, breathing, loving, forgiving.
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But there's one other thing I want to point out.
In this section of the Lord's Prayer. Right after we're
instructed to forgive, it says, and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one. There is a
pattern throughout scripture, and it is all throughout scripture wherever
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there's unattended to anger, bitterness, resentment, desires for revenge. Right
near that passage, it's instructive. We are instructed to forgive,
and if we don't, the evil one comes close. It
is like drop dropping blood in a body of water
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and it draws the sharks near. Let me show you
a couple of other passages where we see this very thing.
If we go all the way back to Genesis in
Genesis chapter four, verses two through seven. Now Abel kept
flocks and Cain worked the soil. Adam and Eve had
two children, Cain and Abel, Right, two brothers. Abel kept
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the flocks and Cain worked the soil. In the course
of time, Cain brought some of the fruits of the
soil as an offering to the Lord, and Abel also
brought an offering fat portions from some of the firstborn
of his flocks. The Lord looked with favor on Abel
and his offering, but on Cain and his offering, he
did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry
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and his face was downcast. Now some people, as we've
studied these scriptures, you know, some people really are concerned.
Why is it that the Lord favored Abel's offering and
not Cain's offering. Theologians have debated this, but I'm going
to give you what I personally see in the scripture.
Here it says that in the course of time, Cain
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brought his offering, but Abel brought his first fruits, right
his first born. And so I don't know if that's
what it is, but I do know that whatever it was,
the Lord was not pleased with Cain, and Cain was
very angry and his face was downcast. Now, if you've
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studied the Bible before, you know that Cain goes on
to murder his brother Abel. But there's something that happens
in between Cain being very angry and Cain murdering his brother.
The Lord himself comes and talks to Cain. What how
many times have I just prayed? Lord? I will not
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tell anybody, but if you can just come right here
into my closet, let me see you and tell me
what to do. I will listen, right. And I know
that that's not going to happen, but if it did happen,
I would keep it a secret, just between me and you.
But look what happens here. Cain gets that. The Lord
comes to Cain and says, in verse six, why are
you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do
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what is right, will you not be accepted? But if
you do not do what is right, sin is crouching
at your door. It desires to have you, but you
must rule over it. Unattended to anger, and sin is
crouching out the door, right, and it says, sin is
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crouching out your door, desires to have you, but you
must rule over it. Let's look at one other place
in scripture Ephesians, chapter four, starting in verse twenty six,
in your anger, do not sin do not let the
sun go down while you are still angry, and do
not give the devil a foothold. And then it goes
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on in verse twenty nine to say, do not let
any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only
what is helpful for building others up according to their needs,
that it may benefit those who listen. And do not
greet the Holy Spirit with whom you recealed for the
day of redemption. Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger,
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brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be
kind and compassionate to one another forgiving each other, just
as in Christ, God forgave you. We don't want to
reduce our life down to the limitations of living heard.
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There is a big, beautiful world out there, full of
such possibilities that you do not want to miss. And
if we are so stuck on the hurt that has
been caused to us and we think about it over
and over and over and over, that's just allowing that
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trauma to traumatize us over and over and over. When
cruel things have been done to you, it is life altering,
but it does not have to be life ruining. Forgiveness
forgiveness is God's provision for us to heal. Forgiveness is
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actually a gift from God. Now, if I were you
and I was sitting there and I was thinking, Okay,
that's nice, But what do I do when the person
who hurt me seems to get away with everything? What
do I do about that? Because honestly, as I take
an assessment in my heart, sometimes the very thing that
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pull's bitterness back into my feelings is that it feels
like they're off living in happy, happy world and I'm
here dealing with all the pain and the fallout of
the decisions. Have you ever been there, Well, let me
read you what the scripture says Galatians six seven through eight.
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Do not be deceived. God cannot be mocked. A man
reaps what he sows. Whoever sows to please their flesh
from the flesh will reap destruction. Whoever sows to please
the spirit from the spirit will reap eternal life. God
will not be mocked. There's a story of Esther, and
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there's several characters in Esther, but there's this one character
that his name is Hayman, and he has bent on
destroying the Jewish people. Mordecai, Esther's uncle finds out about
Hayman's plans. Esther has access to the king, and so
through the course of time, Esther is able to reveal
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Hayman's plot to the king. The very gallows that Hayman built.
I want you to listen to what scriptures said. The
very gallows that Haman built to kill the Jewish people
are the very gallows that he was then hanged on.
Esther seventeen. So they hanged Hayman on the gallows that
he had prepared for Mordecai. Romans twelve nineteen through twenty one.
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Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room
for God's wrath. For it is written it is mine
to avenge. I will repay, says the Lord. On the contrary,
if your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty,
give him something to drink. In doing this, you will
heat burning coals on his head. Do not be overcome
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by evil. Sin is crouching at your door, but you
must rule over You must rule over it. Do not
let it have you. Do not give the devil a
foothold in your anger. Do not sin, Do not give
the devil a foothold, Lord, deliver us from the evil one,
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And forgiveness is such a powerful part of that. Do
not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
I think that the very vest the very best time
to forgive is before we're ever offended. But the next
best time to forgive is right now. You know. I
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started doing these things as I was working on forgiveness
because I really had reduced my life down to the
limitations of living hurt. I really had done that. I
don't know if you can just check your heart and see,
are there places where I've limited myself because of the
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hurt that I've endured? Right? And so I started doing
these things called rebellious acts of resilience. And what a
rebellious act of resilience? First of all, I love the
word rebellious because I'm such a rule follower that it
kind of feels good to say I'm doing something rebellious, honestly,
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But what a rebellious act of forgiveness is is for
me to start listening to the I can'ts and I
don't in my vocabulary. So I had forgiven for the
hurt that it happened to me, but I was still
dealing with the impact very much. So I went on
a beach trip with some friends. And on this beach
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trip we had a little house and the ice maker
wasn't working. Now I am very into ice, especially at
the beach. I like cold things, very very cold. I
have this thing about the beach. I like to pack
it cooler with ice in it. I like to put
my water and my Dike Cob. Don't send me a
message about that. I understand how that it is for me.
(33:05):
I understand that police use it to clean blood off
the road. I got the whole thing, okay. But I
like my water, and I like my Dike coke, my
little sandwich, and I put it in a cooler with
some ice, go down to the beach, and that is
my happy place. I just love it. The problem was
I quickly discovered the ice maker was broken, and I
had an out of portion reaction to the situation at hand.
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I was like yet another thing he's taken from me.
You see, if he would have been faithful, then we
would still be married. And if we were so married,
he would be here and he would fix the ice maker.
But because he isn't here, I can't have ice, you know.
And I'm like, it's ice, Lisa, like it's ice, right,
But boy, did it flood me with I can't. I can't.
(33:51):
I can't. That's reducing your life down to the limitations
of living hurt. And so I stopped myself after being
very embarrassed at my overreaction, and I said, but what
if I could? What if I could? And so I
googled instructions how do you fix an ice maker? I
(34:14):
am terrible with written instructions. They were utterly unhelpful. But
then I remembered the YouTube, y'all, and so I YouTube directions,
how do you fix an ice maker? And I thought,
what's the worst that can happen? It's already broke? What
if I broke it more? Okay, you know? And I
tinkered with it, and I looked at the video and
(34:36):
I did what it said and I fixed that ice
mak God. And in that moment, it wasn't like I
epically healed, but I absolutely epically proved to myself I
still have a lot of life to live. I reduced,
(34:58):
I refused to reduce my life down to the limitations
of living hurt. And when that I fell into that bucket, y'all.
I did the EMC hammer dance around the kitchen, right.
It was glorious. So then my two friends who were
with me, they said, hey, Lisa, let's go down to
the ocean. And I thought, great, I've got my cooler now,
(35:19):
all prepared. So I get my book, I get my towel,
I get my chair and my little cooler and I'm
headed down to the ocean. And my friend Jess, who
was with me, she says, wait, wait, wait, wait wait,
I have a boogie board for you. And I said,
why do I need a boogy board because I'm gonna
sit in my chair and read my book. That does
not require a boogie board, right, And she said no, no, no, no,
(35:41):
We're going to play in the ocean. I said, oh,
I don't do oceans. There are sharks in there that
eat people every day. There's like shells that cut your feet,
jellyfish that sting. I don't do oceans. And we sat
down on the beach. She grabbed her boogie board. She
went and jumped into the water. But before she did that,
she laid my boogie board right in front of me
(36:02):
because she had carried it down for me, and I
was looking at her. I was looking at that boogie board,
and I saw her laughing and smiling, and I kept thinking,
I don't do oceans. But then I stopped myself again.
I'm not going to reduce my life down to the
limitations of living hurt. Therefore, what if I did? What
(36:24):
if I did? And before my overthinking brain could kick in,
I grabbed that boogie board. I went and I jumped
into the ocean. It was disastrous. The wave took me under.
My bathing suit bottoms came down. It was like a
whole situation, you know. I stood up. I did get
my bathing suit bottoms back on, just to clarify, and
(36:49):
then I laughed and I played, and for a few
minutes I wasn't a woman who was living in pain.
I was that same care free person that I had
been for so long. I can't I don't listen for
(37:13):
those types of words, because even after you've forgiven, sometimes
you stay stuck in this place where you just feel
like you can't move forward rebellious acts of resilience. You can,
and you will, and you should, and it is good right. Indeed,
(37:41):
the best time to forgive is before we're ever offended.
But the next best time is now, if you're physically able,
will you please stand. I have something that I've written
that I really want to share with you. This is
a declaration. And when I wrote this, it was a
(38:03):
message really to myself, because I remember waking up at
two am in the morning and just feeling the weight
of all that I was facing. Two am is such
a complicated hour, isn't it. It's like too late to
call your late friends, too early to call your early friends.
So it is just you, right, And so often I
(38:28):
would pray just the simplest prayers, like Jesus, I love
you and you love me, and that's all I've got.
And so to comfort myself, a lot of times I
would pull out my journal and I would write declarations.
So this declaration was something that I wrote for myself,
(38:49):
but I'm so grateful I get to share it with
you today. This is forgiveness, making the decision that the
ones who hurt you no longer get to limit you,
label you, or project the lies they believe about themselves
onto you. Somewhere along the way, they got hurt, really
(39:10):
really hurt. Maybe they really aren't necessarily bad people, but
chances are maybe they're unhealed people. But honestly, aren't we
all unhealed people? Do we ever really get to the
place where we're like, finally I figured it all out,
(39:32):
like I'm not going to do anything else or wrong. No,
we never get to that place. On this side of eternity.
We can grow, we can go to counseling, we can
study the Bible, we can allow God to have his
way with the sanctification process, all of that. But you see,
if if I look at people who have hurt me
(39:52):
and I just say to myself like they're such bad people,
then forgiveness will feel like a really unfair gift that
I have to give. But if I just change my
perspective and I say they're unhealed people, it helps. And
something happened to them along the way. I don't have
(40:13):
to know what it is. But if they're doing something
cruel to you, something cruel has been done to them,
it doesn't make it right, It doesn't justify it. It's
just a fact to consider. When people have a deep wound,
they feel they must protect the pain from that festering
place is often what they'll project. So you must make
the decision that their offense will not define you or
(40:36):
confine you by the smallness of bitterness. The sum total
of your one incredible life must not be reduced to
the limitations of living hurt. The completely delightful, beautiful, fun
and brilliant way God made you must not be tainted
by someone else who lost their way. You've got much
(40:57):
too much going for you to be stunted by anger
or haunted by resentment, or held back by fear. Grow
into God's grace by giving forgiveness kindly and receiving it freely.
Throw your arms up in victory and declare, I'm free
to forgive so that I can live. Do it once,
(41:18):
do it twice, do it seventy times seven. Make it
an undeniable fact that you are indeed bound one day
for heaven. This forgiveness message you dare to declare is
evidence of Jesus in you that not one soul can deny.
Sing it like an anthem that the one who was
crushed will not have their joy hushed. Scatter it like confetti,
(41:42):
coloring bland, surviving with the radiance of thriving. Release it
like the fantastic fragrance everyone loves and always wants more of. Now,
put your fingers on your pulse. Go ahead, you can
do it. Do you feel that it's your heart is beating, pumping,
willing you to press onward and upward your life, your
(42:07):
future is full of possibility, new joys that you do
not want to miss. So maybe it's time to get
carried away dancing to that song, you know, the one
where you can't stay down when its rhythm gets turned
all the way up. And if it's not a pray song,
(42:27):
if it's not a Jesus song, sing it to Jesus anyways, Right,
it's time to get moving and on with living. This,
my friends, is the power of forgiving.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
Thank you for joining us special thanks to those of
you who give generously to this ministry. Is because of
you that this ministry is possible. You can click the
link in the description to give now, or visit Elevation
Church dot org slash podcast for more information and if
you enjoyed the podcast.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
You can subscribe.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
You can share it with your friends. You can click
the share button, take a screenshot and share it on
your social stories and tag us at Elevation Church. Thanks
again for listening. God bless you
Hey, this is Stephen Ferdick.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
I'm the pastor of Elevation Church and this is our podcast.
I wanted to thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hope this inspires you. Hope it builds your faith.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hope it gives your perspective to see God has moving
in your life.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Enjoy the message. My message title is forgiving what you
can't forget. And I know the minute that I say forgiveness,
a lot of you are like, oh, please, not this today.
You don't know what I've been through this week, because
a minute I say forgiveness, you start to feel like
(00:34):
I'm going to attach this to the hardest thing that's
ever happened to me. And I am not in the
mood right. I understand that. That's why I'm going to
preach this message with great tenderness. Let's go to the Lord. Lord.
Thank you so much that you came and you died
for us so that we might have life and be
(00:58):
set free. Jesus, you are so well acquainted with the
hurts and the heaviness of what we walk through as humans.
You loved us so much, and Hebrews that you tell
us that you came to be a merciful and faithful
High Priest. And how true that is because you know
(01:19):
the grit and the grime and the gruesome heartbreak that
can happen when we are hurt, betrayed, overlooked, devalued, lied about,
cheated on. Lord. You know, right before you went to
(01:40):
the cross, Lord, you gave us these amazing words to
give us an insight into how much you understand. When
you cry out from the garden of Kosemite, my soul
is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. And then, Lord,
(02:00):
you prayed the same prayer I prayed so many times.
Everything is possible for you, God, take this cup from me.
But then, in your great mercy, because you are a
God of freedom, you reminded us at the end of
that prayer these nine glorious, health shaking, demon quaking, earth
(02:24):
shattering words. Yet not what I will, but what you will. God, Lord,
help us to trade our will for thy will, because
we are so confident you will. And all God's people said, amen,
you can have a seat. So my journey with forgiveness.
(02:54):
You know, it's kind of ironic that I'm preaching a
sermon today on forgiveness when this very week I have
struggled to forgive something hard that has happened. You know,
I feel like sometimes life is like whack a mole.
Did y'all ever play whack a mole? It's like, we
get one thing taken care of, and it's like kind
of calmed down, but then three more pop up, and
(03:15):
then those three you work as hard as you can
to get those to calm down, and then two more
pop up over here and one over here, and it
just feels like we're never going to get to the
place where life can be tied up in a neat,
nice bow and where things just all line up, the
birds sing, the sun shines, and you think, ain't nobody
hurt my feelings today? Wouldn't that be amazing? Right? So Yeah,
(03:41):
preaching a message on forgiveness in a very week that
I've struggled with being hurt. It's a tough thing. But
as I was praying about it, I thought, Lord, thank
you for bringing this hurt so fresh, so I can
preach this message with the deep tenderness that a message
(04:02):
on forgiveness deserves. You See, sometimes when we hear that
word forgiveness, like I said, we will attach it to
the hardest things that we have ever walked through, and
we will feel like some of us like forgiveness is
such an unfair gift that we now have to give
(04:23):
to the person who hurt us the most. Have you
ever felt that way about forgiveness? You see, I have
an attitude toward forgiveness. As a matter of fact, when
I set out to write my book Forgiving What you
Can't Forget, I did over a thousand hours with a
theologian studying in the Bible exactly what God's word says
(04:45):
about forgiveness. That is a lot of hours. But before
you get all impressed, I want you to know about
seven hundred and fifty of those hours I was looking
for the loophole. Surely, God does not mean we are
to forgive everyone, right, surely, But what I discovered is
(05:05):
that forgiveness is an absolute command by God. Forgiveness is
an absolute command by God. But here's the comfort. Reconciliation
is not a command that you always have to reconcile.
God would not put us in a position where we
(05:28):
have to stay close enough to someone who has used us,
abused us, and let that person keep doing it over
and over and over. Forgiveness is not their ticket to
keep hurting us. Absolutely not. So. While forgiveness is a
command by God, reconciliation is very conditional, and I think
(05:49):
we're going to see that as the message goes on.
Why did I even start studying forgiveness with an attitude
because I walked through some really hard stuff. A lot
of you know my story. You know it's inconvenient to
be a private person who lives a very public life,
(06:12):
and so when hard things happen, everybody knows about it.
And even if I chose not to tell the story,
the media would get a hold of it and they
would tell the story for me. So, for those of
you who don't know what my family and I have
walked through the past ten years, our family changed into
(06:33):
something that I never thought it would be. I was
married almost twenty nine years, and my marriage ended in
an incredibly devastating way. I was heartbroken. I felt so
incredibly betrayed, and though I fought and begged God to
(06:56):
save my marriage for years and years and years, I
would forgive, and then things would fall apart. I would forgive,
and then things would fall apart. I would forgive, and
then things would fall apart. And in the end, I
walked through the devastation of an unwanted divorce. It was hard,
(07:18):
it was awful, and it was something I never thought
my family would face. But I'm not unique with that story.
So many of you have a very similar story to me.
And you came to church this week and you were
just hoping that I would preach a message about how
(07:38):
bad people really are, you know, and then you walk
in here and you're like, dang, she's preaching on forgiveness. Great,
you know, But I just want you to know I
understand the hurt. And maybe your story is nothing like mine,
but here's what I know to be true about all
of us. We've either just been through so hurt, we're
(08:01):
in the middle of some hurt, or we're about to
go through some hurt. And you go, wow, that's not
very positive. No, I'm positive we've either been through some hurt,
we in some hurt, We've had to go through some hurt, right,
And so I think this is a message for all
of us. In the middle of one of the hardest
parts of my journey, I was in one of those
(08:23):
places where it was hard to get out of bed,
and I remember I had scheduled a counseling appointment, and
I drove up to the counselor's office and I remember
looking in the riover mirror and thinking, how long has
it actually been since I washed my hair. Now, you
with short hair, you will not understand this. But for
(08:47):
those of you with hair that's more complicated like my hair,
you know, the top knot is God's gift to us, right,
because you can just have dirty hair whip it up
into a top knot. And so as I looked at
my reflection, I thought to myself, I look awful. And
then I was walking into the counselor's office and I
had a second thought, I can't remember if I put
(09:10):
on deodorant today or not. And I thought, you know,
I can deal with dirty hair, but I'm not walking
in my counseling a point of stinking. And so I
went to the bathroom and I thought, I am a
resourceful girl, and so I opened up the bottom cabinet
and there was no deodorant in there, but there was
peach air freshener, and I thought that'll do, and so
(09:34):
I applied the peach air freshener to me, and I
walked into that counseling session, and I smelled like a
freshly baked peach cobbler. I really did. The counselor looked
at me. His name is Jim. Jim has been such
an incredible gift to me and my family, and so
I looked at Jim, and Jim looked at me and
(09:55):
he said, catch me up. How are you doing? And
I said not well at all. I said, I'm hurting
so bad. I just don't want to get out of
bed some days. And he said, huh, well, today is
a good day then for us to start working on forgiveness.
And I looked back at him and I said, are
you high, Mike? Truly? Like I just said, I am hurting,
(10:20):
and now you say we have to work on forgiveness. Yeah,
I'm not going to do that today. And he said, okay, okay,
why don't we start with your pain? And he handed
me a big stack of three by five cards and
I said, great, very well acquainted with my pain, I
(10:41):
will definitely be able to participate in this activity. And
so he handed me this stack of three by five
cards and he told me to write one thing on
each card of something that had been done that had
hurt me, something that had been said to me that
had hurt me. Just write down all the facts of
the trauma that you've experienced. And so I did. I
(11:02):
wrote card after card after card after card, and then
he told me to lay out the cards on the
floor of his office, and I did that, and before
too long, the entire office floor was full of those cards.
And as I turned and placed the last card and
I looked at all of that pain, I thought to myself,
(11:24):
no wonder, I feel so heavy inside. No wonder, I
don't want to get out of bed because look at
all I have been carrying. And so I looked up
at Jim, and Jim did the best thing that anybody
could do in a situation like that. He looked back
(11:46):
at me and he said, I believe you. What's been
done to you is terrible. It should have never happened.
And if no other human ever dares to say these words,
I'll say them to you. I am so sorry. I'm
(12:10):
so sorry. And in that moment, something in me softened,
and I realized I have been waiting all this time
for the person who hurt me to give me that gift,
to acknowledge how badly they've hurt me, to say that
(12:31):
they were sorry, to do some kind of repentance and
to promise they would never ever do it again. But
if I continue to wait for that person who hurt
me to say they're sorry before I can heal and
move forward, then I am allowing that person to hurt
me twice, because that's a choice they may never ever
(12:53):
make right. And I realized in that moment, I didn't
really need that person to say that they were sorry.
What I needed was for another human to bear witness
to the pain of what I'd walk through. And so
I want to do that for you today. Before we
(13:14):
even get into the scriptures and the message, I want
to say to you, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.
I'm sorry that they said what they said. I'm sorry
that they didn't say what they should have said. I'm
sorry that they hurt you. I'm sorry that they stole
(13:37):
from you. I'm sorry that they belittled you. I'm sorry
that they abused you. I'm so sorry for what you've
gone through. But friend, you deserve to stop suffering because
of what another person has done to you. Right, deserve
(14:01):
to stop suffering because of what another person has done
to you. Forgiveness It's my choice. It's your choice. We
can take a stake and drive it in the ground today,
on this very day, and say I refuse to keep
suffering because of what they did to me. Forgiveness is
my choice, and I choose to receive this provision from
(14:25):
God to help my human heart heal. That's what forgiveness
really is. Now here's the other thing about forgiveness that
can seem very very complicated forgiveness. It can seem if
we forgive that person, then that's us saying that what
they did is now okay, and it's not okay. So
(14:47):
that's not what forgiveness means. Forgiveness can seem like, well, okay,
if I participate and I forgive, does that mean that
I can't ever process this Again, That's not what forgiveness means.
You can keep processing, you can keep healing. And also,
for a long time, I felt like a forgiveness failure
(15:08):
because I would say that I forgave that person, and
then a minute down the road or a week later,
all of a sudden, I would get triggered in my pain.
Do you know what a trigger is? Yes? Is so complicated, right,
don't you wish we could time triggers like Tuesday night
would be a good time for a trigger to hit,
and so let's schedule it. I'll be in the bathtub,
(15:28):
I'll be taking communion and I'll be listening to praise songs, right,
and then a trigger can hit me and I will
just cry it all out in the privacy of my
own bathtub. Right. But that's not how triggers happen. Triggers
just happen in the middle of our every day. And
have you ever been hit with a trigger. You've already
(15:49):
forgiven that person, but then a trigger hits and the
pain feels so fresh, and you think to yourself, I'm
bitter still. I must be a forgiveness failure. You're not
a frigid giveness failure. Every trauma is two parts. It's
fact an impact. Therefore, forgiveness can be two parts as well.
(16:13):
We can forgive for the facts of what happened, and
that satisfies the command of God to forgive. At the
same time, we can also walk through the healing process
of healing from the impact and forgiving for the impact.
What that person did to us. It cost us something.
That's the impact, and that is going to take time.
(16:36):
I used to think that triggers were such a curse,
But now I see it as God's mercy, because if
the full impact would have hit me at once, it
probably would have killed me. So how good of God
to let the impact leak into my life over time.
As I'm healing, I've already forgiven for the fact. But
then when an impact hits me, when a trigger hits me,
(16:59):
and I realize an impact is nothing more than an indication.
There's a little more healing needed right here. There's a
little more forgiveness needed right here. So I had all
those cards laid out on Jim's office floor, and then
he handed me a stack of red felt squares and
(17:21):
he looked at me and he said, Lisa, I think
you should just go card by card by card, and
you should make the choice to forgive. And I said,
that's great, except my mouth will say it, and my
feelings haven't signed up for it yet. So what do
I do about that?
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Right?
Speaker 1 (17:39):
And he said, why don't you say this? Out of
obedience to God, I am choosing to forgive this person
for the fact of what they did to me. And
then take a piece of redfelt and lay it on
top of that card. And then say, and whatever my
feelings will not yet allow, for the blood of Jesus
will surely cover it. Right, So I went card by
(18:06):
card by card and said, I forgive this person for
this fact of how they've hurt me, and whatever my
feelings will not yet allow, for covered it with a
red card. The blood of Jesus will surely cover it.
And when I was done and I looked back, I
didn't have all that pain staring back at me. I
(18:27):
saw the beautiful work of Jesus Christ. Jesus died so
that we could receive God's forgiveness. And as we receive
God's forgiveness, we simply must cooperate with his forgiveness as
his forgiveness flows to us, because we are not perfect,
(18:50):
and we have also sinned and fallen short. But that
doesn't justify what they did at all. And maybe we
didn't participate in in in that situation where they hurt us,
but maybe we've been carrying some bitterness. And so as
we receive God's forgiveness as it flows to us, we
must cooperate with it and then let us flow through
(19:13):
us to other people. We don't have to originate forgiveness.
I used to feel like I would just have to
grit my teeth like I forgive you and conjure up
some forgiveness from mimy. That's not forgiveness. Forgiveness originates from God,
flows to us, flows through us, and it goes to
other people. So what does God's word say about forgiveness?
(19:37):
I want to start with Matthew chapter six, verses nine
through thirteen. I find it pretty amazing that when Jesus
was asked how should we pray, think about all the
things that could be taught in that moment of how
you can pray. This is Jesus and the people are
(19:59):
asking him how do we pray? So if I was
put in charge of saying the ultimate Lord's prayer, I
probably would never have thought that forgiveness should be such
a big part of it. And yet Jesus knows the
human heart so well. He answers the people, this is then,
(20:21):
how you should pray our Father in heaven, how it
would be your name, your kingdom, Come, Your will be
done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us
today our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as
we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not
(20:42):
into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. And
then he goes on in verse fourteen and as another
little section, for if you forgive other people when they
sin against you, your heavenly father will also forgive you.
But if you do not forgive others their sins, your
father will not forgive your sins. Isn't it incredible that
(21:08):
of all those words that we just study, that's in
the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray, that forgiveness
is one of the main subjects in that prayer. And
this is supposed to be a daily prayer. In other words,
each day when we wake up, we should pray something
similar to this. We should pray our Father in heaven,
(21:31):
how would be your name, your kingdom? Con Your will
be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give
us today our daily bread, that daily provision. That's how
I know this is a daily prayer. And then make
forgiveness part of that prayer. How incredible would it be
if we laid in our beds before our feet ever
hit the floor, and we wake up and the day
(21:53):
is fresh, and there's new opportunities, and we decided one
of the main things we're going to do before we
get out of bed, is that we are already going
to pre forgive the fools that hurt us that day. Right,
wouldn't that be so amazing? It would be so amazing.
You know where I got this idea years ago? Pastor
Steven preached a message on a fence, and he brought
up a fence up here was anybody else here? It
(22:16):
was so amazing, right, And so I started doing this,
And how great is it that as I walk into
my day, inevitably it's like I'll be happy, happy, happy,
and then somebody bumps into my happy And it used
to be that they would hijack my day because of
their foolish situation whatever they were doing to me, right,
(22:36):
But now I'm like, oh, you do, you boo? You
get all stirred up right here in the coffee line
because they frapaid your latte and waylaid your whole day. Okay,
I got it right. I mean, if that's the worst
thing that happened to me today, I would still have
a pretty good day. But you do, you boo, because
(22:56):
you know what, You're the person I brak for this morning,
and I have already preforgiven you and Just because you
laid down on a fence does not mean I'm going
to pick it up, carry it with me, and let
it ruin my whole day. Right. It is incredible what
can happen when we make forgiveness part of our everyday routine, eating, sleeping, breathing, loving, forgiving.
(23:25):
But there's one other thing I want to point out.
In this section of the Lord's Prayer. Right after we're
instructed to forgive, it says, and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one. There is a
pattern throughout scripture, and it is all throughout scripture wherever
(23:46):
there's unattended to anger, bitterness, resentment, desires for revenge. Right
near that passage, it's instructive. We are instructed to forgive,
and if we don't, the evil one comes close. It
is like drop dropping blood in a body of water
(24:07):
and it draws the sharks near. Let me show you
a couple of other passages where we see this very thing.
If we go all the way back to Genesis in
Genesis chapter four, verses two through seven. Now Abel kept
flocks and Cain worked the soil. Adam and Eve had
two children, Cain and Abel, Right, two brothers. Abel kept
(24:29):
the flocks and Cain worked the soil. In the course
of time, Cain brought some of the fruits of the
soil as an offering to the Lord, and Abel also
brought an offering fat portions from some of the firstborn
of his flocks. The Lord looked with favor on Abel
and his offering, but on Cain and his offering, he
did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry
(24:54):
and his face was downcast. Now some people, as we've
studied these scriptures, you know, some people really are concerned.
Why is it that the Lord favored Abel's offering and
not Cain's offering. Theologians have debated this, but I'm going
to give you what I personally see in the scripture.
Here it says that in the course of time, Cain
(25:19):
brought his offering, but Abel brought his first fruits, right
his first born. And so I don't know if that's
what it is, but I do know that whatever it was,
the Lord was not pleased with Cain, and Cain was
very angry and his face was downcast. Now, if you've
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studied the Bible before, you know that Cain goes on
to murder his brother Abel. But there's something that happens
in between Cain being very angry and Cain murdering his brother.
The Lord himself comes and talks to Cain. What how
many times have I just prayed? Lord? I will not
(26:00):
tell anybody, but if you can just come right here
into my closet, let me see you and tell me
what to do. I will listen, right. And I know
that that's not going to happen, but if it did happen,
I would keep it a secret, just between me and you.
But look what happens here. Cain gets that. The Lord
comes to Cain and says, in verse six, why are
you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do
(26:23):
what is right, will you not be accepted? But if
you do not do what is right, sin is crouching
at your door. It desires to have you, but you
must rule over it. Unattended to anger, and sin is
crouching out the door, right, and it says, sin is
(26:44):
crouching out your door, desires to have you, but you
must rule over it. Let's look at one other place
in scripture Ephesians, chapter four, starting in verse twenty six,
in your anger, do not sin do not let the
sun go down while you are still angry, and do
not give the devil a foothold. And then it goes
(27:06):
on in verse twenty nine to say, do not let
any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only
what is helpful for building others up according to their needs,
that it may benefit those who listen. And do not
greet the Holy Spirit with whom you recealed for the
day of redemption. Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger,
(27:26):
brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be
kind and compassionate to one another forgiving each other, just
as in Christ, God forgave you. We don't want to
reduce our life down to the limitations of living heard.
(27:48):
There is a big, beautiful world out there, full of
such possibilities that you do not want to miss. And
if we are so stuck on the hurt that has
been caused to us and we think about it over
and over and over and over, that's just allowing that
(28:11):
trauma to traumatize us over and over and over. When
cruel things have been done to you, it is life altering,
but it does not have to be life ruining. Forgiveness
forgiveness is God's provision for us to heal. Forgiveness is
(28:36):
actually a gift from God. Now, if I were you
and I was sitting there and I was thinking, Okay,
that's nice, But what do I do when the person
who hurt me seems to get away with everything? What
do I do about that? Because honestly, as I take
an assessment in my heart, sometimes the very thing that
(28:59):
pull's bitterness back into my feelings is that it feels
like they're off living in happy, happy world and I'm
here dealing with all the pain and the fallout of
the decisions. Have you ever been there, Well, let me
read you what the scripture says Galatians six seven through eight.
(29:22):
Do not be deceived. God cannot be mocked. A man
reaps what he sows. Whoever sows to please their flesh
from the flesh will reap destruction. Whoever sows to please
the spirit from the spirit will reap eternal life. God
will not be mocked. There's a story of Esther, and
(29:44):
there's several characters in Esther, but there's this one character
that his name is Hayman, and he has bent on
destroying the Jewish people. Mordecai, Esther's uncle finds out about
Hayman's plans. Esther has access to the king, and so
through the course of time, Esther is able to reveal
(30:05):
Hayman's plot to the king. The very gallows that Hayman built.
I want you to listen to what scriptures said. The
very gallows that Haman built to kill the Jewish people
are the very gallows that he was then hanged on.
Esther seventeen. So they hanged Hayman on the gallows that
he had prepared for Mordecai. Romans twelve nineteen through twenty one.
(30:30):
Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room
for God's wrath. For it is written it is mine
to avenge. I will repay, says the Lord. On the contrary,
if your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty,
give him something to drink. In doing this, you will
heat burning coals on his head. Do not be overcome
(30:53):
by evil. Sin is crouching at your door, but you
must rule over You must rule over it. Do not
let it have you. Do not give the devil a
foothold in your anger. Do not sin, Do not give
the devil a foothold, Lord, deliver us from the evil one,
(31:15):
And forgiveness is such a powerful part of that. Do
not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
I think that the very vest the very best time
to forgive is before we're ever offended. But the next
best time to forgive is right now. You know. I
(31:41):
started doing these things as I was working on forgiveness
because I really had reduced my life down to the
limitations of living hurt. I really had done that. I
don't know if you can just check your heart and see,
are there places where I've limited myself because of the
(32:01):
hurt that I've endured? Right? And so I started doing
these things called rebellious acts of resilience. And what a
rebellious act of resilience? First of all, I love the
word rebellious because I'm such a rule follower that it
kind of feels good to say I'm doing something rebellious, honestly,
(32:21):
But what a rebellious act of forgiveness is is for
me to start listening to the I can'ts and I
don't in my vocabulary. So I had forgiven for the
hurt that it happened to me, but I was still
dealing with the impact very much. So I went on
a beach trip with some friends. And on this beach
(32:43):
trip we had a little house and the ice maker
wasn't working. Now I am very into ice, especially at
the beach. I like cold things, very very cold. I
have this thing about the beach. I like to pack
it cooler with ice in it. I like to put
my water and my Dike Cob. Don't send me a
message about that. I understand how that it is for me.
(33:05):
I understand that police use it to clean blood off
the road. I got the whole thing, okay. But I
like my water, and I like my Dike coke, my
little sandwich, and I put it in a cooler with
some ice, go down to the beach, and that is
my happy place. I just love it. The problem was
I quickly discovered the ice maker was broken, and I
had an out of portion reaction to the situation at hand.
(33:29):
I was like yet another thing he's taken from me.
You see, if he would have been faithful, then we
would still be married. And if we were so married,
he would be here and he would fix the ice maker.
But because he isn't here, I can't have ice, you know.
And I'm like, it's ice, Lisa, like it's ice, right,
But boy, did it flood me with I can't. I can't.
(33:51):
I can't. That's reducing your life down to the limitations
of living hurt. And so I stopped myself after being
very embarrassed at my overreaction, and I said, but what
if I could? What if I could? And so I
googled instructions how do you fix an ice maker? I
(34:14):
am terrible with written instructions. They were utterly unhelpful. But
then I remembered the YouTube, y'all, and so I YouTube directions,
how do you fix an ice maker? And I thought,
what's the worst that can happen? It's already broke? What
if I broke it more? Okay, you know? And I
tinkered with it, and I looked at the video and
(34:36):
I did what it said and I fixed that ice
mak God. And in that moment, it wasn't like I
epically healed, but I absolutely epically proved to myself I
still have a lot of life to live. I reduced,
(34:58):
I refused to reduce my life down to the limitations
of living hurt. And when that I fell into that bucket, y'all.
I did the EMC hammer dance around the kitchen, right.
It was glorious. So then my two friends who were
with me, they said, hey, Lisa, let's go down to
the ocean. And I thought, great, I've got my cooler now,
(35:19):
all prepared. So I get my book, I get my towel,
I get my chair and my little cooler and I'm
headed down to the ocean. And my friend Jess, who
was with me, she says, wait, wait, wait, wait wait,
I have a boogie board for you. And I said,
why do I need a boogy board because I'm gonna
sit in my chair and read my book. That does
not require a boogie board, right, And she said no, no, no, no,
(35:41):
We're going to play in the ocean. I said, oh,
I don't do oceans. There are sharks in there that
eat people every day. There's like shells that cut your feet,
jellyfish that sting. I don't do oceans. And we sat
down on the beach. She grabbed her boogie board. She
went and jumped into the water. But before she did that,
she laid my boogie board right in front of me
(36:02):
because she had carried it down for me, and I
was looking at her. I was looking at that boogie board,
and I saw her laughing and smiling, and I kept thinking,
I don't do oceans. But then I stopped myself again.
I'm not going to reduce my life down to the
limitations of living hurt. Therefore, what if I did? What
(36:24):
if I did? And before my overthinking brain could kick in,
I grabbed that boogie board. I went and I jumped
into the ocean. It was disastrous. The wave took me under.
My bathing suit bottoms came down. It was like a
whole situation, you know. I stood up. I did get
my bathing suit bottoms back on, just to clarify, and
(36:49):
then I laughed and I played, and for a few
minutes I wasn't a woman who was living in pain.
I was that same care free person that I had
been for so long. I can't I don't listen for
(37:13):
those types of words, because even after you've forgiven, sometimes
you stay stuck in this place where you just feel
like you can't move forward rebellious acts of resilience. You can,
and you will, and you should, and it is good right. Indeed,
(37:41):
the best time to forgive is before we're ever offended.
But the next best time is now, if you're physically able,
will you please stand. I have something that I've written
that I really want to share with you. This is
a declaration. And when I wrote this, it was a
(38:03):
message really to myself, because I remember waking up at
two am in the morning and just feeling the weight
of all that I was facing. Two am is such
a complicated hour, isn't it. It's like too late to
call your late friends, too early to call your early friends.
So it is just you, right, And so often I
(38:28):
would pray just the simplest prayers, like Jesus, I love
you and you love me, and that's all I've got.
And so to comfort myself, a lot of times I
would pull out my journal and I would write declarations.
So this declaration was something that I wrote for myself,
(38:49):
but I'm so grateful I get to share it with
you today. This is forgiveness, making the decision that the
ones who hurt you no longer get to limit you,
label you, or project the lies they believe about themselves
onto you. Somewhere along the way, they got hurt, really
(39:10):
really hurt. Maybe they really aren't necessarily bad people, but
chances are maybe they're unhealed people. But honestly, aren't we
all unhealed people? Do we ever really get to the
place where we're like, finally I figured it all out,
(39:32):
like I'm not going to do anything else or wrong. No,
we never get to that place. On this side of eternity.
We can grow, we can go to counseling, we can
study the Bible, we can allow God to have his
way with the sanctification process, all of that. But you see,
if if I look at people who have hurt me
(39:52):
and I just say to myself like they're such bad people,
then forgiveness will feel like a really unfair gift that
I have to give. But if I just change my
perspective and I say they're unhealed people, it helps. And
something happened to them along the way. I don't have
(40:13):
to know what it is. But if they're doing something
cruel to you, something cruel has been done to them,
it doesn't make it right, It doesn't justify it. It's
just a fact to consider. When people have a deep wound,
they feel they must protect the pain from that festering
place is often what they'll project. So you must make
the decision that their offense will not define you or
(40:36):
confine you by the smallness of bitterness. The sum total
of your one incredible life must not be reduced to
the limitations of living hurt. The completely delightful, beautiful, fun
and brilliant way God made you must not be tainted
by someone else who lost their way. You've got much
(40:57):
too much going for you to be stunted by anger
or haunted by resentment, or held back by fear. Grow
into God's grace by giving forgiveness kindly and receiving it freely.
Throw your arms up in victory and declare, I'm free
to forgive so that I can live. Do it once,
(41:18):
do it twice, do it seventy times seven. Make it
an undeniable fact that you are indeed bound one day
for heaven. This forgiveness message you dare to declare is
evidence of Jesus in you that not one soul can deny.
Sing it like an anthem that the one who was
crushed will not have their joy hushed. Scatter it like confetti,
(41:42):
coloring bland, surviving with the radiance of thriving. Release it
like the fantastic fragrance everyone loves and always wants more of. Now,
put your fingers on your pulse. Go ahead, you can
do it. Do you feel that it's your heart is beating, pumping,
willing you to press onward and upward your life, your
(42:07):
future is full of possibility, new joys that you do
not want to miss. So maybe it's time to get
carried away dancing to that song, you know, the one
where you can't stay down when its rhythm gets turned
all the way up. And if it's not a pray song,
(42:27):
if it's not a Jesus song, sing it to Jesus anyways, Right,
it's time to get moving and on with living. This,
my friends, is the power of forgiving.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
Thank you for joining us special thanks to those of
you who give generously to this ministry. Is because of
you that this ministry is possible. You can click the
link in the description to give now, or visit Elevation
Church dot org slash podcast for more information and if
you enjoyed the podcast.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
You can subscribe.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
You can share it with your friends. You can click
the share button, take a screenshot and share it on
your social stories and tag us at Elevation Church. Thanks
again for listening. God bless you
Host
Steven Furtick
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