What about forgiveness

Dear friends in Christ,

I want to thank my God for another opportunity to share some thoughts with you and I pray that I may just get to know Him more and more with every passing day.

Do you realise how blessed you are today if you can honestly admit that you don’t carry hate for someone in your heart? I recently met a woman who admitted to me that she is struggling to forgive someone who caused her a lot of pain. She is also feeling extremely guilty as a result of this and she is putting a lot of pressure on herself to forgive this person. It made me think and I realised how blessed I am to not harbour any hateful feelings toward anyone. There are so many people who have been hurt so deep in their hearts that forgiveness does not seem like an option and it can be a challenge to convince someone in that position that forgiveness is a necessary step to take on the road to healing.

If you are in that position though and you know that there is someone who has hurt you so much that you cannot find it in your heart to forgive them, don’t you want to just think about the following points before you resign yourself to carrying that heavy load with you for the rest of your life.

• A hate filled life does much more harm to the one carrying it in his heart than the one being hated.
• By hating someone who hurt you, you are in fact allowing that person, without his knowledge even, to hurt you even more, because as long as you hate, you will be obsessing about the negativity and the pain that the person/ people have caused you, while they may have long since forgotten about it.
• The longer you carry hate in your heart the heavier it becomes. Life is so short, do you really want to spend the rest of yours carrying a burden that steals your joy from you?

Dear friends, do you realise how heavy the burden is that you are loading upon yourself because of the hate in your heart? Not only that, but inevitably the hate will lead to feelings of guilt and shame because it becomes something you cannot stop focussing on and it pulls you down. You are worth so much more than wasting your life and the joy God wants to give you on something as meaningless and harmful as hate.

Do you realise that God sent His Son to die for a world who hates Him? Jesus came and was killed by the very same people whose souls He saved and to whom He has given everlasting life.

Imagine you gave the biggest gift you can to people who don’t even know you and in return they kill your child. How much hate will you have in your heart? Yet, though this is exactly what we did to Jesus, God has absolutely NO hate for us, only love!  (John 3:16.)

Ask yourself : If God was able to forgive me every sin I could ever do and give me eternal life after His Son had to DIE FOR ME, how can I NOT forgive? How can I hate someone but accept that God has forgiven me? Psalm 55:22 tells us to cast our burdens on the Lord, because He cares for us. Don’t you want to consider doing that today? God really wants to take the heavy load you are carrying off your shoulders and replace it with joy and with healing and with freedom from the guilt that hate has laid upon your heart.

You have to realise that forgiveness is one of the most important parts of healing. If you are hurting and your heart is heavy with hate, God wants to heal you and if you want to be whole again and not hurt anymore you have to realise that forgiving will have to be a part of that process. When you realise how much lighter your load will be once you have chosen to forgive, you will realise that the act of forgiveness may make absolutely no difference to the person you forgive, but it will make a world of a difference to you as YOU are the one who will become free, YOU are the one who will heal and YOU are the one who’s life will be filled with blessings and with the joy of the Lord.

Whoever has harmed you or hurt your heart has his own path to walk and his own burden to carry and his own explaining to do to God. Don’t you allow that person to steal even more from you and to take from you your joy and to lead you to sin by causing you to hate. You have been given freedom from all of that when your God sent His Son to die for you!

Ask the Lord to come and heal your heart and fill it with so much joy and love that there will be no more place for hate to attach itself to you and steal from you. Let it go and start living in freedom from every negative thing that satan wants to use to kill your joy. Nehemia 8:10 states: “The joy of the Lord is your strength.” Make the choice today to accept that joy into your life. Take it for it is given freely. Take it and realise that there is no place for hate in a heart that is filled with the joy of the Living God.

Dear Lord, thank You for loving me so much that I have been forgiven and that even though You sent Your Son to die for me, you harbour no hate towards me. Thank You Jesus for giving me freedom to rise above hate because of what You did on the cross. Lord help us to be filled with Your love and help us to realise that when we forgive we are allowing our own hearts to be healed and filled with more of You. Lord You are everything and You are all to me. Amen.

Be fearless in Christ and expect the unexpected.

Lizz