How to Forgive those who Hurt you
Forgiveness is the act of intentionally letting go of feelings of resentment or vengeance towards someone who has wronged you.
It’s a voluntary process that involves transforming your feelings, attitudes, and behaviors.
When it comes to forgiving those who hurt you, here are some things you should do:
Number 1
Pray for them.
You see, when you pray for a person who hurt you, it is impossible to continue holding a grudge against them.
Now there are different kinds of prayers tho..
Lol..
But I am not talking about the one where you pray for them to die 😅
No. Don’t do that.
Instead, act like Jesus. While he was on the cross dying for the sins of the world
Instead of cursing and praying for God to punish those who were responsible for his crucifixion
He said: “Father Forgive them, because they don’t know what they are doing…”
The forgiveness does not ignore the fact that there’s pain and hurt inflicted by this person…
Who most times are still undeserving of the forgiveness
It simply denies that pain and hurt the power to control you.
It’s a divine thing to forgive
Its a divine thing to let go of what that person did to you…
And the bible doesn’t say forgive and forget
Cos how will you be able to forget? You cannot erase your memory
Rather it teaches that when you forgive and remember what happened
instead of feeling hurt and bad, FORGIVE AGAIN.
Thats how come when peter asked Jesus how many times a person should offend him before he takes action against him
Jesus said, 70 x 7 times per day
Question is, will you do it the bible way?
Or will you continue holding unto the hurt?
Happening this December:
When you refuse to forgive, several things happen
We live in a society that knows and cares little about forgiveness.
In fact, I would think that one of the major contributors to the destruction of relationships in our culture is the absence of forgiveness.
Our culture pushes us to be unforgiving.
It celebrates and exalts people who are not willing to forgive.
We make heroes out of the Dirty Harry’s and the Rambo’s who murder people out of vengeance.
As a result of this unforgiveness, we have a society filled with bitterness, vengeance, anger and hate toward others.
For a Christian, however, the failure to forgive is unthinkable.
Whatever the issue, whatever the offense, a failure to forgive is a blatant act of disobedience.
We have been told as explicitly as possible that if anybody offends us, we are to forgive them.
How many times? Seventy times seven — that is, an endless number of times (Matthew 18:22).
To look at this issue from the negative side for a moment, if you buy into this culture
— a culture that says you don’t have to forgive, you have a right to your pound of flesh —
I’ll give you four things that will happen in your life.
1. Unforgiveness will imprison you in your past.
As long as you fail to forgive an offender, you are shackled to the past.
Unforgiveness keeps that pain alive.
Unforgiveness never lets that wound heal, and you go through life reminding yourself of what was done to you,
stirring up that pain and making yourself progressively angrier.
You go through life accumulating bad feelings.
Now, think about it. What’s the point of that? What’s the benefit?
Unforgiveness just imprisons you in the past and robs you of the joy of living.
On the other hand, forgiveness opens the door and lets the prisoner out.
Forgiveness sets you free from your past.
As soon as you forgive, you’re free.
If you insist on remembering the offense and never forgiving it, then you allow the person to go on offending you the rest of your life.
2. Unforgiveness will produce bitterness.
The cumulative effect of remembering without forgiveness some offense done against you is that you become a bitter person.
The longer you remember the offense, the more data you accumulate on it, the more you recite the memory, the more it occupies your thinking, the more it shapes your person.
Bitterness is not just a sin; it is an infection, and it will infect your whole life.
And bitterness can be directly traced to the failure to forgive.
It makes you caustic, sarcastic, condemning and nasty.
Harassed by the memories of what you can’t forgive, your thoughts become malignant toward others, and your whole view of life becomes distorted.
Anger begins to rage in you, and it can easily get out of control.
Your emotions begin to run wild.
You entertain continuing thoughts of revenge.
And what happens? Even casual conversation becomes a forum for slander against the offender,
and your flesh, that horrible remnant of your old self, gains control.
Forgiveness, on the other hand, dispels bitterness and replaces it with love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness and self-control.
Why would anybody want to live in the prison of their past?
Why would anybody want to live with accumulated bitterness that makes them violate every relationship?
3. Unforgiveness will give Satan an open door.
Unforgiveness throws the welcome mat out and invites the demons in.
Where you have unresolved bitterness and an unforgiving spirit, you have given place to the devil:
“Be angry, and yet do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not give the devil an opportunity.” (Ephesians 4:26-27)
“But one whom you forgive anything, I forgive also; for indeed what I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, I did it for your sakes in the presence of Christ, so that no advantage would be taken of us by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his schemes.” (2 Corinthians 2:10-11)
It is no exaggeration to say that most of the ground that Satan gains in our lives is due to unforgiveness.
We’re not ignorant of his scheme to move in on an unforgiving attitude and destroy relationships.
You can evict all the demonic trespassers by an act of forgiveness.
4. Unforgiveness will hinder your fellowship with God.
Jesus said that if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you (Mark 11:25).
If you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. In the ongoing relationship with God, if we don’t forgive others, He doesn’t forgive us.
So if I’m not right with you, then I’m not right with Him.
Why would I sentence myself to not being right with God?
Is there some virtue in cutting off the purity and the joy of my fellowship with God?
You see the idiocy, don’t you, of an unforgiving attitude?
It makes you a prisoner of your past, it gives you the all-pervasive disease of bitterness, it opens the door for Satan,
and it alienates you from the full, rich fellowship that God desires to have with you.
There is plenty of good reason, then, to be a forgiving person.
To forgive is to turn the key, open the cell door, and let the prisoner out. And the prisoner is YOU.
To forgive is to write in large letters across a debt, “Nothing owed.”
To forgive is to pound the gavel in a courtroom and say, “Not guilty.”
To forgive is to bundle up all the garbage and dispose of it, leaving the house clean and fresh.
To forgive is to relax a stranglehold on a wrestling opponent and give him his life.
To forgive is to sandblast a wall of graffiti, leaving it looking like new.
This matter of forgiveness is very important, and it’s right at the crux of our spiritual health.