May 6 2019

It’s pretty safe to say everyone gets wounded. Someone, somewhere, has hurt you. A father abandoned you as a kid. A spouse left you. You got fired from a job that you loved. Someone owes you money. Whatever your thing is, someone has hurt you, you know that you need to forgive them, but you just can’t find it within yourself to forgive.

A couple of things God has revealed to me about forgiveness:

Forgiveness is NOT forgetting what happened. I think this is why we struggle with forgiving someone. Forgiveness feels like we are condoning what happened, or that we are excusing the offender and letting them off the hook. When we forgive, we are instead trusting God to deal with it. As we release the person who’s wronged us to God, He ensures justice is served, not us. “Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath…” Romans 12:19.

Forgiveness is NOT dependent upon the other person. In a perfect world, the person who has wronged you would come forward and say they are sorry. For some of you reading this, that is impossible. The person who wronged you has passed away or you’ve lost all contact with them. Forgive them anyway. True forgiveness is you releasing that person and basically saying, “You don’t owe me.”

“It’s not fair! Somebody has to pay for what they did.” I agree. Someone must pay. And somebody has…And that somebody was Jesus. “God made Him who had no sin be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” II Corinthians 5:21. So stop focusing on what someone did to you and start focusing on what God did for you.

When we fail to forgive, the one suffering is typically us. It has been said, “Unforgiveness is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies.” 

Choose forgiveness. You will find that the prisoner that was set free was you.

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This devotional was written by Karl Stoneking