“If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins.” (Matthew 6:14-15)
As Jesus Christ was sitting on the mountain teaching the crowd of people, He explained that we must forgive others so that our Heavenly Father God will forgive us.
So why is it so difficult to forgive others? Most of the time, it’s because we’ve been deeply hurt, whether we’re on the receiving end of words that cut deep or experience rising anger. It does not matter what the circumstances are when we feel we can’t forgive someone. If we believe the other person is guilty of wrongdoing, even if they are not, we need to forgive them — always — no matter what!
Your life will wreak havoc if you don’t forgive others. When we hold back our forgiveness for another person, we can become sick, we may remain in pain and anguish, and/or we are stuck with an inability to move forward. Forgiveness is actually more for us than it is for the other person.
How many times do we get hurt, upset, or angry? How many times do we hurt someone else (whether or not it’s intentional)?
What’s going on? It doesn’t matter!
Plain and simple, we need to seek our Heavenly Father God. We need to call on Him for help. We need to forgive others as soon as we possibly can (immediately is best). We can always forgive through the power of God. He will help us.
In fact, we ought to stop right now and pray to God for His help to forgive everyone of everything, and furthermore seek God’s help to remember everything at this time. We need to forgive everyone right now with the power and strength of God!
We may find out, as I did, that we still don’t recall everything. There are time frames of “as soon as possible” or “immediately” that don’t always happen when it comes to forgiveness. Sometimes, we seem to simply forget all about forgiving someone. We may be still holding onto “unforgiveness” in our heart against someone and not even realize it until something changes.
In my case, just a couple weeks before I received the news that my aunt was suddenly dying, I was confessing my unforgiveness to her son. Wow! I didn’t realize that the incidents in which she had hurt me were buried deep inside of me. I had actually thought that I had said a prayer to forgive everyone of everything and asked God to reveal it to me at that time, but I realized that I had still forgotten this. I now needed to forgive her — immediately — and I did. Thank God it was prior to the news of her impending death.
It would certainly be best to forgive a person immediately, and seek humility and forgiveness from Jesus Christ for ourselves! If it is possible, we need to forgive quickly and forget easily. We need to be right with God at all times.
The simplicity in our being able to forgive others, and even ourselves, is that no matter what the offense is, whether it’s anger and/or pain we have endured, or it’s our own regrets, it will never, ever be comparable to what Jesus Christ did for us.
Jesus Christ endured a horrible, extremely difficult, and nearly indescribable road to death. He suffered beatings, whippings, excruciating pain, and humiliation on the way to and on that cross, as the Son of God in the flesh. Why? To take on all the sins of all the people everywhere (yes, each and every single offense past, present, and future of each and every single person of all time from the beginning and until the end of time as we know it), and to offer forgiveness to each and every one of us for each and everything, with only one exception, and that is, the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. This sin is the only sin that is never forgiven, with an unclean spirit as the cause.
This is a warning with severe consequences. You will not be forgiven if you hold on to unforgiveness for someone else, and you may even suffer the worse kind possible (in an eternal separation from God)? Is it worth it? No! So we must forgive and forgive now. Why wait?
Pray to God and seek His healing by quickly forgiving others always!
I don’t know who said this, but when you forgive, you don’t change the past, you change the future! Let’s move on and truly be the best Christians we can be by giving our best to imitate Jesus Christ and follow Him.
Two more things, I must share. First, I received an e-mail from someone (after 4 years of silence), asking for my forgiveness. Funny thing is that I had already forgiven that person long ago. God is so good to us!
Second, we must forgive because if we don’t and we should die, we won’t have another opportunity to be forgiven by God. It will be too late!
Until we virtually meet again, may God call you to Himself.
God’s Word for Today: [Jesus Christ said], “I tell you the truth, all sin and blasphemy can be forgiven, but anyone who speaks blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven. This is a sin with eternal condemnation.” (Mark 3:28-20)
Copyright © 2014 by Patricia Shehan
