A church member e-mailed me after I had preached a sermon on forgiveness. She wrote, “It’s easy for you to stand up there and preach about the need to forgive, but some days the pain is just too great.”
I wrote back, providing an illustration from my experience with a man who, several years earlier, had tried to oust me from the church where I was pastor. He had made many false accusations about me, first behind my back, then publicly, at a standing room-only meeting. He claimed that I was not preaching the truth from God’s Word, and that I was not doing my job as a minister of the gospel.
My enemy attacked all the things to which my life had been dedicated. At that meeting, though, God won that battle, in prayer, as we surrendered to Him. Almost the entire church dropped to her knees in prayer and the angry accuser stormed out of the room.
I didn’t take revenge. I let God handle it. And He did a much better job than I could have.
After the smoke had cleared though, I struggled with debilitating feelings of betrayal, anger, bitterness, and unforgiveness. A counselor told me that I was going through the same stages of grief that a rape victim endures. I had been “violated,” not physically, but emotionally, since my enemy had “ravaged” my character.
For six months I struggled with depression, anger, and various physical ailments, and I knew deep down that the only way to freedom would be to forgive this man. But I simply could not bring myself to do it.
Finally, desperately searching the Scriptures for some comfort, I came across another passage about forgiveness. Instead of getting mad at God for telling me (again) that I needed to forgive, I gave up and said, “God, I CAN’T do it. You are going to have to, because I can’t. If you say I have to do this, then YOU forgive him.”
It was a weird prayer. But he answered it anyway.
It wasn’t too long after that prayer that I ran into this man at a home improvement store. My initial reaction when I spotted him was to duck behind a row of refrigerators and sneak out of the building. But I found myself walking over to him and extending my hand. That was not me. That was the Holy Spirit. I could never have done that. But God was doing it through me. I had asked Him to do it, and He was doing it.
The man shook my hand and we talked for five minutes, about his family, and about a project he was getting ready to tackle. Neither of us brought up the offenses of the past. We didn’t have to. They were past.
From that moment on I was free from the awful effects of unforgiveness. Since then I have bumped into this same man several times, and each time I have been able to strike up a friendly conversation with him. He is no longer my enemy.
When I gave up, God pried away the death grip Satan had around my broken heart. When I found myself consumed with Christ, I was no longer consumed by bitterness.
Clark Cothern pastors in Lincoln, Michigan.
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