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This was written by a Christian Minister, that I’m adding here for Tribe Members, because if we are going to get along in the Tribe of love, we must be able to forgive. AND forget. Note: This is a long page
This is a Web site under God, and follows Gay Freedom and Gay Religious Freedom, as found in the constitution of the United States, and
Found in the Civil Laws of this country.
All pictures are believed to be in public domain any that are not will be removed upon request.
Art and text are owned by the FREE and INDEPENDENT TRIBES and CHURCH of the MAOY
And shall not be removed or copied for use other then personal use or promoting the Tribe.
Any questions you have about use, please contact the Tribe.
This is the stronghold I want to show you tonight. Brothers, I believe that many people who think they have forgiven, have not forgiven from their heart. Probably everyone reading this has been hurt at some point. Maybe you are someone who had been enjoying a close relationship with God, but then someone said something about you, rejected you, or spread a false report about you, and you became hurt I’m sure you understand what I’m talking about.
I have been hurt deeply in my life, and I know what a struggle it can be to forgive. How do we deal with these hurts? There are only two ways. We can forgive and release the person, or we can refuse to forgive him and seek revenge. Now we know better than to take revenge openly, so we hold unforgiveness in our hearts. I want to show you what happens when we do that.
An important thing to remember is that hurting people hurt others. Two of my sons came running into the house one day, and both of them were crying. I asked the first one what was wrong, and he said, “He hurt me.” So I asked the other one, “Why did you hurt him?” And he said, “He hurt me first.” You see, hurting people hurt others. If you have been hurt by someone, chances are that the person himself was hurting.
My wife and I have counseled many people who have problems and struggles. When we mention unforgiveness, almost every one of them tells us they have forgiven those who hurt them. But they still feel rejected. They struggle and cannot find victory. So I ask them, “Have you ever been hurt in your life?” A number of them will say, “Yes, I have.” Then I ask, “What is the deepest hurt, the deepest pain that you’ve ever been through?” And sometimes they never tell me, but the tears just start running down their cheeks. Oh, they still have deep, deep pain. Let me tell you, hurts will hurt until they’re forgiven. But once they’re forgiven, there is amazing grace to not hurt anymore.
There is a deception in the lives of many saints. We think we have forgiven, but we have not forgiven. There’s a root system at work. Whenever unforgiveness is buried in our hearts, it will sprout and its shoots will start coming up. This is happening to so many people today. I think of an old man I worked with, trying to help him find freedom. He was sixty-seven years old when I met with him, and he sat there in terrible pain. He is so depressed that sometimes he doesn’t talk for three days. He doesn’t think he’s ready to meet God, yet he doesn’t know what to do. The man sat there and told me his story. When he was a boy of 15 years old, his father said, “You can’t do anything right. You’ll never be like your older brother.” Oh, that cut into his heart. I could see the pain in his eyes as he told it to me in vivid detail. (This must never happen in the Tribe)
This man’s father was not living anymore, but the son was still holding that against him. I told him, “You need to forgive your father. You need to forgive him and release him.” But he couldn’t see it, and today he is still not free. Oh, what a terrible thing. Eternity is coming, brothers, and we need to forgive-we must forgive.
Lets turn to Mark 11. In verses 25 and 26 it says, “And whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him, that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses. But if you do not forgive, neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses.”
This is not a light subject. Destinies are changed because of unforgiveness in the lives of people. I believe some people who have sat in churches year after year will get to eternity and find that they are lost forever because they didn’t forgive. Hurts will hurt until they’re forgiven. And if we don’t forgive, neither will our Father forgive us.
Let us look briefly at Luke 17:3-4. It says, “Take heed to yourselves: If your brother trespass against you, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him. And if he trespass against you seven times in a day, and seven times in a day turn again to you, saying, I repent; you shall forgive him.”
Jesus is saying here that to forgive someone, you cannot wait until you feel like it. Feelings cannot be a part of our forgiveness, because sometimes we don’t feel like forgiving for years and years. Suppose someone does wrong to you and an hour later he comes back and says, “I’m sorry I talked to you in such a negative way.” Then you need to forgive him. If he comes the second, third, and fourth time in the same day, you are to forgive him again. But you know what? By about the third time we’re ready to say, “Now, brother, you have a serious problem. You need to repent and find real victory.” Jesus didn’t say that here. He simply said, “If he comes, forgive him.”
By the sixth or seventh time, we will have lost all interest in forgiving our brother. We have no feelings lift to forgive him, because we wonder why he keeps hurting us. In essence, God’s Word is saying here that forgiveness is something we must choose to do. We cannot wait until the right feelings come. We need to forgive as an act of the will.
Jesus also said we must forgive from the heart. What does that mean? When we forgive from the heart, we will feel and act toward the brother as if he had never hurt us. We will not only act that way toward him but feel that way. Was Jesus ever hurt when He was on earth? Indeed He was. Jesus was deeply hurt. And since we are Jesus’ children, it’s okay for us to hurt too.
You cannot expect to go through life and never have any hurts. But there is a tremendous principle here for dealing with hurts, and it’s the principle of forgiveness. Maybe you say, “I have forgiven. Let’s drop that and move on.” But when someone hurts you, who is going to pay for that hurt? Who’s going to take that wound, that pain? What the other person said or did really wasn’t right. It caused pain, and that must be taken care of somehow.
I myself was deeply hurt by a brother some years ago. I went to him and told him, “Brother, I forgive you.” I thought I really had forgiven him, but before I knew it, I felt something rise up inside and I was speaking evil of him again. I sat down to study the Word of God one day, and all I could think of was that brother. I needed to go back to him, not to ask him to forgive me, but to tell him again, “Brother, I forgive you and I release you to God. It’s over.”
I had to go to that brother five times and do the same thing. It really wasn’t right what he had done, but I needed to forgive him anyway. Even if he never admits his wrong, I still need to forgive him and release him. He really hurt me. There were nights when I didn’t sleep well because of it. Some people wouldn’t look at me, and some friends even forsook me, because of what he had said. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t true, but I needed to forgive.
If we don’t forgive, we want to tell others about the one who hurt us. We think the offender should also feel some pain. We expose him to others so they don’t think too highly of him. We try to hurt him back by slandering him. If we do things like that, we do not have the spirit of forgiveness. With a forgiving spirit I just take it if they hurt me. I do not try to hurt in return.
But again, who is going to pay for that hurt? Have you been forgiven by Jesus Christ? Who paid for that forgiveness? Who took the pain? It was Jesus Himself. He prated in agony in Gethsemane , down on His face. Later His back was torn open. The crown of thorns was on His head, and blood was oozing out of His body. His flesh was hanging open, and the blood was running down His back. And He hadn’t done anything wrong.
Jesus took my pain. I was wrong, but He took the penalty for it. That was true forgiveness. It was forgiveness at His expense. I hurt, but I release the hurter so that he may go free That’s okay because it’s what Jesus did. It means the offender doesn’t owe me anything. I don’t try to balance the scale anymore. I leave it in the hands of God.
If we truly forgive, we let go of our attachment to past hurts-through I am not saying that we will forget the hurts. Jesus can forget, but often we cannot forget those things. Forgiving from the heart means remembering without pain. If the pain is still there, it’s a sign that we have not forgiven. I think again of that brother who hurt me so deeply. Some time after I forgave him, he went through a deep trial in his life, and I found myself crying and praying for him. I couldn’t understand it, because earlier I could never have cried for him. I would have wanted to say, “Well, now you know how it feels.” Today I know what happened. I had experienced the miracle of forgiveness by the grace of God.
If we have forgiven our hurter from the heart, we are ready to cry for him when he gets hurt. We will gladly be there to comfort and encourage him. But again, the memory may not be gone. If we ever feel the pain again, we must forgive him again-just forgive again and again, over and over. Forgive and release him, then release him again.
When we are hurt, it’s as if a seed is planted in our heart. That hurt or seed is taken out if we forgive from the heart. But if the seed is left there, it sprouts into an unforgiving spirit. A root system starts growing, and it permeates more and more of our heart. Bitterness sets in, and soon the shoots of anger are coming up. The Bible talks about this in Hebrews 12:15: “Looking diligently lest any man fail of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled.”
Let me explain what bitterness is. Bitterness means refusing to accept something that happens to me that I can’t change. For example, I cannot accept the fact that my brother hurt me like that. The hurt is just a little seed at first, but soon the roots are spreading until my whole heart is full of bitterness. Do you realize that a person you don’t forgive is actually controlling your life? Your mind is occupied with him. When you come to church, you try to avoid meeting him or sitting beside him. When you go to town, you don’t want to meet him on the street. You think you have him by the collar, so to speak, but he is controlling your life.
Unforgiveness will keep growing and growing until bitterness takes over our whole heart. Many people try to keep it all inside, but they always suffer for it. We see a picture of this in Matthew 18, where Jesus told the story of the unforgiving servant and what happened to him. Note verses 34 and 35: “And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him. So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if you from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.”
The unforgiving servant was delivered to the tormentors. And if we refuse to forgive, God will send difficult things into our lives-fear, depression, and even physical illness.
The root system of bitterness may all stay underground for a long time. Then suddenly it starts cropping out and we see the fruit-ill temper, sharp words, angry outbursts. Sharp words hurt, don’t they? This is because a tiny seed of hurt will sprout and reproduce itself. If we bury hurts in our hearts, we will hurt others unless we forgive. We will also lose interest in the Bible reading and find it hard to pray.
I want you to understand that a stronghold has many different symptoms. The exact symptom often depends on your particular areas of weakness Whenever there is repeated defeat in a certain area, you need to ask, “Is there anything in my life that belongs to Satan?”
A young man came to me and said, “I have a problem with anger. When I talk, I often say sharp words that hurt my wife and children. I don’t know what’s wrong. I just can’t find it.”
I asked, “Have you ever been hurt?”
He said, “Yes, I was deeply hurt by my former bishop.”
I knew that bishop, a man who was no longer living. But the young man said, “I have forgiven him.” Then he said, “When that man died, I couldn’t go to the viewing or the funeral.” I asked why, and he said, “I just couldn’t make myself go. But I have forgiven him.”
I told him, “Brother, you have not forgiven him. You still have a lot of pain, and when you forgive from the heart, you can remember without pain.” I explained how his pain had grown until the roots of bitterness filled his heart, and suddenly he put his head down on the table and just wept and wept. I put my arm around him and prayed with him, and there he forgave that bishop. Then I told him, “As a witness, I want you to write a letter to that bishop and give it to me (since he’s dead now).” I have that letter somewhere. In fact, I have a number of letters from people. I usually don’t even read such a letter, but it’s a witness, a stake that’s driven to say, “I have forgiven from the heart.”
A WHITE RAG IN THE APPLE TREE
I will close with one story. An evangelist once held a week of meetings in a distant state. When he got on a train to return home, he sat beside a teenage boy and tried to start a conversation with him, but the boy wouldn’t talk. They traveled in silence for some time, then the pastor got out his Bible and started reading. Suddenly he noticed that the boy beside him was crying. He said, “I’m a pastor, and if you tell me what your problem is, maybe I can help you.”
The boy said, “Well, I was a mean boy at home. In fact, I got so mean that one day I hit my father and he chased me off. I ran away and have lived in this state for over a year. A few weeks ago I went to a revival meeting, and the preacher talked about heaven and hell and about being born again. I knew that I was going to hell, so when he gave the invitation, I responded and gave my heart to Jesus. Then the first thing I thought of was my father and my mother back home. I felt terrible about the way I had treated them, and I really wanted to go back. But I didn’t know if they would forgive me, so I wrote a letter telling them I would be on this train. I wrote that if they could forgive me they should tie a white rag to the apple tree. If I see the rag when the train goes by our homestead, I’ll get off at the next station and come home. If I don’t see the rag in the tree, I’ll keep on going.”
Then he started crying and said, “We’re almost there and I just can’t look. I’m afraid they don’t want me back.” The preacher said, “Don’t worry; I’ll look for you.” So he strained his eyes to watch for the white rag. When the train got close to the boy’s home, the pastor pointed and said, “Look at that!” The boy looked out the window, and there was the apple tree with not just one rag but with dozens of white rags tied all over it. And there beside the tree stood a mother and a father with a white sheet, waving it back and forth to show their son how gladly they forgave him and how much they wanted him to come home.
Brothers, how does your apple tree look tonight? If someone has hurt you, can that person see you waving a sheet to show he is forgiven?
We need to forgive from the heart, for that is the only way to find joy, peace, and real living, in the USA
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Action without vision just passes time
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This is a Web site under God, and follows Gay Freedom and Gay Religious Freedom, as found in the constitution of the United States, and
Found in the Civil Laws of this country.
All pictures are believed to be in public domain any that are not will be removed upon request.
Art and text are owned by the FREE and INDEPENDENT TRIBES and CHURCH of the MAOY
And shall not be removed or copied for use other then personal use or promoting the Tribe.
Any questions you have about use, please contact the Tribe.
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