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ACCOMPLISHING
FORGIVENESS
The primary need for forgiveness springs from the law.
Until forgiveness is effected in the heart, the law of
sowing and reaping must roll on to its inevitable
conclusion.
Prayer deliverance ministers should not stop short; we
are to bring the client to an understanding that
forgiveness is the foundation on which this entire
ministry stands.
Without forgiveness there simply is no healing.
This lesson makes the necessity of forgiveness clear. You
will learn how resentments become lodged in the heart
and, once entrenched, require a work of God's grace to
remove.
The main stumbling blocks to forgiveness are
misconceptions of what it means to forgive. Forgiveness
is simply giving up the right to be angry with someone
who has hurt or offended you. Further it allows God to be
the judge and the jury. Forgiveness does not condone the
offense, nor do you have to forget, or put yourself in a
position to be hurt again.
We are commanded to forgive:
Forgiveness is not an option. Matthew 6:1-15, 18:21-35;
Mark 11:25-2 6
Forgiveness comes easy when we catch our resentments
quickly, and we are determined to walk cleanly in Jesus.
1 John 1:19; Ephesians 4:32; Colossians 3:13
Forgiveness is very difficult when resentments are
allowed to lodge in the heart. Hebrews 3:12-15; Proverbs
26: 21-26
Resentments go deep into the heart:
They can get stuck there when we are too young to
understand our anger, or to know how to pray or express
forgiveness.
Sometimes
we are not aware when we are angry.
We tend to rationalize our ability to handle the
situation.
We refuse to forgive immediately.
What happens to these resentments?
They are often forgotten, suppressed, and hidden in the
heart.
How to recognize if resentments are hidden in our hearts:
If you know of or remember a specific hurt from a
particular person - what emotion emerges at the thought
or sight of them? Does your heart leap for joy, or do you
get angry, or feel pain deep inside. Do you get sick to
your stomach or experience abdominal pain?
Do you want to fellowship, or would you rather avoid
him/her?
When the person comes into your mind, do you still
rehearse "speeches" you'd like to deliver?
Do you imagine things that you would like to say or do to
get even, and then have to repent?
The presence of any of these negative symptoms says the
work of forgiveness is not complete in your heart. There
is resentment still lodged there.
Sometimes pain, anger, judgment and unforgiveness are
lodged so deeply that we cannot remember resentment.
There may be some symptoms that will help you to
recognize if any are still down there.
o Are you losing power?
o Are prayers not being answered as before?
o Are you finding it harder to come into God's presence?
o
Are you afflicted somewhere in your body? Are you
experiencing new aches and pains, or possibly fevers that
don't respond quickly to antibiotics? Proverbs 6:12-19
Says that if man holds perversity in his heart and
spreads strife, calamity will come suddenly, he will be
broken, and there will be no healing. God does hate
certain things!
o Do periods of despondency return quickly after joyful
times?
o Is your sleep or rest disturbed with troubled dreams,
or heavy, but unrefreshing sleep?
Although there may be other factors contributing to the
symptoms, these things taken together are a fairly clear
indication that unforgiveness has lodged itself in the
heart.
The role of the Prayer Deliverance Minister is to help
the client discover who and what needs to be forgiven
through the leading of the Hoiy Spirit.
What if we don't feel the anger that we are supposed to
have suppressed?
What if we have said the words "I forgive" but
don't feel as though we really have, does it count?
What if after we have spoken the words of forgiveness,
our anger continues to burn within us?
What if I can't make myself feel the forgiveness; does
that make the process hopeless?
The Lord asks us to choose to forgive, in obedience to
Him; when we do, He can then help us to handle our
emotions rightly.
The process of leading the client to forgiveness:
Pray the Gethsemane Prayer. When Jesus prayed in the
garden at Gethsemane He identified with every one of us.
He became our sin. II Corinthians 5:21
To identify our own sins, and know that our righteousness
is as filthy rags Isaiah 64:6 makes it become a little
easier to forgive those who have sinned against us. It is
only when we feel like a total victim that we find it
hard to forgive. Be as quick to forgive others as we
would like them to forgive us when we sin against them.
Help your client
In
the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus drank the cup of our
sins. He reaped in His own body all the consequences of
each and every sin committed in the past, present and
future. He felt the full penalty of every murder, rape,
perversion, lie and betrayal... He bore this in His body
to the extent that it caused His capillaries to burst.
But that was just the physical part of what He was doing.
Emotionally and spiritually, He became more and more
removed from the Father as He took more and more of
humanity into Himself. He had never experienced
separation from the Father. In the fullness of taking all
our sin into himself, He then qualified to startd in our
place.
He was, for the first time, sin, and the Father could not
look upon Him. In the depth
of His separation, He cried out, "Why have you
forsaken me?" His agony was not just physical, but
spiritual and emotional as well. He was fully identified
with mankind and thus, for the first time, fully
separated from God the Father.
Legally, because He was God and had the power to do so,
Jesus transcended time and space and became us-every
person in the past, present, and future. He took into His
body all the sins we had ever committed or would commit.
If He had not done that, the cross would have had little
effect. He had to become "as we are" in order
to take the pun-ishment which the Law prescribed. The God
of the Universe suffered that intense agony and pain out
of His intense love for His creatures.
It is this prayer in which He became us is an integral
part of the work of the cross. It was the act of becoming
us that nearly killed Him in the Garden.
This
work fulfilled the legal requirement of the law that sin
must result in death. God is a legal God and He fulfilled
His own law.
By accepting His substitutionary death as my own, I can
then set in motion that same law of reaping and reap for
myself His righteousness. That makes me a very grateful
person. If the one for whom we are praying can really
grasp the meaning of this act of Jesus, he or she can see
hope for him/herself and can begin to believe that the
reaping of destruction will end. If I, as a prayer
partner, really KNOW this in my heart, I can convincingly
communicate my confidence in the Lord's substitutionary
death and the effectiveness of
it. I base my confidence on God's own legality.
As an individual with my own hurts, I go into the Garden
as often as I need to. There I identify with the pain in
the other, with my part in that pain, my part in tempting
some-one to wound me. I experience the other's pain, and
Gods pain, and I am devastated- because thefr pain
becomes my own. Feeling such anguish, I can forgive, or
deeply repent, either for myself or on behalf of the
other. This removes the "good guy/bad guy"
syndrome. We cannot elevate ourselves because we KNOW the
cost of sin. We have felt it. Jesus is our model--He felt
it.
This type of identification and repentance is what we
teach and help others to do. This identification with the
other is most effective in bringing about deep repentance
and pow-erful forgiveness. It works because God is a
righteous God and He does not nullify His own law. He
fulfills it!
HEAPING
COALS OF FIRE ON THE HEAD
"BUT IF YOUR ENEMY IS HUNGRY, FEED HIM, AND IF HE IS
THIRSTY,
GIVE HIM A DRINK,
FOR IN SO DOING YOU WILL REAP BURNING COALS UPON HIS
HEAD.
Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with
good." Romans12:2O-21
When missionaries taught those scriptures, the natives in
certain portions of the world thought they had been given
permission to dump buckets of coals on the heads of their
sleeping enemies!
And perhaps we don't understand much better. When
Proverbs 25:21-22 was written-and when Paul quoted it in
his letter to the Romans, housewives of the day had no
gas or electric ranges or even wood stoves, for that
matter. The cooking was done on small fires set between
two bricks about six inches apart on the floor, or in an
alcove. The only fuel likely to be available would have
been a few sticks and dry leaves-and dried cow chips!
Imagine cooking for your family on
dried cow dung!!
Starting those fires was also difficult. There were no
matches; one had to strike flint against stone, or
literally rub two slicks together, over tinder. Few
people had the necessary tinder or the time. So a village
fire tender would be appointed. All night he would keep a
small fire going. Toward morning, he would build it up,
and then let it burn down to coals. Next he would scrape
the coals into a metal brazier, place a wood block on his
head, and with pads to protect his hands he would
carefully lift the brazier and set it on the wood block.
Then he would go from house to house. With metal tongs,
he would place some of the hot coals
between the bricks to that all the housewives
could have fire for their families.
The familiar sight of the fire tender making his rounds
with the coals heaped on his head gave rise to a common
turn of phrase-that if you give kindness or do good to an
evil man,
you will turn him into one who spreads the warmth of love
wherever he goes.
You will "heap coals of fire on his head."
So Paul wanted Christians to learn to overcome evil with
good--not merely to withstand it, but to make use of
every enmity and persecution in order to transform
enemies into
God's loving servants, even as had happened to himself!
Saul of Tarsus had held Stephen's coat when he was being
stoned to death, and Stephen's blessing arid forgiveness
of those
who were killing him began the Lord's transformation of
Saul, the zealous persecutor of the church,
into Paul, its greatest apostle.
We all need to learn how to heap burning
coals of fire on our enemies' heads.
FORGIVENESS
AND RECONCILIATION
Malachi 4:5, 6 "Behold, I am going to send you
Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and
terrible day of the Lord. And he will restore the hearts
of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the
children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the land
with a curse."
Matthew 7:1, 2 "Do not judge lest you be judged. For
in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your
standard of measure, it will be measured to you."
Hebrews 12:15 "See to it that no one comes short of
the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springing up
causes trouble, and by it many be defiled."
Deuteronomy 5:16 "Honor your father and your mother,
as the Lord your God has commanded you
that it may go well with you
Galatians 6:7 "Do not be deceived, God is not
mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also
reap."
Romans 2:1 "Therefore you are without excuse, every
man of you who passes judgement, for in that you judge
another, you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice
the same things."
I John 4:19, 20 "We love, because He first loved us.
If someone says, "I love God," and hates his
brother, he is a liar, for the one who does not love his
brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not
seen."
Proverbs 20:20 "He who curses his father or his
mother, his lamp will go out in time of darkness."
Matthew 6:22, 23 "The lamp of the body is the eye;
if therefore your eye is clear, your whole body will be
full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body
will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is
in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!"
Matthew 5:29 "And if your right eye makes you
stumble, tear it out, and throw it from you; for it is
better for you that one of the parts of your body perish,
than for your whole body to be thrown into hell."
Matthew 6:14, 15 "For if you forgive men for their
transgressions, your heavenly Father Will also forgive
you. But if you do not forgive men, then your Father will
not forgive your transgressions."
II Corinthians "Now all these things are from God,
who reconciled us to Himself through Christ,
5:18-20 and gave us the ministry of reconciliation,
namely that God was in Christ reconciling the world to
Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and
He has committed to us the word of reconciliation.
Therefore we are ambassadors
for
Christ, as though God were entreating through us; we beg
you on behalf ofChrist
be reconciled to God."
II Corinthians 2:5-11 "But if any has caused sorrow,
he has caused sorrow not to me, but in some degree to all
of you. Sufficient for such a one is this punishment
which was inflicted by the majority, so that on the
contrary you should rather forgive and comfort him, lest
somehow such a one be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow.
Wherefore I urge you to reaffirm your love for him. For
to this end also I wrote that I might put you to the
test, whether you are obedient in all things. But 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, in order that no
advantage be taken of us by Satan; for we are not
ignorant of his schemes."
I John 1:6-10 "If we say that we have fellowship
with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and we do
not practice the truth; but if we walk in the light as He
Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one
another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from
all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving
ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our
sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins
and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say
that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word
is not in us."
Ephesians 4:31-32 "Let all bitterness and wrath and
anger and slander be put away from you, along with all
malice. And be kind to one another, tender-hearted,
forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has
forgiven you."
Ephesians 1:7-8 "In Him we have redemption through
His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according
to the riches of His grace, which He lavished upon
us..."
Acts 10:43 "Of Him all the prophets bear witness
that through His Name everyone who believes in Him
receives forgiveness of sins."
Acts 2:38 "And Peter said to them, 'Repent, and let
each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for
the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the
gift of the Holy Spirit."'
Matthew 12:31 "Therefore I say to you, any sin and
blasphemy shall be forgiven men, but
(Mark 3:28-29) blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be
forgiven."
(Luke 12:10)
Luke 11:39-41 "But the Lord said to him, 'Now you
Pharisees clean the outside of the cup
and of the platter, but inside of you, you are full of
robbery and wickedness.
You foolish ones, did not He who made the outside make
the inside also? But give that which is within as
charity, and then
all things are clean for you."'
Luke 6:45 "The good man out of the good treasure of
his heart brings forth what is good; and the evil man Out
of the evil treasure brings forth what is evil; for his
mouth speaks from that which fills his heart."
FORGIVENESS:
Ephesians 1 :7-8a "In Him we have redemption through
His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according
to the riches of His grace, which He lavished upon us.
Psalm 130:4 "But there is forgiveness with Thee,
that Thou mayest be feared."
I John 1:9-10 "If we confess our sins, He is
faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to
cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have
not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in
us."
Acts 5:30-31 "The God of our fathers raised up
Jesus...
He is the one whom God exalted to His right hand as a
Prince and a Savior, to grant repentance.. .and
forgiveness of sins.
Mark 11:25-26 "And whenever you stand praying,
forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that
your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your
transgressions. But if you do not forgive, neighbor will
your Father who is in heaven forgive your
transgressions."
Matthew 6:14-15 "For if you forgive men for their
transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive
you. But if you do not forgive men, then your Father will
not forgive you your transgressions."
Luke 17:3-4 "Be on your guard! If your brother sins,
rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him. And if he
sins against you seven times a day, and returns to you
seven times, saying, 'I repent,' forgive him."
Ephesia.ns 4:31-32 "Let all bitterness and wrath and
anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along
with all malice. And be kind to one another, forgiving
each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven
you."
Colossians 3:12-13 "And so, as those who have been
chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of
compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience;
bearing with one another, and forgiving each other,
whoever has a complaint against anyone; just as the LORD
forgave you, so also should you."
Isaiah 55:7 "Let the wicked forsake his way, and the
unrighteous man his thoughts; and let him return to the
LORD, and He will have compassion on him; and to our God,
for He will abundantly pardon."
Psalm 103:3-4 "Who pardons all your iniquities; Who
heals all your diseases; Who redeems your life from the
pit; Who crowns you with loving kindness and
compassion."
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forgive
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Last Updated October 18,2023
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