How to FORGIVE

Holding a grudge against some is like have a garbage can full of 3 month old trash sitting in your kitchen. After a while it starts to smell and keeps you from enjoying life. This is what it’s like when you don’t forgive someone who has hurt you. This article will help you take out the trash and forgive.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Courage

1. CHOOSE A NEW ATTITUDE.
   This concerns how we deal with the PAST. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we can make a choice to deal with festering hurts, the trash and begin the journey of forgiveness. We can decide neither to perpetuate the hostility nor to suppress the hurts and allow them to eat away inside us.
   
   A refusal to forgive binds us eternally to the past and our righteous anger may become self-righteous bitterness. In essence: the Trash left in the basket begins to smell. So we ask God to help us deal with our past.
2. CHOOSE A NEW PERSPECTIVE.
   This concerns how we cope with the PRESENT. We begin by viewing people differently. We attempt to get outside the hurts and anger of our present brokenness and see our enemy as God sees them. He sent his son to die for them also. The temptation will be to view those who have injured us totally in terms of their sin. We look at the trash and not the basket. In reality they are normal people, a mixture of the image of God and sinful humanity.
   
   Real forgiveness cannot take place unless we are prepared to see them as they truly are - not as the demons we have perceived them to be in the midst of our hurt and anguish, but, just like us, sinful people for whom God sacrificed His Son.
3. CHOOSE A NEW DETERMINATION.
   This deals with the possibilities of the FUTURE. Forgiveness opens the door to new possibilities in relationships which you may not have previously thought. That is why forgiveness must be unconditionally granted because he unconditionally forgave you. None of this, I’ll forgive you if… stuff. If we lay down conditions, it means we are seeking to manipulate the other person into satisfying our unrealistic demands.
   
   Reconciliation is not a return to old ways, a turning of the clock back to the exact moment of the offense. But it is identifying the trash, and cleaning out the basket.
   
   Forgiveness naturally involves courage and risk. – the worst part of take out the trash is when the bag leaks. There’s a theological term for that “YUCK!” but in order to reconcile relationships you may have to wade through some YUCK to get UNSTUCK. It may be difficult to go to your elderly parents and ask for forgiveness or tell them you forgive them. It may be difficult to swallow pride, and risk reconciliation with your spouse.
   
   But where there is no risk, there is no need of forgiveness. Forgiveness does not deal with contracts and guarantees but with covenant and trust. That is God’s way with us, and the way it can be with ourselves and with others.