5 Biblical Steps to Forgiveness and Letting Go
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Are you struggling to forgive someone who hurt you in the past? Are you tired of holding on to the pain and trauma of your past?
Forgiving and letting go is much harder than we think it is.
However, the cost of bitterness and unforgiveness is greater than we can afford to pay. Not only can it bring disease to our body from the constant stress it causes emotionally, it damages our soul and spirit as well.
Today we are going to look at five steps to forgiveness and letting go of hurt and pain from the past.
Just because I grew up in a pastor’s home does not mean that I was somehow sheltered from pain and trauma.
We often like to think that pastor’s families live in a bubble of protection from hurt and pain, but that is a wrong assumption to make.
Pain, hurt, and trauma visits everyone. These are no respecter of persons.
I have had to follow these five steps to forgiveness in recovering from the trauma of sexual, verbal, and mental abuse.
Then, I had to follow these five steps to forgiveness again as I dealt with the pain of rejection and gossip in the church – friendly fire is incredibly painful and honestly hard to recover from.
5 Biblical Steps to Forgiveness and Letting Go
In my walk with Christ over these past 40 years, I have come to realize that the cost of bitterness and unforgiveness is a price I cannot afford to pay.
It cost me my health for over a decade, but more than that, it cost me precious years in my walk with the Lord during which I was cold and distant from Him.
Thanks to God’s grace, He has restored both my health and my relationship with Him, but the path to restoration was not easy.
The Bible tells another story of the dangers of unforgiveness – one you may not suspect.
In Jonah 1 we read that the word of the Lord came to Jonah, calling him to go to Nineveh and tell the that their wickedness had come before Him.
This is one of the more unusual books of the Bible. Jonah is the only prophet we read about in the Bible that was sent to a non-Hebrew people.
But Jonah did not go.
Why?
Was it because he didn’t feel like it? Was it because he had something else he’d rather do? Why did Jonah run from the Lord’s call?
The answer lies in the people to whom he was called to carry the word of the Lord.
Nineveh was an ancient city in Assyria, and the Assyrians were Israel’s enemies. They were brutal terrorists and treated their enemies in horrific and inhumane ways.
Jonah knew God was gracious and loving, compassionate and merciful, and he did not want to risk the Ninevites repenting for their wickedness.
He wanted God’s judgement to rain down on their like it did on Sodom and Gomorrah!
So, in his bitterness against the Assyrian people, he ran.
His bitterness nearly cost him his life and the lives of every man on that ship he was taking to Tarshish.
You see, the men on that ship were seamen. They were weathered and brave. There wasn’t a storm they hadn’t faced and lived to tell about. But this storm shook them.
And it shook them so bad, they were terrified, and as they threw Jonah overboard they were crying out to God for mercy on their souls.
THIS was the price of Jonah’s bitterness and unforgiveness.
If we choose to hang on to our unforgiveness, trauma, and bitterness, the price we will pay is our very lives, and sometimes the lives of others.
Oh, maybe not in physical death, but emotional and spiritual death will certainly occur as we slowly shut down and build walls of protection.
Walls in which we lock ourselves, losing the right to decide whom we shut out.
Eventually even God is locked outside the walls of our heart, as we are forced to dwell alone inside the ever-narrowing barricade we’ve created, assuming it would give us protection.
Instead, all it brought was loneliness and bitter gall to feast on.
But there is a way of escape! We don’t have to live in the vice-grip of bitterness and unforgiveness.
There are steps to forgiveness that will set us free!
Five Steps to Forgiveness and Letting Go
1. Choose to release judgement
This step is one of the hardest steps to forgiveness we will take, but we will not be able to follow through with the following steps until we have taken this first one.
Judgement doesn’t rest with us. Judgement belongs to God.
Sitting in the seat of judgement against the person who has offended us is assuming God’s place, and this is pride.
We will never follow through with all of the steps to forgiveness if we don’t first humble ourselves and recognize that we don’t possess the right to judge another.
Perhaps that person has already sought and received God’s forgiveness.
If God has forgiven them and wiped away His judgement against them, we cannot afford to assume a place above God in refusing to release our own judgement.
2. Recognize the weight of your sin against God
When we release our judgement against the person who offended us, we are free to recognize the fact that the weight of our sin against God is exponentially greater than the weight of that person’s offense against us.
This does not make their offense less serious.
It doesn’t mean this person is safe or even off the hook for their offense, especially if their offense is illegal.
However, an important step in true, biblical forgiveness is gaining an appropriate perspective.
The fact is, we are all sinners and in danger of eternal judgement.
We begin accumulating sin in our lives from the day we are born until the day we ask Christ to forgive us of our sins.
The weight of that accumulated sin is greater, far greater than any single sin – or a number of sins – committed against us.
This is a humbling picture, when we finally compare our sinful state with Christ, instead of comparing ourselves with that person.
That is the meaning of the parable Jesus told of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18!
3. Choose to not entertain negativity
Once we have to released judgement against the person who has offended us, and have allowed God to give us a new perspective, we must learn to walk in that forgiveness.
Forgiveness is not an emotion. It is a choice.
And just because we forgave once, does not mean the enemy won’t try to revisit that pain and offense on us again.
It is in his interest to keep us bound to past hurts and trauma!
When the enemy shoots back into our minds old pain and trauma from the past, we have to let it go and choose not to entertain the negativity of that old pain.
We have to choose not to talk or think about it negatively.
Instead, we renew our mind by replacing that thought with Scripture and expressing our new thinking through the principles of God’s word.
This literally rebuilds new thinking patterns, so instead of defaulting to old pain and trauma, we default to God’s Word!
4. Identify yourself with Christ (not with the pain)
This is one of the most important steps to forgiveness that we will take.
So many people sadly find identity in their hurt, pain, and trauma. They find community in their pain and trauma.
They cloak themselves in it, choosing to call themselves a victim, and walk with that label.
Dear sister, if you are in Christ, you are a new creation! They old has gone, and the new has come.
You have a new identity and a new nature. Those things happened to the old you, and that old person died with Christ. She no longer lives!
Begin building an understanding of your new identity in Christ today with these amazing resources. They have been crucial for me in this important step to forgiveness and letting go.
5. Decide each day to live free from offense
Forgiveness is a choice we make everyday.
Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” How have you forgiven your debtors?
That is how Christ will forgive you. He went on to say, if you don’t forgive, He won’t forgive you. And partial forgiveness isn’t forgiveness at all.
Wake up each day and pray, “Father, I choose ahead of time today to forgive all who will offend me – no matter how hard or how big.”
Don’t hang on to dead, rotting stuff in your life. It only brings disease.
Let it go and embrace LIFE!
The life of Christ is a life of letting go and forgiveness.
Unforgiveness and bitterness will cost you more than you can afford to pay, just like it cost Jonah 3 days inside of a great fish, nearly costing him his life and the lives of every man on that ship that night.
Is there someone in your life you need to forgive? Begin taking these five steps to forgiveness and letting go today.
