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Bitterness - it affects more than just you!
13 Plays4 years ago
Vernon and Torben (discipleship counselor and staff member at Joni and Friends) talk through the destructive force of bitterness and outline God's solution as defined in the New Testament. You do not want to let bitterness take root and effect your life or the lives of those you love.
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Transcript
Introduction to Bitterness and Its Prevalence
00:00:03
Speaker
This is your host, Vernon Terrell, with Grace Ministries International, and it's time for Walking Free. And we are back again with Torben Jensen. Welcome, Torben. Thank you so much. And we are going
00:00:28
Speaker
to talk about a subject that is prevalent in society in general, and with Christians specifically, and something that the Bible addresses and talks about, and it's this idea of bitterness.
Understanding Bitterness and Its Spread
00:00:51
Speaker
And before we jump into maybe cause, can we talk a little bit about
00:00:57
Speaker
what bitterness is. What is bitterness? Absolutely. I think bitterness is a
00:01:07
Speaker
completely common and very, very normal temptation that all of us face when life just doesn't work out the way we plan. That's kind of the simplest way of defining it, where I have some sort of idea of how life should play out. I have some sort of picture of what should be happening and something
00:01:28
Speaker
Completely opposite happens something terrible happens something that completely crushes my plans my dreams my idea of what life may look like in what's very very tempting in those circumstances is to react with bitterness is to react with this
00:01:45
Speaker
this reality where bitterness is, I hold on to this idea, this should not be this way. And the more I hold on to this idea of how life should be, but it's not, the more bitterness becomes the fruit of that. And that's something that
00:02:04
Speaker
All of us, we have some sort of idea. I've heard it so many times from people where they'll say to me that, yeah, I may have some issues with bitterness over in this kind of area of my life and this one relationship, this one person, and we think we can control it. But unfortunately, that's just how we're set up. We can't.
00:02:25
Speaker
control these different compartments in us and bitterness is something that will always spread. It will always spread to the rest of us and it will affect people around us. Again, we have that in Hebrews 12.
00:02:38
Speaker
You get a warning there where it says Hebrews 12, 15, and 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." So it talks about this bitterness that can spring up in us and it's going to cause trouble. It's going to hurt us, affect us.
00:03:02
Speaker
It'll also affect people around us, and people around us become defiled. People around us become affected by our bitterness, because there is this real sense of bitterness being very, very contagious. We say that misery attracts company, and I've sometimes said to people that, again, if you want company, then just get on a public bus or something like that and start complaining. And you'll instantly have people around you who will agree with you, and it's very easy when life doesn't work out the way we want.
00:03:30
Speaker
Most people, unfortunately, find it very easy to find people around them who will just agree with them, who will sit and wallow in whatever has happened and bitterness spreads like that. And that word is the root word in there is this pikross and it's
00:03:55
Speaker
this word to indicate it's the fruit of like a wild vine or bitter gourd which are so excessively bitter and this is from a word study that it's almost poison
00:04:17
Speaker
And that's the word, the New Testament word.
Modern Perspective on Bitterness
00:04:21
Speaker
And if you look in the modern English dictionary, this idea of bitterness as an emotion is defined as it's a complex and multi-layered emotion that is described as a mixture of disappointment, disgust, anger,
00:04:46
Speaker
and fear. Some psychologists consider it a mood or as a secondary emotion that can be elicited in the face of insult or injury, and you're talking about when life doesn't go our way. That can feel like we're injured or when a relationship doesn't go our way and
00:05:11
Speaker
we are injured or we feel this insult or resentment or unfair disappointment.
Suffering, Forgiveness, and Personal Reflections
00:05:21
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And all of that, as you said, there's an emotion there that is that anger, that disappointment, but it can seep down to what I call, there's emotional responses, but those can seep down into an emotional state
00:05:41
Speaker
And that emotional state can be like a state of depression, a state of anxiety, and a state of bitterness. And so tell me a little bit more about what you've seen in this idea of bitterness.
00:05:59
Speaker
We touched on it briefly, I know the other podcast that I've been a part of, how suffering is something that God uses to call us into a deeper relationship with Him and He wants us to really be set free to live the kind of lives we really want to live and the pathways through suffering that can be very confusing for us.
00:06:20
Speaker
to learn. But of course, what's tricky about suffering is that we can essentially have two reactions to it. Suffering is inevitable. We will all experience suffering, but there are two ways of reacting to it. Either you can react with bitterness, and that ties into what you just mentioned that, hey, my rights have been violated. My dreams have been crushed.
00:06:46
Speaker
I lost my job. I lost a relationship. I lost everything I hoped for. And reacting with bitterness is very, very common. It's, I would say in biblical terms, it's the broad road. It's the road that most people choose to travel.
00:07:01
Speaker
is also the road, unfortunately, the most Christians choose to travel. They may not say it like that. They may say, oh, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. But really in their hearts, again, this starts to, as Hebrews tells us, starts to take root. Then there is the other reaction to it, which is the one that God wants us to take. But it's a journey of brokenness. It's a journey of accepting
00:07:25
Speaker
First off, that life is not fair and then it's a journey with Christ and it's just me and Him. It's me and Him walking this journey. It's an individual, tailor-made journey that all of us must walk with Him, where we walk away from bitterness, where we accept, okay, life is not fair and we walk into a journey that has to do with forgiveness, that has to do with letting go of our rights, that has to do with a fuller sense of surrender. And I thought about it today,
00:07:55
Speaker
It's not very often you hear truth spoken in Hollywood movies, but I remember a Hollywood movie. It's called The Interpreter that I watched many years ago. It came out in 2005. Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn are in this movie. And there's a pretty cool little scene in that that talks a little bit about this, where so Nicole Kidman is from some made-up African country, and she talks to Sean Penn, who is an American.
00:08:22
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and explains how they deal with this issue of things not being fair. She explains how in their country, if someone has been murdered and they found out who is the murderer, a year of mourning will happen there in the village.
00:08:41
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And then after that year, they'll do the ceremony where they will take the murderer, convicted murderer, and they will put him in a boat out in the middle of a river. They'll tie him to that boat so he has no way of escaping. And then the family of the murder victim, they have a choice to make. They can swim out and they can flip this boat around.
00:09:04
Speaker
and the murderer will die and they will have a sense of justice but they'll also never stop mourning, they'll also never stop grieving, they'll also never stop living in bitterness or they can accept that life isn't just, life isn't fair and they can go out there and swim out there and cut the ties and rescue the man and by that
00:09:29
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they can start walking in towards freedom and i just remember seeing that the movie scene there in the movie theater i was like oh wow it's pretty deep for hollywood because they're because they're right that that's what we we end up with a a choice when when life doesn't work out our way and i mentioned um how for me when i think about a lot of this i think about
00:09:53
Speaker
four years ago when a situation deteriorated and I lost my job in a church that I was working in and it took place in terrible ways that maybe I'll write a book about that someday. But I was left with a shattered life in many ways. Again, we were facing not having a job, we were facing being evicted from the house, we were renting, we had three little kids, we didn't know what to do. And yeah, bitterness started building in my heart.
00:10:23
Speaker
And I remember just dealing with that over the next many months. Again, it took several months before I was really ready to deal with it, this level of betrayal, this level of hatred that I'd also felt for people towards me and my family when all of this took place. And I remember I was actually on my way to a funeral and I remember sitting in the car and I had like
00:10:47
Speaker
for our driver ahead of me. And God was kind of just in my thoughts, Job, it's time to deal with this. And I'm like, I don't want to, I don't want to deal with this. And kind of just going like that, Job, it's time to deal with this. And I knew it was time to step into fullness of forgiveness of what had happened and what people had done because I didn't want this
00:11:14
Speaker
bitterness to be there and to continue to spread and to continue to affect my life. Before you go into that solution, which we really want to talk about, when you were in that time, in that bitterness, it was towards someone else, not toward your family, obviously, but did you see things leaking out as a result?
00:11:39
Speaker
of that bitterness in other areas or in other relationships.
00:11:44
Speaker
Yeah, I would say so. Again, if you ask my wife, again, was I an easy person to live with for the first several months after this took place? You would say absolutely not. I was not in a good place. I was in a place where I think in my case, the bitterness manifested itself a lot in anger, in this sort of like, I will show them, I will prove myself, I will
00:12:11
Speaker
pull myself out of this situation. And that is not at all what God wanted to do. That's not at all what took place. But yeah, I caught a very frustrated and irritable figure for those months while I was still stewing in this sense of betrayal and bitterness and all this sort of stuff. And again, like what kind of what you read that dictionary definition, it's a
00:12:34
Speaker
It's a very yucky mix. It's a lot of stuff that's in it, and it will spill over and affect people around us. And in my case, again, it took several months before I was ready to fully deal with it, and I think God will certainly allow that as well. And there's also, again, there are some people who think they can just kind of jump to forgiveness straight away, and I certainly don't recommend that. Again, it's all in God's timing, and He sees when we are ready for it.
00:13:03
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ready to go there fully. And some, I think, try to, when they're hurt or injured or feeling the insult and with insult comes hurt, obviously in anger and disappointment and maybe some fear. When that mix kind of mixes together,
00:13:27
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and produces this bitterness of soul, bitterness that just goes deep down, that does, as you said, it does just affect, it just comes out in the weirdest places and it does affect, I like Paul said in Romans talked about, really talking about the unsaved person, but this can be saved or unsaved, but describing them said,
00:13:54
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whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness. And it said their poison of asps or snakes is under their lips, and their feet are swift to shed blood, destruction, and misery in their paths. All this is associated alongside of this bitterness.
00:14:18
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leave this wake of destruction when we don't deal with it. And sometimes folks try to deal with it by just boxing it up, putting it aside, and trying to forget it. That doesn't work. Or they try a distraction, which is another form of forgetting, or just, you know, I'll just
00:14:43
Speaker
let bygones be bygones or time will heal, that never works. And we try these strategies or like you said, I will deal with it in my own way and everyone, I don't even know what that means yet, their own way, but there is a biblical way to deal with bitterness. And you had to deal with, I've had to,
00:15:13
Speaker
to deal with this is a, and this is not a one shot thing with bitterness can come at us as humans at any time. And there is a solution for bitterness. So can you talk about, as you were just leading into, here you are, God's dealing with your heart. God's just putting his finger on that and says, I love you.
00:15:42
Speaker
you need to deal with this, how did you deal with that bitterness? Yeah, I think we need to focus on forgiveness and it's been a few minutes kind of breaking down what forgiveness is and what it's not because these are realities that I learned myself 14, 15 years ago that have transformed how I see everything with forgiveness and how I live in forgiveness.
00:16:10
Speaker
There's lots of confusion for many Christians who believe that they have to forgive, that they must forgive. And it's some sort of demand, it's some sort of law, and I gotta just get it done straight away. But that's not, again, we live in the new covenant, we live in a new reality. So I just want to focus just briefly on that and then share a little bit more personal.
Forgiveness: Conditional vs Unconditional
00:16:35
Speaker
There's stock difference between how forgiveness is spoken about when we look at the Old Covenant in the Bible and that's before the cross of Christ and when we look at it on the other side of the cross of Christ where we live in the New Covenant. For so many Christians, they have to come to a place where they see, okay, it can't be both ends.
00:16:58
Speaker
Because there is a real contrast. Again, in Matthew 6 right after Jesus teaches the Lord's Prayer to his disciples, it says Matthew 6, 14, 15, it says, 4, if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.
00:17:20
Speaker
And there he is. Oh, that's not good, huh? So he's teaching conditional forgiveness. He's saying, if you forgive, then you will forgive. And if you do not forgive, you will not be forgiven. And there are so many Christians who are stuck here. So they live with that sort of idea that I have to forgive in order to be forgiven. They have still not made it all the way to the cross. They've still not heard Jesus Christ cry out.
00:17:48
Speaker
It is finished. This is all taken care of. They still live here. Jesus is talking to disciples. He's talking to people there who lived before the cross. He's still sharing about how the futility of the old covenant that this leads to, as he'll conclude later in the same passage, that be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect. He's talking about this level of forgiveness. He's talking about
00:18:16
Speaker
this level of perfection, and he's talking about in this context of forgiveness, that's how it worked in the Old Covenant. If you forgave, you were forgiven. If you didn't forgive, you were not forgiven. Then we jump to the New Covenant, we jump on the other side of the cross, and we jump into the reality that we live in. It's very, very different.
00:18:36
Speaker
We see in Ephesians 4 verse 31 and 32, we have bitterness there again. It says, "...let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you along with all malice." And then it says, "...be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you."
00:18:58
Speaker
Past tense, done deal, no conditions. This is unconditional forgiveness and that is crucial for every listener. If you don't know this, if you don't understand this, give Grace Ministries a call. Get in touch with us. We'd love to break this down more for you.
00:19:17
Speaker
because this is so important to understand how to do forgiveness, live in forgiveness in a healthy way, that I knew sitting there in that car that even if I chose to hold on to that bitterness for the next 3 years, I am still 100% forgiven by God.
00:19:35
Speaker
There's nothing between God and I. It's all taken care of. Romans 8.1, there's no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, regardless of what I do, regardless of what I hold on to, regardless of what I feel, whatever. None of that is an issue. So I knew that sitting there that, okay, this was an invitation to forgive.
00:19:58
Speaker
And that's what Paul says. Forgive each other just as God and Christ also has forgiven. He's talking about something that's a natural part of your flow, of your life as a child of God. I know that I'm fully forgiven, so I want to extend that to other people. Great. It's an invitation. You can say no. We don't get many real invitations. Most of us know if you get an invitation to some sort of family party, you know there's going to be consequences if you say no.
00:20:25
Speaker
That's not a real invitation. A real invitation you can say no to, and you're still okay with that person. That's how God invites. He invites us and says, hey, there's something here, Tobin. It's time to deal with this. Again, do you want to let it go? Are you ready to forgive?
00:20:42
Speaker
And I could say no, and Him and I are still equally okay. That's just super important for our listeners to know that. Crucial. So that forgiveness is not a demand. Forgiveness is an invitation for our own good. Forgiveness is God our Father saying to us as His kids, hey, I know this is bothering you. I know this is hurting you. Should we look at it? Is it time to let it go?
00:21:08
Speaker
And then you can choose to walk into forgiveness as I did there sitting in that car and as I've done many, many other times. This has become a way of living. Again, my wife knows something difficult will happen, whatever situation it might be. And I'll tell her, you know what, I'm going to go for a forgiveness drive. And in my case, that's how it works for me.
00:21:31
Speaker
My house is, I have three little kids, so it's a noisy place typically. So I'll go for a drive. And I will go through, again, I don't work and operate with process in many things or that there are steps necessarily to many things in life. But I think this is an exception. When it comes to forgiveness, I think there is a process of, and the first couple of steps are the most painful and those that most people skip.
Steps to Forgiveness
00:21:58
Speaker
They'll go to, I was hurt, but I forgive an onward life. And that's not forgiveness. It's a very shallow way of forgiving. And that's why so many people experience, they don't experience the fullness of forgiveness. So in this case, sitting there in the car, having to forgive people, being invited to forgive people who had destroyed my life and had caused so much heartache for myself and my family.
00:22:25
Speaker
First step is naming what happened. What did they do? What was said? What were the actual actions? Not without apologizing, without explaining, just putting it in clear words, what took place. Second step is how did that make me feel? And that can be difficult for a lot of people if you're talking about something that took place with your dad, a mom or whatever, 20, 30 years ago.
00:22:50
Speaker
Go there as specific as possible. This is how it made me feel. And then what happens there is you're charging the debt. You're looking at what is this debt that you feel the other people owe you? And it has those two components, the actions and how you felt about it. Then you can start moving into
00:23:13
Speaker
Okay, I choose to forgive. Not, I would like to forgive. I hope to forgive. One day it would be great if I could forgive. No, no, I choose to forgive. This is a choice. This is something that you can make as a choice. You may not feel it. There may not be butterflies and roses around you in this moment, but you can make this choice with your mind and say, okay, I'm going to make this choice. And then what will happen is the feelings well over time follow your decision.
00:23:44
Speaker
And then again, there are steps where you can then, if you're ready for it, that you're not always ready for it, but you can, what I do is I will then forgive them in very short and simple. I choose to forgive everything that I've just listed. And then I'll say, and I wish good for them. I wish a blessing for all these people. Sometimes if it's a deep betrayal, deep hurt, sexual abuse, anything like that, you may not be ready for that. And that's not a problem. The last,
00:24:13
Speaker
thing there is not really a part of forgiveness. It's almost like an extra add-on, but the first three are listing what happened, listing how it made me feel, and then just saying, I choose to forgive all of this. I add one more thing. I add, Torben, one more thing to that. I add
00:24:31
Speaker
Hebrews 10.18 that says, now, where there is forgiveness of these things, there is no longer any offering for sin. And I say, after I choose to forgive, that they do not owe me anything. Exactly. I was just going to say that. Absolutely. And that's the thing. You've charged the debt, you've listed the debt, and forgiveness is then canceling all of it and saying, no one owes me anything.
00:24:59
Speaker
There's nothing between me and this other person. And that's, of course, why so many people don't want to go there because, of course, it feels unfair. And it's true, that's the nature of it. It's deeply, deeply unfair. But someone said, and I don't know who it was, but I heard it years ago, that unforgiveness is the poison I drink while waiting for someone else to die.
00:25:21
Speaker
Oh, that's good. That's what I'm not doing. I hold on to unforgiveness and I think the other people are suffering. The truth is that people who have done all sorts of things to you, they don't even know it. They never even think about it. But you're the one who's suffering. You're the one who's drinking this poison and it's killing you. So forgiveness is then choosing to let go and you find out that the one that really needed that was you.
00:25:50
Speaker
The other people are typically completely unaware of it. And it's become, like I said, it's a thing that I do. I've chosen to live like that where I keep very short accounts. Something happens that upsetting, disappointing, hurtful, whatever it might be. And I will do this. I will go for a drive. I'll go through these steps.
00:26:10
Speaker
and I will choose to forgive and I'll choose to let go. And I remember one time I was speaking to a guy that I met who we were talking about forgiveness and he had deep issues of unforgiveness in his life. And I was sharing some of my stories from my life and he just asked me, so what's the difference between you and me? How do you not live like a bitter person? And I just said, wow, talk about the easiest setup for sharing about Jesus.
00:26:40
Speaker
Let me tell you about Christ. Let me tell you about what He has done in my life. Let me tell you about the freedom there is to live as a child of God, knowing that I'm fully forgiven, no matter what I say, do, think, or feel, and that I can extend that forgiveness to people around me. Most of the time, I don't share with other people what I have forgiven them. This is between me and God. This is for my sake. God says that in the Old Testament as well, that He forgives for His sake.
00:27:10
Speaker
That's part of what God is teaching us. Forgiveness is from Isaac. So a lot of times, again, it's not like I will call people and say, I have now forgiven you. Very often that's not necessarily the smart or the wise thing to do, but it's something that I choose
Choosing Forgiveness as a Lifestyle
00:27:25
Speaker
to do. Again, we talk so much about in churches about soul care and if you want to talk soul care, this is
00:27:31
Speaker
This is where the road meets the road. Live in forgiveness. Practice forgiveness. Keep short accounts. Don't minimize the pain. Don't say that you weren't hurt. Don't say that it didn't disappoint you. Be aware and say, hey, I want to forgive this.
00:27:52
Speaker
like the flip side of this. I was working in a jail, working with inmates, and I was in a prison cell, jail cell, pod, they call them, of about 80 inmates. And I was going through talking to these in a
00:28:11
Speaker
section of that pod, some inmates, 15 or 20, and talking about this idea of freedom from addiction. And we were on this topic of forgiveness, and I was talking about Christ and receiving Christ and forgiveness. And I remember this big old inmate just came up to me right in my face and said, why do I need forgiveness? And
00:28:39
Speaker
I didn't have time to explain everything. I was actually having to leave the pod and I said, well, that's going to be something between you and God to hammer out. Because if you don't see the need, you're not going to receive the forgiveness. And it's like here, if we don't take time to outline exactly the hurt
00:29:05
Speaker
we're not going to be able to offer that forgiveness. And so we need to understand the need, as you said, the hurt and the pain, and then we can choose to forgive and let it go.
00:29:19
Speaker
It's so important. Exactly, because it's taught to so many this idea that just leave it at the cross. But the problem is that so often people have no clue what it is they are to leave at the cross. You have to, as I often say to people,
00:29:35
Speaker
in order to disown something, in order to put something behind it, you have to own it first. You have to be able to sit and look at it. You have to be able to call it by its right name. And to the degree that you do that and you're able to be honest about what happened, how it made you feel, to that degree I've seen in my own life, do I experience the fruit of forgiveness? Because of course the fruit of forgiveness is joy, is hope, is peace.
00:30:05
Speaker
is trust being rebuilt so that you don't walk around with this bitterness. Because, of course, what bitterness does as well is that so many people are so hesitant to engage in a new relationship, in a new friendship, to go to a new church or whatever it might be because, oh, no, no, no, no, because it's probably going to be exactly what I experienced before.
00:30:27
Speaker
They walk with this bitterness into this new relationship, situation, job, whatever it might be. And the people there don't have a fair chance because they're up against something that's hidden from them. They don't know that the person walking in
00:30:43
Speaker
has already judged them based on previous experiences because that's what bitterness will do. It will cause me to judge people around me and I will stop to protect myself and say, no, no, no, no, I'm not gonna put myself out there. I'm not gonna engage because I'm gonna get hurt. And you saw what happened last time and
00:31:04
Speaker
That's how bitterness speaks. That's how the enemy speaks through bitterness. And that's why it's so important that we keep short accounts, that we choose to take on this invitation from the Father when He says, hey, son, it's time. This will be a good time. Walk into forgiveness with Me and experience the fruit and the freedom that comes from living like that.
00:31:27
Speaker
And I think we have got it flipped and mixed up a bit when often when people here keep short accounts, they're thinking, keep short accounts with God. God's already wiped your account clean. You're forgiven. We're talking about, as Torben's been explaining, keeping short accounts with the relationships that you're in that have impacted you where you're hurt and maybe angry and maybe even bitter and deal with it.
00:31:56
Speaker
In fact, if you're saying, you know, I've forgiven this person, but I'm still not feeling XYZ or I'm still not walking free, maybe you didn't take the time to really unpack what and how you were hurt. What was hurt?
00:32:19
Speaker
What exactly, how did you feel? You didn't really define it completely, and therefore you couldn't release it completely. Yeah, yeah, or maybe you need to meet with someone, and again, for so many people, they have pushed down this type of stuff, the things that have happened so deeply, and that's where counseling is such a gift to people. I remember this one time, a young lady who I was counseling,
00:32:49
Speaker
And we had been talking about a bunch of different things and we were talking about forgiveness. And she came in and I had given her an assignment to write down some things about different people in her life to forgive. And she came in and she said, I can't do this.
00:33:07
Speaker
And I said, okay, that's fine. Could you explain to me why? And in her case, she had discovered something that had been pushed down in her memory and it had to do with, in her case, sadly, some sexual abuse from her granddad. And she was getting in touch with that. And what happened in this case is she came in
00:33:29
Speaker
The next six Tuesday she came in and she said the same thing. I'm not ready. I can't do it. I can't let go of this. I cannot forgive this. And I said, fine, no problem. We'll just continue our conversation. She came in the seventh week and she said, okay, I'm ready. Let's go. So there was a process she was in and now she was ready to let go of in this case, this, this horrific memory and this pain that had been
00:33:59
Speaker
eating her breakfast, lunch, and dinner for many, many years, because that's, of course, what it will do.
Counseling and Starting Forgiveness Process
00:34:06
Speaker
That's this idea that unforgiveness acts like poison. But she needed time. And I just want to say that to listeners that this is where counseling can be such a help, to walk with somebody who is able to sit with you and give you time and process things with you.
00:34:24
Speaker
and give you that safe space to dive into the depths of forgiveness and for you to be able to experience the freedom that comes from living like this where...
00:34:35
Speaker
Yeah, I have nothing in my life no matter what has happened where I'm still holding on to this. And just a very personal comment on that where sometimes I'll talk to my sister about some of the things that took place at that church that I just shared. And my sister will openly say to me, yeah, you have forgiven them, but I haven't.
00:34:56
Speaker
So she is still living, even though it wasn't her that it affected directly, it was actually me. She is still living in bitterness and it's still affecting her negatively, which is a sad reality that you can even hold on to something on behalf of somebody else.
00:35:14
Speaker
But again, all of us, the imitation is the same from God. Come, let's walk through this together. Let's let it go. And we have Jesus as a model, crying out on the cross there, Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing. I've had to say that many, many times to God, where people have hurt me, relationships, friendships have disintegrated in some sort of way.
00:35:43
Speaker
And that's, again, I associate myself with Christ right there. Forgive them, they don't know what they're doing. And I wanna let go of all of this. And we don't need, we have enough troubles with our own relationships. We don't need to take up a fence for another. That's just one brick we don't need in our backpack of issues. But this has been, I think,
00:36:10
Speaker
so helpful, and it will be so helpful for so many. So thank you for sharing this. It was a great conversation. This is where, again, you say, well, where do I start? How do I start? Maybe you've been talking about, yeah, I need to forgive, or you've been talking and you know things are not right in a relationship, and you need to do something about it.
00:36:40
Speaker
But you just haven't. Maybe you procrastinated. Maybe you've just tried to distract yourself. Well, this is where we say that tagline, if you will, there is something you can do. There is a step that you can take to walk in freedom. And that step is the process. Begin that process to forgive. And if you're not ready, then you ask God to
00:37:10
Speaker
reveal to you, to help you push through and to process through is a better word, to process through the hurt, to understand it, to define it, and how it made you feel as Torben outlined some of those ideas. And then it's up, the decision is yours.
00:37:30
Speaker
The decision is yours and God loves you whether you choose to make that decision to forgive or not. You're loved and you're already forgiven. So put that, you and God are good. This is for you to experience and walk in his freedom. That's the decision and that's the decision to forgive. So if that's what you need to do, then I want you to pray and ask God to give you the courage
00:37:59
Speaker
the insight and the wisdom to make that choice. So as we say on the podcast, it may be time for you to stop talking and to start walking in that first step
00:38:18
Speaker
may be to process through forgiveness. You've been listening to Walking Free, a production of Grace Ministries International in Marietta, Georgia. For more information, go to our website at gmint.org. That's gminc.org.