We need to face the fact that we can’t walk with God and be even a little unforgiving or a little offended. If we’re going to walk with God, we must allow His love to drive out every trace of any kind of unforgiveness.

“But you just don’t know how badly they treated me!”

Has God forgiven your sin?

“Yes.”

Then you forgive them. Period. End of discussion.

Quit crying and whining about how hurt you are. Maybe you have been mistreated, but if so—get over it! Everybody has been mistreated in some form or another.

The reason I can talk so straight to you about this is that God has already said these things to me. I remember one day when I was moping around at home. I’d just come in from preaching on the road and it seemed that as soon as I got there, I had to start fighting the devil. I was whining about it when Gloria said something to me I didn’t like.

“Oh, she doesn’t care about me anyway,” I muttered in self-pity.

Right then, the Lord spoke up in my heart and said, It isn’t any of your business whether she cares for you or not. It’s your business to care for her.

Then He added something I’ll never forget. He said, I’m the One Who cares whether you hurt or not. Your hurts mean everything in the world to Me, but they ought to mean little or nothing to you.

As the Church, we need to learn that today. We need to quit paying so much attention to our own hurts and cast them over on God. We need to take a lesson from the pioneers of the faith.

People like Peter and John and those Pentecostal old-timers years ago would walk into the very jaws of hell. They’d go through persecutions that make the things we face look like child’s play. They didn’t come out crying about how they’d been hurt either. They came out saying, “Glory to God! We’re getting an opportunity to suffer for His Name. What a privilege!”

When you have that attitude, it’s not hard to forgive because your focus isn’t on yourself. It’s on God and His purposes, God and His love.

If you want to discover the secret to real forgiveness, that’s where your focus has to be—on God. We are instructed to forgive others in the same way, or on the same basis, that God has forgiven us.

Speak the Word

« I forgive others, as God for Christ’s sake has forgiven me. »  (Ephesians 4:32)