FORGIVING YOURSELF – LETTING GO
The irregularity of my writings these days isn’t for the lack of time. In fact time isn’t the constraint, but what to write. I don’t just want to be like every blogger/writer that posts for the sake of posting, but of course it is good for the stats. So I pray one of these days I will be released from my constraint and post more, but for now the issue to be addressed today is FORGIVENESS.
Great sermons have been preached on forgiveness and this is not to add to the list of sermons preached already, it is just to shed light to another side of the story and to free you. So I am most definitely going to use myself as an example. I’d be glad to be your lab mice for today.
If I were to be in a congregation where the pastor had just preached about forgiveness, I won’t have come out because of course there wasn’t anyone I had not forgiven, errrrm wait a minute that’s wrong. I won’t come out because there wasn’t anyone to forgive, but because it was me I had to forgive. Yeah right.
So it is with so many of us. I have shouted when I wasn’t supposed to, said the wrong things I wasn’t supposed to and done the wrong things I wasn’t supposed and I find that the hardest person on my case about these things was me. Oh but God was long ready to walk with me, but I had taken the post of the judge and I had sentenced myself to UNFORGIVENESS.
The danger of not forgiving yourself even makes it harder to forgiving others or having a smooth relationship with God. What better time to forgive yourself than now. I had built a mechanism that when I got something wrong, I punished for myself, it could be that I wouldn’t eat for days, Phew! Did that a whole lot! It just might have been over mundane things.
So you think you wore the wrong clothes that’s why you were raped, you gave the wrong signal that’s why you got what you deserved. You really can’t forgive yourself for not doing this or that. What you are doing is limiting yourself from God’s ultimate love for you by not forgiving yourself. You think it is because of the way you are that’s why you should be in that abusive relationship or just maybe you think you deserve past hurts because of who you are. Dear friend, it is time to let go of that junk and forgive yourself of what has happened and tell yourself you deserve all that God has planned for you.
Isa 1:18 Come now, and let us reason together saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as soon; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.
I haven’t talked about God’s forgiveness so far, not because it is not important, but because he is ready when you are, just come as you are. Your own part is just the hardest part, forgiving yourself, letting go of all that has happened to you. You have held a lot of things against yourself and even God, I think now is the time to let go.
Now get me right, forgiveness is not license to getting it wrong, rather it is a license to correct that which you have gotten wrong and an opportunity to get others right. It is the ability to see God’s Grace and rely on it at any point in time, it is shifting your eye from you and moving it to him. Forgiving yourself is the faith to believe that you can also be Christ like, irrespective of past mistakes. Now make this vow of forgiveness;
I ________________________________ Vow to let go of past hurts and mistakes.
I choose to rely on God’s Grace
To fellowship with him and become more like Christ.
Thank you Lord
Doing a little video on FORGIVENESS on YouTube, so STM is getting a Youtube channel…Hmmm…Cool right…Then I had a cool peek into the design of STM’S second edition, I was blown away. God is indeed faithful