Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Wednesday, May 28th. How well do you release the weight of past mistakes? As we conclude this series on forgiveness, here are practical steps to help you extend grace to yourself and move forward with freedom. Our forgiveness is never complete until, first of all, we have experienced the forgiveness of God until we can forgive others who have wronged us, and thirdly, until we are able to forgive ourselves.
My friend, there'll be no peace in your heart, no real contentment until you are able to forgive yourself even for the wrongs that you have committed. God's forgiveness isn't enough. Those you've wronged, when they forgive you, that's not enough.
You must be willing to forgive yourself. I want you to turn to a beautiful passage of Scripture in the Bible that has to do with this matter of God's attitude about our forgiveness, and He says it in a beautiful way in Psalm 103. I just want us to read a few of these verses here. In the 103rd Psalm, in verse 10, He has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great, listen, as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His loving kindness toward those who fear Him. As far as the east is from the west, which never meet, so far has He removed our transgressions from us, just as the Father has compassion on His children. So the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him. For He Himself knows our frame. He's mindful that we are but dust. A beautiful assurance to you and me that God is a forgiving Father.
And what we have to ask is this, and I'm going to ask you this several times. If I know that God has forgiven me for my sins, whatever their nature, if I know that God has forgiven me, how can I any longer hold an unforgiving spirit toward myself which is just as destructive as if I hold it against someone else? Because the guilt is just directed differently.
The guilt is the same. How can I continue, watch this, how can I continue to hold in bondage one whom God has forgiven when that person I hold in bondage is myself? We have seen we cannot afford, we cannot justify holding anyone else in the bondage of our unforgiving spirit who's sinned against us no matter what they've done. Neither can I hold myself in bondage for I too am a child of God forgiven just like the other person that I may have sinned against and have had to exercise a forgiving spirit toward them. How is it that you can accept the fact that sovereign, almighty, holy, merciful, righteous, loving, forgiving, kind, gracious, saving God has seen fit in his omniscience to declare you not guilty and forgive you of your sin? Pray tell me how in the world can you hold onto it if you have really accepted his forgiveness?
Let me ask you a question. If God knows everything there is to know about you, he knows all about your sin, what motivates you, he knows every detail of your sin. If God knows all there is to know about you and God says I choose to forgive you, do you think you know something about your sin God doesn't know? Have you come up with some new information about your sin that God doesn't know?
Have you come up with a whole new angle about the motivation of why you did thus and so? Do you know something about the consequences of your sin that God doesn't know? The real truth is a man cannot really and truly accept the forgiveness of God and at the same time hold on and not forgive yourself.
In reality that's it. If you're holding an unforgiving spirit towards yourself, the truth is you don't believe God. Oh, I believe God.
No, you don't. You are not believing Almighty God if you're unforgiving toward yourself when he says he's paid the penalty. Now why did he pay it?
If you're gonna have to pay it. He paid the penalty so you could be free, you see, but Satan says you're getting off scot-free. No, you're not because you see the consequences of your sin may linger.
Now watch this. It's one thing for me to suffer the consequences of my sin that is not synonymous with not forgiving myself. I can experience the forgiveness of God.
I can experience the forgiveness of a person that I may have wronged, but you see if I hold on and refuse to forgive myself, friend, even if I forgive myself that doesn't eliminate the consequences. So you see here's what Satan says. Satan says I know why you're trying to believe that. You're just trying to get off scot-free. Let me ask you a question. Is the cross free?
No. It speaks of a penalty paid. And you see here's our twisted thinking because we talk about grace but we don't live by grace. Somebody says, now, Stanley, you're just preaching one of these free, simple, cheap sermons where anybody can do anything and anybody can be free and you don't have to worry about a thing.
Let me ask you a question. Is the cross cheap? When anybody says that, they're absolutely ignorant of the cross. The cross was God. Listen, that was God there on that cross shedding his blood for your sin and mine.
You can't add anything to the blood of Jesus, not one thing. And if you think you're going to be saved or forgiven or accepted by doing anything other than accepting the blood of Jesus Christ, I'm telling you, your theology is all messed up. Grace is an unmerited, undeserved, non-negotiable gift from Almighty God that has been prepaid for, can not be purchased and is offered freely to all who will receive. That's what the grace of God's all about. But you see, if you're still performance-based in your thinking, what's going to happen is you're going to think somehow you've got to perform in order to get God's acceptance. There's a second reason we won't forgive ourselves and that's this. We have a difficult time in dealing with self-disappointment. Now, I can remember a personal experience in my own life where God had done a marvelous work in my life and the Lord was just blessing me and I was just moving right along and all of a sudden, I mean, I disappointed me something terrible.
Now I should have known better. And I looked back and realized and analyzed what was going on and I just thought, Lord, you've just lifted me on a high plateau. Hallelujah, praise the Lord.
You can't ever come down off of this and I just want to thank you. And man, I was just rejoicing. And the truth is, you know what I was doing? I, big I, was right smack dab in the middle of all that. And I was moving right along and I was making progress and I had left all of this behind me and I fell flat on my face.
That's exactly what I did. And I can remember where I was and what I felt. And I wrestled with God's forgiveness for a short period of time and then I was able to accept His forgiveness, I thought. But I thought, Lord, then I began to realize what happened is I disappointed me. Have you ever disappointed you? Isn't it tough to get over self-disappointment? And we disappoint ourselves.
It's real tough for us to forgive ourselves. But one of the reasons we have an unforgiving spirit is because sometimes in our self-disappointment, it's very difficult for us to forgive ourselves for messing up, for failing, for falling short, in essence for not performing the way we intended to or for not living up to our own expectation. And if I see my acceptance before God based on my performance, I want to tell you we're all going to fail in our performance. So if acceptance is based on performance, I'm going to disappoint God and me. And so I hear people say, oh, I'm just afraid I'm going to disappoint God.
Let me ask a question. What do you have to do to disappoint somebody? In order to disappoint someone, they must expect something of you that you fail to do, right? If God is omniscient, knows everything you're going to do, you can't disappoint Him.
You see, what you do and what you fail to do all falls in the same line. In other words, He's not doing this. Oh, there He goes again. Oh, I'm surprised.
Oh, look what He's done again. God doesn't feel that way. You know why? Because He saw it all from the beginning and you can't disappoint God. But if you have this feeling of disappointing yourself and you can't deal with that, then you're going to find yourself having an unforgiving spirit.
There's a third reason. And that is we emotionally adjust to our guilt and we emotionally adjust to these attitudes we have. You know what happens? Sometimes we live under guilt and self condemnation so long that the very idea of being freed is threatening. Oh, if I step out now, what's God going to do if I step out of line? But if you get freed and liberated in Jesus Christ, some people have lived under guilt and self condemnation so long, they wouldn't even know how to act. And here's what they're afraid of. They'll think, well, if I get free, well, I may commit a real sin. They've been imprisoned so long by an unforgiving spirit.
They are afraid to be free. They have adjusted to guilt. And my friend, the truth is that so many people live under self condemnation. Listen, Jesus came to set you free from that. Your feelings and your spirit of unforgiveness toward yourself is self imposed punishment that Jesus came to deliver you from. But He will not take it from you. You'll have to be willing to give it up.
Then I believe there's another reason. We surrender. One of the reasons we won't forgive ourselves, we surrender to, we give up.
Throw up the white flag and absolutely surrender to these feelings of unforgiveness and these feelings of guilt. We surrender to them and deny the truth of God's Word. God's Word says you don't have to have it. Well, but I'm just an exception. I've taken this book and I've sat down with people across the table on the sofa there and said, here's what God says, you believe that?
Yes, I do. Will you pray this prayer after me? Tell them what to pray. And they prayed the same old predisposed prayer. They pray all the time. And when they end up praying, they hadn't even dealt with the issue.
Now here's what I want you to see. If you're not willing to change your thinking, then you've wasted your time listening. You're going to have to change your thinking about God and yourself to get free. I'm telling you, you're going to have to have a cleansing of your thought processes because you have grown up under guilt and self-condemnation and you've become so comfortable with that, it's difficult to deal with it.
Oh, I know what the pastor said. Yeah, I did read that in the Bible, but and I want to tell you every time you put a but behind that, what you do is you just put one more bar in your prison, get rid of the bars, break out of the prison. You don't have to be there. But if you choose to be there, nobody is going to break you out of prison.
You got to want out to get out. Why do we not forgive ourselves? How many times have I heard this? Well, you know, I know God could forgive me and I know He has forgiven me. And why don't you forgive yourself? Well, I guess here's the reason I don't forgive myself. I just can't forgive myself because you see, the truth is I know I'm going to go back and do the same old thing over again. How's God going to forgive me of my sin?
How's He going to deal with me? How can I accept God's acceptance? How can I believe that God died for all my sin 2000 years ago when here I go again? He knows I'm going to sin again. How can I accept God's forgiveness when I know that I'm going to sin again? Let me ask you a question. How many sins did you commit before the cross?
Any of them? You weren't even in existence before the cross. So when He forgave you, He forgave, listen, when He died, He died for all of your sin, all of which was in the future. So when you say, God, I'm just afraid I'm going to do it again. So I just, I can't forgive myself when I know that I'm so weak in that area, I'm going to do it again. How can I forgive myself? Because God said you're forgiven.
I want to say this again. Our fear is, oh, you're telling me that I'm going to escape the consequences? No, I didn't say that. I said you were forgiven.
Being forgiven and escaping the consequences are not synonymous. Now, how do you and I forgive ourselves? Now, this is so simple. And my friend, for Jesus sake, for your sake, please listen.
It's so simple. I don't know how long you've been in bondage, but I'm going to tell you the next three minutes, you can get free if you'll follow these simple instructions. You want to be freed, forgiving yourself, no matter what you've done, where you've been, how long, what happened? Here's what you must do to forgive yourself. You recognize, you acknowledge that you have not forgiven yourself, that you still hold yourself in bondage. You acknowledge your unforgiving spirit toward yourself.
That's step number one. You repent of that sin. You tell God that you realize that that is not in keeping with His Word. And you thank Him for His forgiveness as you confess it to Him. I thank you, Father, for forgiving me, for holding myself in bondage, keeping myself from you, limiting your use of me. The third thing you do is to reaffirm your trust in the testimony of Scripture. As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us. Father, I reaffirm my trust, my faith in the Word of God.
Step number four. Lord Jesus, on the basis of your Word, by an act of my will in faith, I here and now forgive myself because you have already forgiven me, and I accept my forgiveness, and I choose from this moment to be freed of all for which I have held against me. If you're willing to accept God's acceptance of your confession of your repentance, of your surrender, of your release toward yourself, my friend, right where you sit, Jesus Christ will liberate you. You don't have to feel anything. You just tell Him, I choose to accept by faith the forgiveness of myself like I would choose to accept by faith that I have forgiven and released my brother, and you'll be free.
The issue is this. Will you choose to be free? On the basis of the Word of God, will you choose to accept your forgiveness and your acceptance? Will you tell Him today that you have rerun that film for the last time, and you're accepting His freedom by faith? And if you're willing to follow those simple steps on your face before God, He not only will free you, but the healing process will begin to transpire in your life, and it is a process of healing that goes on. Being able to accept, you begin to feel, you begin to sense, you become aware that you're free. God placed on him what you've been tugging around for years, and you let it fall, and now you're free.
Your freedom is your choice for the asking and the believing right now. Father, thank You that Jesus stood that day and said, I've come to set the captives free, to liberate those who are in bondage. And I pray the Holy Spirit will take this simple message on forgiving ourselves and drive it home. Let it stick, and let there be fruit abundance. In Jesus Christ, our Lord, is my prayer. Amen. Thank you for listening to Forgiving Ourselves. If you'd like to know more about Charles Stanley or In Touch Ministries, stop by intouch.org. This podcast is a presentation of In Touch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.
