In this episode, Pastor Rick Warren delves into the essence of true forgiveness through personal testimonies and biblical teachings. Eloise’s journey from pain to peace highlights the power of acceptance and letting go. Learn about the role of forgiveness in leading a purposeful life, and how God’s grace paves the way for personal freedom and spiritual growth.
Thanks for joining us here today on Pastor Rick’s Daily Hope, the audio broadcast ministry of Pastor Rick Warren. Today we continue in a series called The Seven Greatest Words of Love. There are seven words in particular that Jesus spoke during his final hours on the cross. that hold the keys for finding fulfillment in your life, relationships, and even your career. Right now, here’s Pastor Rick with the final part of a message called The Word of Forgiveness.
SPEAKER 03 :
Now, there’s even a right way to ask for forgiveness. And there’s a wrong way. Let me tell you the wrong way to ask forgiveness. First, don’t beg. Oh God, please, please, please, please, please, please. Pretty please with sugar on it, cherry on top. Oh God, please, please, please, please, please. Like God is unwilling to forgive you? No, he’s more willing to forgive you than you are willing to admit it. God is more willing to forgive you than you’re willing to admit it. You don’t have to bribe or bargain or beg God. You don’t bribe and say, God, if you’ll forgive me, then I’ll do this good work. You don’t bargain. God, if you forgive me, I’ll never do it again. God said, yeah, you’re right. You’ll be back there in another day or so. Forgiveness does not change the future, it clears up the past. That’s another episode we need to deal with later on in this series. But you don’t beg, you don’t need to. God wants to forgive you. You don’t bargain, I’ll never do it again. You don’t bribe, well God, I promise I’ll tithe 20%. No, just ask. Romans 3, 23 and 24 says this. All of us have sinned, duh, yet God declares us not guilty. If we trust in Jesus Christ, who in his mercy freely, circle the word freely, freely, you don’t have to bargain, bribe, beg, freely takes away all our sins. Now, notice it says, if you just trust, if we just trust in Jesus Christ. You say, but Rick, you don’t know what I’ve done. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. I don’t need to know what you’ve done. I could tell you this. What matters is what Jesus has done for you. That’s what the cross is all about. We said that when we look at the cross, Jesus hangs on the cross and the first thing he says is, Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing. So the first message of good news, the first word of love from the cross is the word of forgiveness. And when you come to God humbly, honestly, admitting, accepting, and asking, God says, Father, forgive them. Jesus says, Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing. He comes, his immediate response is forgiveness. Now, you may say, you know, I’ve done that, Rick. I’ve asked God over and over and over to forgive me, but I don’t feel forgiven. Well, let me just say a couple things. You don’t have to ask over and over and over and over and over. When you ask over and over and over, you’re acting like God didn’t hear you the first time. When you ask over and over and over, you’re saying, I don’t really believe you forgave me. That’s a sin, right? I don’t really believe you forgave me, so I’m gonna ask again. Because I haven’t forgiven myself, I’m gonna ask again. The problem isn’t God, the problem is you haven’t confessed it to another person and let it go. That’s false guilt from Satan. Now let me explain how this works. Before I commit a sin, Satan minimizes it. It’s no big deal. It’s no big deal. Go ahead and do it. Everybody does it. It’s no big deal. Go ahead and do it. That’s minimizing. The moment I do it, Satan changes strategies and he maximizes it. That is so big, you will never have the blessing of God in your life again. See how he works? It’s the exact opposite. Before you do it, it’s no big deal. After you do it, you stupid pervert. You nutty pervert. Sinner, you wild, evil, wicked, mean, bad, nasty person. And he just maximizes it afterwards. If you keep asking over and over, that’s a lack of faith. You don’t really believe God forgave you. Now the reason you don’t feel forgiven is because A, you haven’t done all three steps, and B, you don’t really believe you’re forgiven. I’m gonna talk about that in a minute, but first, I want you to hear a story. And I want you to hear a testimony of dealing with guilt and forgiveness. Give her a warm welcome.
SPEAKER 01 :
Hi. My name is Eloise, and I want to share with you my story of how feeling completely accepted and forgiven by God has been the key to breakthrough for my lifelong patterns of perfectionism, self-righteousness, and trying to control everything and everyone around me. I grew up in a large, blended family of six kids. I learned pretty quickly that if I do the right thing, I got a reward and approval, and I craved that feeling of approval. For me, love was all about words. Tell me I did good. Tell me I’m smart. Tell me you’re proud of me. That was my definition of love growing up. At the age of seven, I had a traumatic experience. My cousin sexually molested me. I felt ambushed, betrayed, and dirty. That night I was having pain and my mom had asked me what had happened. I innocently told her that my cousin touched me. Immediately I saw in my mom’s eye that something was terribly wrong. I minimized my abuse, not knowing if I was in trouble or my cousin was the one in trouble. I felt confused. My mom said nothing and left the room. But I could hear her shouting on the phone in the living room. I felt abandoned, afraid and alone to deal with these feelings that I felt so overwhelmed with. After a while, my mom returned to the room and put a phone to my ear. I heard my cousin crying and my aunt yelling at him to apologize in the background. Then I heard a very broken, I’m sorry, and over the phone. And I heard myself respond with a quick good Christian, I forgive you. It was all so fast, so I just stuffed it down. Eventually, my mom returned and told me it wasn’t my fault and that she loved me. But that night, I developed two warped convictions that I would carry with me into adulthood. First, I believed that my emotions, my fears, my anxieties, and my insecurities were so strong that I dare not share them with anyone else. Second, I began to believe the reason that I hid my deepest pain and emotion was in order to protect the ones that I loved. These two belief systems followed me throughout my life. We all know people who have reacted from their childhood abuse and become more promiscuous. We know those others who became victims, sometimes developing fearful and warped ideas about sex and carrying that throughout their life. But still there are others who become control freaks, trying to control not only everything in their lives, but also controlling everyone around them. That’s what I became. I was hungry for love, which, as I said earlier, meant hearing the right words of approval from others. I became a super achiever. I would finish chores ahead of schedule, excel in school with minimal effort, and if there was a random task from my parents, teacher, or church member, I was quick to meet it. Naturally, I was praised for my acts of goodness, but these moments of praise for my accomplishments only left me needing more.” And I still desperately needed a safe place to feel and express negative emotions. Whenever I did share those feelings, I was shamed by my father for crying, and my mother tried to fix what it was that burdened me. So I learned to show no emotion but anger. Anger was the emotion my father understood, and anger was what kept my mother from hovering over me, wanting to ask questions and trying to fix me. I became very active in church, leading worship, volunteering for building projects, mission trips, and bringing friends to church. My mission became to right all the wrongs in the world. In some ways, I felt that I was supposed to be a savior. Because I’m a fighter by nature, I just had to fight for something. So I began to fight for justice and truth. I was very critical of others, believing I had a right to be so, because I was the good girl. I didn’t do drugs, I didn’t drink, and I didn’t have sex. I was a good kid with good grades, and inside I thought that people should be more like me, since that’s what I was told by almost everyone. I graduated from high school and decided to attend a small Bible college. There my passion for God, justice, and truth only grew, and I was accepted into an elite ministry training program. If there was a hierarchy of righteousness, it went something like this. God first, then Jesus, then me, then humanity. I was so close to perfect, it was sinful. In college, boys who liked me were not in short supply, but only one had caught my eye. It was the bad boy in the back of the class, and he rode a bike around campus, and I thought to myself, I will call him bike boy, and he will be mine. After only six months, Nate and I were dating. He showered me with compliments, treated me like a princess, a real gentleman, opening doors and paying for me. He even donated plasma in order to buy me roses. This was the type of sacrifice I was looking for. One who knew my true value and worshiped the ground that I walked on. Nate joined the Marine Corps and after boot camp, I was all in. Handsome, confident, and with dressed blues, I told him I couldn’t live without him and started planning a wedding. There was no proposal. I once found pornographic magazines in my groom-to-be’s barrack room one visit before our wedding. It wouldn’t be the last time. I made it very clear that I would not be okay with this kind of material within our marriage. We married in November of 06 and I moved to Georgia with my new husband. Our son was born in 2007 and shortly, and shortly after, we received orders to Camp Pendleton. On our trip, I caught my husband viewing an inappropriate movie, and I was mortified. This was when we had our first heart-to-heart about sexual addiction. He told me that he struggled with pornography, and I thought, okay, who doesn’t struggle with something? He went on to say that it had been going on since before we met. Wait, what? This is when I realized that he had an addiction, but I decided at that moment that all I needed to do was love the sin right out of him. While my husband was deployed overseas, my father died from cancer. Living in Camp Pendleton, I had been attending Saddleback Church in San Clemente for a little while, and then decided to share my feelings with a kind lady out on the patio. She spoke about Celebrate Recovery and how it would help with my hurts, habits, and hang-ups, and I asked, isn’t that for addicts? I told her kindly that’s not what I’m looking for, and I was actually offended that she would even offer such a group to me. Me. I don’t hurt, my habits are holy, and my only hangup was Jesus’ truth and justice. So I decided all that I needed was more church. I attended Saddleback’s class 301. In this class, they help you find out where you fit in the church, and I signed up for the music ministry on Thursday nights. Well, to show up, to my surprise, it was Celebrate Recovery. I helped with worship on and off for a few months until one day I felt God tell me to stay and listen after the music. As I began to listen to the great teachings and testimonies each week, I began to realize that I had a hang-up, which was codependency. Now I had considered myself to be the most independent person I knew, but I picked up a codependent pamphlet and I headed to a small group. For six months, I sat in that circle not relating to anything that was shared. I was going crazy. God was telling me that I was codependent and I just did not understand. In my frustration, I spoke to my ministry leader. I told her that God was telling me I was codependent, but I could not stay one more day in that codependent group. I told her that my husband struggled with porn and that was really the problem. She looked at me with a big smile on her face and said, well, we have a group for that too. So the next week I found myself at Celebrate Recovery Lake Forest to attend codependent in relationship with an addict. I grabbed a pamphlet and there was one line that I truly related to. I talked about how we may be an unforgiving towards the addict and punishing towards the addict. Well, that was me. My husband’s many relapses meant that I shamed, blamed, guilted, manipulated, and tried to control his addiction in the name of love because he was unable to do so himself. I felt it was my job to fix and manage his addiction because I was his God. Still not truly believing that I was codependent, I got a sponsor and joined a step study to work on me. I was a narcissist married to an addict until the day I learned about grace. I thought grace was portioned out according to the need. I thought I only needed a little grace. My husband needed a lot of grace. What I learned at Celebrate Recovery was that God’s grace for me was like a waterfall that I could barely stand underneath because of its sheer weight. That amount of grace was able to wash even the most secretest parts of me. I realized that rather than being a savior, I needed a savior just as much as my husband did. That day I saw myself with humanity and not above them. I realized that I’m not God. Then in August 21st, 2010, my husband sat me down and proceeded to tell me about an affair that he had had a year and a half prior. A flood of questions came to my mind, but I heard the Lord say, clear as day, not a word, Eloise. But I often ignore God and relapse because I tried to control and play God. During the seven months my husband was gone in Afghanistan, I continued to work the steps of my recovery. One of the steps was make a fearless moral inventory of our lives. And then the fifth step is to share the inventory with God and someone I trust. So I asked my sponsor to meet with me. Then came my husband’s affair and I began to rock not being able to contain the pain of my life any longer. I cried, like snot to the ground, can’t catch my breath, scream like someone was hurting me type of cried. And my sponsor didn’t move or speak, but one single tear rolled down her cheek. There was great healing for me to have someone contain my pain. I was never free to have painful emotions because it always ended up being about the other person, either them being hurt by my feelings or hurt that I was having such pain. The inventory process opened a can of worms for me, feelings. I didn’t have feelings before because I was busy managing the feelings of everyone else in order to control that didn’t cause me pain. I had to learn to speak what I wanted, needed, and felt without any motive to control. I needed to learn to accept forgiveness and offer forgiveness to others. My husband returned from Afghanistan in May 2011. From that time until July 2012, we went through four counselors, three relapses, were separated within the home, and at the same time, I was learning a lot through my second step study. I learned to believe that God loved me simply because he created me, not because of what I did or didn’t do. He loved me because I was his. I needed sobriety, openness, and honesty from my husband, which he was unable to give me, so I moved out in mid-July of 2012. It seemed the less I controlled, the healthier I got, the more my life sucked. The longer I was in recovery, the more I discovered about myself and my pain. Year three is where my miracle happened. It’s where my paradigm shifted. Ezekiel 36 26 says, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. I will take from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. This is what happened to me. Even after three years of recovery, two years of sobriety, and a year as a leader, I still had a heart of stone, one of judgment for the things that I didn’t understand, like others’ pains, problems, and issues, their hurts, habits, and hangups. My heart was critical of the way others lived their lives. Truth and justice is what I longed for, but you see, what I thought was truth and justice was only my view of what was true and just.” I would look at the life my husband was living this far and say, how could he treat me like this? He had the affair. Why am I the one being punished? In watching my husband’s recovery and doing life with other women like him, I started to care for the brokenness within him. This third year was all about surrender, surrendering my belief systems about myself and others, surrendering my right for the sake of compassion, surrendering my wants, needs, and feelings to show my husband that he was valuable to me. Our entire marriage, if mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. And he knew it. I believe God in his sovereignty was saying to me, enough. I believe love was managing and containing my husband’s addiction so he didn’t feel horrible about himself all the time. And that me choosing to love him would give him value because I am so valuable. Just as God showed me that I mattered to him, he was saying the same was true of my husband to me. And if I respected at all what God was doing in my life thus far, I had to honor what he was doing in my husband’s. This was painful to do, and it takes what Pastor Rick calls daring faith. We were attending counseling weekly, if not twice a week, with what seemed to little to no progress. I was so angry with God because I finally stopped doing all the horrible things, the controlling, the manipulation, shaming, blaming, tone. and I still wasn’t getting what I wanted. All I wanted was my husband’s heart to be for me. Then I was reminded that I don’t do the right thing because it gets me what I want. I do it because it’s right. In this season, God became so real and close to me. I felt abandoned and rejected, but God was closest in these times. It was one day at a time, one moment at a time until my miracle. In February of 2013, I asked to have a conversation with my husband. I had to apologize for the things that needed apologies and I opened my heart and validated his pain. Everything I said were things that I had said before but not a motive for myself any longer. I truly cared for his brokenness and it grieved me that he was doing it alone. The week that followed was one of true celebration. My separated husband and I spoke every day for a week and we ended up at the end of the week exchanging rings and committing to moving forward together. We met with our therapist, not believing that we were cured, but knowing that there was still work to be done. In therapy, we discussed a game plan for me to move back in April of 2013. Everything has not been smooth sailing, but I see my husband now and he matters to me. It’s crazy to me, but I truly believe my husband’s affair saved my life. Without the pain of the betrayal, not being… Without the pain of the betrayal, I do not believe for a moment that I would have taken the painful steps to grow, face the truth about myself, and stayed in Celebrate Recovery program. In closing, I want to say that I have learned to accept the forgiveness and grace of God for myself, and I am now able to offer the same grace and forgiveness to others. That has been liberating. I am not as judgmental or picky about others and I no longer worry about things that I have no control over because time and time again, God shows me that I am his and he is mine. Looking back, it’s funny to me that I was so self-righteous, God had to get me into CR through the back window by being a worship leader. I would have never humbled myself enough to go on my own, but through learning about forgiveness, God took me from a narcissist who only thought of myself and protecting my pain to a compassionate warrior who speaks the truth, but with greater goodness and patience. Thank you.
SPEAKER 03 :
So what does Jesus do when we do it his way and ask forgiveness for sin? We ask, we accept, and we admit. Write these four words down. I’ll just give them to you. Number one, he forgives instantly, instantly. You don’t have to suffer a little while first. He never makes you wait. He doesn’t say, I’ll think about it. The moment you ask, zero delay. Should a believer ever feel guilty for sin? Yeah, about 10 seconds. That’s about how long it takes to confess and receive forgiveness from God. The myth is that feeling guilty makes me a better person. It does not. Feeling guilty does not make you a better person. God doesn’t want you walking around in guilt. It just makes you miserable. It’s unnecessary for holiness. Number two, God forgives completely. He forgives completely. He’s not just quick and merciful to forgive. When Jesus died for your sins, which ones did he include on the cross? Every one of them. Even the ones you haven’t committed yet have already been paid for on the cross. He died for all of them. And when he said, Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing, it included everything you ever have and ever will do wrong. Jesus nailed himself to a cross so you can stop nailing yourself to a cross. to a cross. Colossians 2, he has forgiven all your sins, circle all. He has utterly wiped out, circle that, the evidence of broken commandments which always hung over our heads. He has completely, circle that, completely annulled it by nailing it to the cross. It is a super stain remover. Completely annulled, what does that mean? It means as if it never happened. How long do you remember a paid bill? You don’t. And if God forgives, and not only forgives, but forgets sin, shouldn’t you? The problem is if you don’t understand complete forgiveness, every time something bad happens in your life, you’re gonna think, God’s punishing me for what I did. He doesn’t work that way. He doesn’t work that way. Number three, God forgives repeatedly. God forgives repeatedly. Have you ever committed the same sin more than once? Yes. Then do you feel embarrassed to ask for forgiveness again the next time? Yeah. Oh, I can’t come back to God on this one. I just confessed it five minutes ago. God does not get bored with your confessions. It is God’s nature to be forgiven. Hebrews 7, 25. Christ is always forgiving. interceding on our behalf. He forgives repeatedly, over and over and over. He doesn’t get embarrassed, you don’t need to. Number four, God forgives freely. You don’t earn it, you don’t deserve it, it’s a gift of God’s grace. Because you are human, forgiveness is your greatest need, and because Christ died for you, forgiveness is God’s greatest gift. So let me just say this. Have you been haunted by secret sin? you can be set free. Now the Bible says, last verse on your outline, Psalm 32, one and two, what happiness for those whose guilt has been forgiven, and what relief for those whom God has cleared the record. God wants to give you happiness, and God wants to give you relief from the guilt that you felt over the things done wrong in your life. If you have not believed in Jesus Christ, You have not put your trust in him to be the savior of the world. If you don’t let Jesus pay for your sins, listen, you’re gonna have to pay for them. Somebody has to pay for your sins. Either you, or Jesus. Somebody’s gotta pay for your sins. The Bible says the wages of sin is death, and Jesus died on the cross for you. That’s how much God loves you. That’s God’s grace, that’s God’s mercy. And so we’re gonna pray a prayer together. And if you’ve never settled this issue, I want you to do it right now. I want you to accept, admit, and ask so you can be free from guilt till you receive Jesus Christ as your Savior and as your Lord. You don’t have to beat yourself up anymore. You don’t have to belittle yourself anymore. If you don’t do this, you will go one of the three ways that Eloise talked about. Some people when they blow it, they just do it more. And some people when they blow it and they sin, they just go into depression and feel bad about themselves. Some people, when they blow it, try to become super saints and overcome, and they become perfectionists and legalists and phonies and Pharisees, and they go around judging everybody else because if I don’t feel good about me, I certainly don’t want you feeling good about you. When you find someone who’s high control, it’s because they feel their life’s out of control. When you find someone who’s highly judgmental, it’s because they are judging themselves. When you find somebody who’s ungracious all the time, it’s because they don’t really feel God’s grace in their life. When you really feel the grace of God and you feel how much slack God has cut you, you’re gonna cut everybody else a lot of slack. You’re gonna stop being the perfectionist thinking you’re better than everybody else. like Eloise was talking about. One of those three, we all take different paths in dealing with our unresolved guilt and our unresolved reactions to relationships. As I said, it’s always relational, the root of everything. So I want us to pause right now and bow in prayer. Would you bow your head with me? Father I know that without a doubt there are people here listening and even listening online that are suffering under an immense load of guilt and shame and regret. And for some people it’s been eating away at them for years. Let this be the day of their release. Let this be the day of their relief. Let this be the day of their freedom that comes with your forgiveness. Now I want to invite you to pray the steps that I’ve just taught you. The steps for forgiveness. And if you’ve never accepted Christ, the steps of salvation. I want you to say something like this in your mind. Just say it to God. Dear God, in your mind, just say, you know everything about me. You know everything that I’m ashamed of. You know my regrets. My sins. My sins. You know my mistakes. You know my habits. You know my actions and the attitudes that I feel guilty over. Today, Jesus Christ, I again admit that I need your forgiveness. I agree with you that I’ve done wrong, that I have sinned. And many times I’ve done what I wanted to do rather than the right thing. But I not only admit it, I accept responsibility for it. And I’m not going to blame anybody else in my life. I’m not going to make excuses. I’m going to own up to what’s wrong in me, in my life. I want to change. I want to go your way. I repent. I want to follow you and I want to trust you completely. Jesus Christ, thank you, thank you for what you did and what you said on the cross. Thank you for saying, Father, forgive them. I believe that. I ask you to forgive me for even the things that I don’t know about. Take away all my guilt. I thank you for paying for my sins on the cross so I could be forgiven. And now in faith, I do, I do accept your gift of forgiveness and salvation. Thank you for forgiving me instantly and completely. And yes, God, thank you that you forgive me repeatedly. And most of all, I thank you that you forgive me freely. Please help me to feel forgiven and to forgive myself and to forgive everybody else around me. and with their heads still bowed, if you sincerely prayed that prayer, then I want to say to you, in the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven. Amen.
SPEAKER 02 :
Hey, if you’ve just prayed along with Rick to accept Jesus in your life, Rick would love to hear from you. Just email rick at pastorrick.com. And now Rick’s going to share a letter from one of our listeners who says Daily Hope is making a real difference in their life.
SPEAKER 03 :
I love letting you hear some of the letters that we receive every day here at Daily Hope. Here’s one from a woman named Bonnie. She says, “‘Dear Pastor Rick, my husband Tom and I both receive your Daily Hope print devotional in our email every morning. We take turns each day reading the daily devotional. They must read it aloud. And it’s a great way to start our day along with our individual daily quiet time.'” It’s been such a blessing and encouragement to us in each of our daily lives. And sometimes I’m able to turn on the podcast and we listen to the broadcast as well. And we’ve both been Christians for a long time, but that daily encouragement from you helps us keep on track, and it helps us make our lives so much richer as we follow God every day. So thanks, and may God continue to bless you and use you for many more years to come. Blessings to you, Pastor Rick, Bonnie, and Tom. Hey, thanks for writing, Bonnie. It always blesses me when we hear that daily hope is helping other people grow strong in the Lord.
SPEAKER 02 :
Did you know that you can start every day with hope and encouragement from Pastor Rick? Well, you can when you sign up to receive his life-changing Bible study teaching delivered directly to your inbox. Just go to pastorrick.com and sign up for this free Daily Hope devotional. Be sure to join us next time as we look into God’s Word for our daily hope. This program is sponsored by Pastor Rick’s Daily Hope and your generous financial support.
