Forgiving One Another, Part 3

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Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Tuesday, May 27th. If you find it difficult to let go of the pain caused by others, take heart. You are not alone. The story of Joseph offers a powerful example, teaching us to embrace forgiveness and extend grace to one another.

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If you have been deeply hurt in the past and you’re still struggling, with the capacity to forgive the person who wronged you if you will listen very carefully to this message God could set you free liberate you from the awesome sense of the weight of an unforgiving spirit the Bible has a lot to say about forgiveness But at no place in the scripture does it say that I can ever justify an unforgiving spirit. Every aspect of life is affected by an unforgiving spirit. One of the most beautiful examples of a forgiving spirit is to be found in the Old Testament. And one of the best ways to teach a great spiritual principle is to find somebody in the Bible who is the perfect example of that principle. I don’t know of anybody in the Old Testament who could even begin to match the attitude that Joseph had who understood, who experienced hurt, but whose forgiving spirit is so evident. So if you’ll turn to the 50th chapter of the book of Genesis, the last chapter of the was sold into a caravan going to Egypt as a teenager. And now the Scripture says his father has died. They carried his bones up into Canaan where his father requested to be buried. And now Joseph, the prime minister, is back and his brothers are carrying on a conversation. The Scripture says in verse 14 of the 50th chapter, “…and after he had buried his father, Joseph returned to Egypt.” He and his brothers and all who had gone up with him to bury his father. When Joseph’s brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, what if Joseph should bear a grudge against us and pay us back in full for all the wrong which we did to him, which was they were going to kill him. Then they decided to throw him in a pit. Then they finally sold him as a slave into Egypt. They said, what if he decides to take vengeance on us for what we did to him years ago? So they connived to defend themselves by saying in verse 16, so they sent a message to Joseph saying, your father charged before he died saying, thus you shall say to Joseph, please forgive, I beg you, the transgression of your brothers and their sin. For they did you wrong, and now please forgive the transgression of the servants of the God of your father. And Joseph wept when they spoke to him. Now they held their fathers in high esteem, and one of their fathers said, That’s what you did in those days. So what they said is, Please forgive the transgression of the servants of the God of your father. So they were afraid that Joseph was going to take out on them what they had done to him. Here these brothers are saying, frightened for their life, having treated Joseph, their brother… to the point of desiring to kill him because they hated him so desperately, the Bible says. And now they’re afraid that he’s going to do back to them what they did to him. So as far as they’re concerned, all these years, his unforgiving, resentful, bitter, hostile, angry spirit has been just brooding for the opportunity to give back to them what they did to him. Now in the light of that, I want you to open your heart, my friend. And some of you have an unforgiving spirit and you don’t even realize that you do. Something that happened back there when you were a child, something that happened weeks or months or maybe a few years ago, something that happened when you were an adult, and you just buried it down there and you’ve forgotten about it, you think. But while you’ve been in the process of forgetting, that unforgiving spirit has been gnawing and eating away at you on the inside, and little by little, absolutely destroying your emotional base. the wise response is to be forgiving the moment we’re wrong the moment we are hurt to be forgiving to choose right then to forgive the other person no matter what they’ve done you say well but in those moments I didn’t feel like forgiving or I don’t feel like forgiving I was wrong yesterday I don’t feel like forgiveness feelings and forgiveness have nothing to do with each other forgiveness is an act of the will Feelings are something that you and I cannot possibly trust at any point in our life. Forgiveness is an act of the will. I choose to forgive. And we’re either going to respond in one of two directions. Either forgiveness or unforgiveness. If we respond in unforgiveness, a root of bitterness is going to take place. And out of that is going to spring anger, resentment, bitterness, and hostility. You may keep it submerged for a while, but I’m here to tell you, it’s either going to trickle out little by little, or one of these days it’s going to blow like a volcano, and it’s going to spill out on everybody that knows you and everybody that lives around you. Now listen very carefully to what I’m about to say so you’ll not misinterpret and won’t misquote me. If you unwisely choose not to be forgiving to those who wrong you, you have two other choices. If you choose not to be forgiving, you can choose to do one of two things. Two words I want you to jot down. You can either blast… Or you can bury. You can either blast or you can bury. That is, you either can blast back those who have wronged you and tell them what you think, or you can go home and get in your bedroom and close the doors and the windows and cut the air conditioning on and just blast away. I mean, just tell all four walls and everybody you want to off and just tell them exactly how you feel. Or you can bury it deep down inside your emotions. Now, if you have to make one of the two choices, to bury or to blast. Blast, don’t bury. Now, don’t go out here and say, well, the pastor told me I could just blast you away because you wronged me. Because that’s not what I’m saying. But I’m saying if you choose the unwise reaction of unforgiveness, then of the two other responses you can have, to blast or to bury, choose the wiser of the two unwise positions. Blast away and get it out of your system. Don’t just bury it and deny its very presence because whatever you bury is going to resurrect itself in your emotional being in some fashion or the other over a period of time. It may be years before it ever gets to the surface, but every day it’s down on the inside of you. What it’s doing is corroding and degenerating your emotional base, and one of these days it’s going to tell on you in a way that you probably do not want to face. The consequences of an unforgiving spirit. It penetrates, it saturates every single facet of your life. Your attitudes, your actions, your emotions, your relationships. You cannot have a healthy attitude, loving relationship with your children, or with your parents and have an unforgiving spirit. You cannot have the right relationship on your job with those you work for or those who work for you when you have an unforgiving spirit. Listen to me very carefully. You cannot walk in the Spirit and have an unforgiving spirit. You cannot say Jesus Christ is Lord of my life and have an unforgiving spirit. How can I say that Jesus Christ is Lord of my life, which means He’s in control, if I am expressing something that is diametrically opposed to everything Jesus ever said, ever taught, ever expressed? That’s unforgiveness. How can I say that Christ is my life and that He’s living His life through me if I’m living with an unforgiving spirit towards someone? At no place in the Scripture do you and I find justification for an unforgiving spirit. Now, my friend… God has forgiven you who are believers once and for all at the cross the moment you received Him as your Savior. But mark this down. Almighty God does not remove the consequences of my continuing unforgiving spirit toward anybody, myself or toward someone else. I am forgiven before Him, but my forgiveness before Him does not remove the consequences of my unforgiving spirit. Well, let’s look at Joseph for just a moment here because he’s such a beautiful example in this particular passage and I think in the whole Old Testament. I want to remind you of something now and then I want to show you something about him. Remember his hurts. Rejected to some degree by his father because his father rejected his dream from God at a high spiritual peak in his life. When Almighty God gave him two dreams to foretell his future, his father upbraided him about the whole idea. His brothers hated him and despised him and were going to kill him. Sold as a slave into Egypt. betrayed, lied about by Potiphar’s wife, sent to prison by Potiphar, forgotten by the man who could have remembered him to Pharaoh. So his life is a life of hurt and despair and pain and suffering. And remember this now. Every time he was hurt, he was deeply hurt. He struggled. He had to struggle with what they did to him. He struggled because he was absolutely and totally misunderstood. Absolutely vilely treated. Joseph. knew how to deal with an unforgiving spirit. Joseph allowed God to heal him quickly when he was wrong, and that is the reason the Bible says, and God was with Joseph in Potiphar’s house, and God honored Joseph in the prison house and made him keeper of the prisoners. That’s why people were drawn to him, loved him, gave him authority. That’s why he was a success, and that’s why God honored him. Everywhere we turn, we see him responding in the right way. If he had not, the rest of this passage would not be here. Now, what I’d like to do for you for just a moment, I want you to get a pencil and paper out. I want to give you 12 steps. Here’s what happens when we don’t. Deal with an unforgiving spirit. Here are the steps we take, the steps we go through. Now, I’m not saying that all of you have to go through all of these. You can skip a whole bunch of them if you deal with it properly. But if you don’t deal with it, if you don’t handle it, here’s what you can expect. There are 12 of them. The first step is wronged. That is, you’ve been wronged either physically, you’ve been wronged verbally, but you’ve been wronged as a child, as an adult. Whatever, it makes no difference. You’ve been wronged. All right, now. So what are the steps that follow that? All right, if you’ll jot these down. Difficulty. You have difficulty in dealing with it when you’ve been wronged because the person who wronged you or because the nature of what they did, whatever it might be. All of us have difficulty at times. The third word is difficulty. Detour. We just sort of want to detour around the whole idea. We want to get that out of our mind. We want to forget it. So that’s the next step we usually try to take. Number four is dig a hole. And I mean by that emotionally, we just want to bury the whole idea. Dig a hole just to bury it. Not going to think about it. The next step is to deny it. You don’t want to deal with it anymore, so you just bury it and deny that it’s there. The next word is defeat because you’re defeated. When you start… detouring around it, digging a hole and burying it, you begin to deny it. Defeat is going to be your lot in life because you’re going to suffer defeat after defeat. The next word is defiled. It is going to defile your relationships, your conversation, your attitudes, your emotions, your physical body. Everything about you is going to be defiled. You may cover it well, but you’re defiled. The next word is discouraged because you see things aren’t going to work out. On your inside, you may have all the things in the world, external, that a person could ever need. But on the inside, where’s the contentment? Where’s the joy? Where’s the peace? Why can’t you feel the love of the people feeling? Why can’t you love other folks? Why don’t you sense their love? What is it on the inside that’s not exactly right? Then the next word is desperation. Because you see, eventually, if you don’t deal with it, you won’t know what’s going on and you’re going to get desperate. Now, beside desperation, would you put a little mark, a little dash, and put destruction? Because unless something happens at this point in the whole ladder here, you’re going to do something drastic in your life that could destroy your life. But the point of desperation, you’re wise enough, the next step is the word discover. You ask someone to help you. Find out what’s wrong, what’s deep down inside, what’s going on inside of you, and you discover there’s a root of bitterness, a root of resentment, hostility, anger, that unforgiving spirit that developed way back down in your life that you’ve nourished and cherished and hidden and camouflaged and denied and suppressed and buried and kept covered all these years. You discover it. The next word is deal. You begin to deal with it. You begin to let someone else share with you, and you begin to open your heart. Lay your life bare. And the next word, hallelujah, is delivered. You get delivered from the very spirit of unforgiveness that was about to absolutely destroy your life. Now, friend, the average person who gets delivered, that’s the way they travel. They go from wronged to delivered, we hope. You say, well, how do I get delivered? You tell God. God… I don’t feel it, but I choose by an act of my will to forgive him. I choose by an act of my will to forgive her for wronging me. And I accept by faith already my forgiveness, and I am accepting by faith that I have released them. I am releasing them for what they’ve done. I choose to be forgiving toward that person. Listen, the moment you say, I choose to forgive… The healing process begins at that moment. Now listen. When you come to God, God, I thank you that you have forgiven me. for my unforgiving spirit. I release the other person. And God, I’m willing to go to that person and I’m willing to ask them to forgive me for my unforgiving spirit. Father, I acknowledge that my present circumstances You have allowed. I acknowledge that You are revealing to me a weakness in my life. I acknowledge, God, that I am in these circumstances in some form or fashion for Your glory. Now, here is the principle. Here’s the key. A God who is all good does not work in the life of His children with an evil purpose. God never works in your life with evil in mind. If God has allowed you to be hurt deeply, painfully, weepingly, hurt over the years, a good God with a good purpose who’s going to work out a good cause and a good end result allowed that in your life. And the key is to get my eyes off my offender and get them on my God. the eyes off the tool that offended me, and on the great purpose for which God has in my life and your life. Friend, if you can choose, by an act of your will, I choose to be forgiving. And refocus my attention. That’s what he did. That’s the reason Joseph did not live in bitter resentment, hostility, and anger. And because he did not, God sent him and placed him in a position of being the prime minister over all of Egypt. He was entrusted by Potiphar. Watch this. Entrusted by Potiphar to one household. And he succeeded. Entrusted by the jailer to the whole jailhouse, and he succeeded. And entrusted by Pharaoh to the whole kingdom and the civilization at that moment in history of Egypt itself. Could it be that the reason some of you have succeeded no more than you have is because you failed in Potiphar’s house? You can correct that today. God will do for you and in you and to you and through you what he did for Joseph. God will equip you to help somebody who desperately needs help out of a hurting, broken life. Friend, you can’t help many folks if you have a root of bitterness. And if you’re willing to surrender what’s destroying you, God will cleanse you and heal you. And he’ll make you a great helper to some other folks who desperately need to find out the root of their problem is unforgiveness. And how the healing of your damaged emotions made you whole once again. Set you, hallelujah, free once and for all. You can be free. But you’ll stay in the prison house until you forgive the last person toward whom you have an unforgiving spirit.

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Thank you for listening to part three of Forgiving One Another. For more inspirational messages like this one, visit our online 24-7 station. And if you’d like to know more about Charles Stanley or InTouch Ministries, stop by InTouch.org. This podcast is a presentation of InTouch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.