There are times in our lives when things we have done to others haunt us. Things that we can not confess for fear of retribution or because the ones we have wronged we can no longer speak with. Death, imprisonment, legal separation, distance, or refusal to allow you to have an audience with the one you offended are all barriers to asking for forgiveness.  How can we move from unobtainable forgiveness?

How can we live beyond the failure

The key to Paul and David’s lives after their offense was they did not let their failure imprison them from stepping into their future. Christ came to nail our guilt and condemnation to the cross. We do not have to carry our past sins into our future and allow them to define who we are. People may label us people may remember our failures, but they were who we were that is not who we are.

Many people do not

Knowing how to handle these insults and attacks is difficult knowing that they are justified

It may never be possible to obtain forgiveness from the

Shame, guilt, and

Living beyond your failure is difficult. The shame, guilt, and condemnation can eat you alive. As we talked about in a previous podcast forgiving yourself can be the hardest thing to do. No one knows us as we know ourselves. The problem is we fail to believe God’s word. However, there is hope in the forgiven life.

We continue to recall

Micah 7:19 He will again have compassion on us, And will subdue our iniquities. You will cast all our sins Into the depths of the sea.

When it comes to

To better understand the inward

The world looks to see that we are so begrudging to our past

So how do we live in this world without shame, guilt, and

The physiological result of unforgiveness is life-threatening. To harbor resentment and allow those feelings to fester within you will result in physical symptoms. Unforgiveness must be eradicated from our lives if we are to live a healthy productive life in the Kingdom Of God.

Unforgiveness can affect your blood pressure; increase your risk of heart attack, alter your sleeping, increase your perception of pain, increase your anxiety, impact depression, and increase stress to name a few.

Christ came to give us life and that life more abundantly. We can not live the abundant life that has been given to us if we bring our hurts, shame, guilt, condemnation, and resentment for others with us as we live this life.

As long as we carry the baggage of the past with us on our journey, we remain unable to receive anything new into our life. Carrying the luggage of past hurts prevents us from picking up the blessings God gives us with each modern day.

It is God good pleasure to give us the Kingdom, but as long as our hands are full of the hurts and baggage of our past, we do not have room to receive the fullness of the Kingdom.

Unforgiveness robs us of our future and the manifestation of the promises that God has set before us on our journey. It is time to receive all that God has prepared for you. It is time to let go of unforgiveness and step into the life of abundance, health, prosperity, and blessing Christ came to give us.

Learning to forgive someone is difficult if not impossible. I know that statement sounds contradictory to what this podcast series has been about. However, it’s in out our nature to hold onto offense with high tenacity. Call it an adaptive process or our carnal nature, but when we experience trauma, we remember it. It is not uncommon that our life experiences become hard wired into who we are. We associate smells, sounds, and a myriad of other sensory input into the memory. Nothing works better at ensuring an event is remembered than trauma, however. If this is so, how do we truly forgive?

Within ourselves, we

In a war, trauma will occur.

The world has its programs and systems to facilitate forgiveness, but they in no way achieve what the Spirit of God can achieve when we allow His presence to renew our minds.

Many may wonder what PTSD has to do with forgiveness. The

So how do we truly forgive? Where do we even begin to rewire

Many people will try to convince you that forgiveness is a

Our minds have to be renewed

God’s forgiveness of man is the perfect example of true

Just like every good father, as we raise our children we can

God changed His approach to mankind.

As mortal fleshly people,

The act of forgiveness is a powerful life-changing action. In 1881-1894 Russia was ruled by a repressive Tsar Alexander III. His wife held an entirely different composition. On one occasion Alexander had sentenced a man to excel. He only wrote in his proclamation, “Pardon impossible, to be sent to Siberia.” Maria, his wife, forever changed the life of the prisoner when she moved the comma within the edict to read, “Pardon, impossible to send to Siberia.”  By moving the comma, she changed the outcome. The same is true in our spiritual life. The Cross Of Christ moved the Comma that once definded our eternal fate.

We had a sentence of death over our head that read, “Forgiveness impossible, to be sentenced to death.” The Cross of Christ moved the comma, and the proclamation over our life now reads, “Forgiveness, impossible to be sentenced to death.” We can not live a life of unforgiveness and expect God to forgive us.

Even under the new proclamation for eternal life, we are still accountable if we return to a lifestyle of sin.

21 Then Peter came to him and asked, “Lord, how often should I forgive someone who sins against me? Seven times?”

22 “No, not seven times,” Jesus replied, “but seventy times seven!

23 “Therefore, the Kingdom of Heaven can be compared to a king who decided to bring his accounts up to date with servants who had borrowed money from him. 24 In the process, one of his debtors was brought in who owed him millions of dollars. 25 He couldn’t pay, so his master ordered that he be sold—along with his wife, his children, and everything he owned—to pay the debt.

26 “But the man fell down before his master and begged him, ‘Please, be patient with me, and I will pay it all.’ 27 Then his master was filled with pity for him, and he released him and forgave his debt.

28 “But when the man left the king, he went to a fellow servant who owed him a few thousand dollars. He grabbed him by the throat and demanded instant payment.

29 “His fellow servant fell down before him and begged for a little more time. ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it,’ he pleaded. 30 But his creditor wouldn’t wait. He had the man arrested and put in prison until the debt could be paid in full.

31 “When some of the other servants saw this, they were very upset. They went to the king and told him everything that had happened. 32 Then the king called in the man he had forgiven and said, ‘You evil servant! I forgave you that tremendous debt because you pleaded with me. 33 Shouldn’t you have mercy on your fellow servant, just as I had mercy on you?’ 34 Then the angry king sent the man to prison to be tortured until he had paid his entire debt.

35 “That’s what my heavenly Father will do to you if you refuse to forgive your brothers and sisters from your heart.”

Matthew 18:21-35 New Living Translation (NLT)

Even amid a forgiven life, we can bring upon ourselves the debt of our past. For this reason, we must be quick to forgive those that trespass against up. The establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven was founded upon the act of forgiveness. For the Kingdom to manifest in our life, we must begin with the foundation of forgiveness.

In Matthew 6:14-15 and in the Lord’s prayer recorded in Luke 11: 2-4, we see that the forgiveness

One of the hardest things to do is forgive yourself. To other people, they only see our outward persona. Most people never know what in honestly within our hearts. Most of us would prefer to suffer death than to have the thoughts and intents of our heart or the mistakes of our past on public display. However, within our minds, we parade our failures and faults contently. We judge ourselves, within ourselves without mercy.

This continual self-shamming prevents us from seeing our real value. It is a trick of the enemy to keep us rehearsing the failures of our past to prevent us from seeing the victories of today. The outcome of these actions only results in shame, guilt, and condemnation.

The funny thing is if we have asked God to forgive us He has cast those sins into the sea of forgetfulness to be remembered no more. So why do we continually dig up our past? It seems to be a trait that man innately possesses. As Proverbs 16:25 says, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but the end is the way of death.”

As long as we continually interrogate, judge and condemn ourselves, we will never be victorious.

As long as we continually interrogate, judge and condemn ourselves, we will never be victorious. Everything that God has said about us as children of God is made void when we allow unforgiveness of our own mistakes to burden our souls with the same guilt and condemnation.

People make mistakes. We all have a past. Some people have past sins that have had or could have devastating consequences on their lives. But we have to move beyond our failures and press towards the mark of the high calling in Christ Jesus. We must forget those things which are behind us and focus on who Christ has made us be.

We cannot allow our past failures to predict our future but rather allow God’s Word and the purpose to which He has called us into His marvelous light to be the motivating force in our lives. The kingdom of God cannot be manifest from within us if we cannot forgive ourselves.

On the battlefield of spiritual warfare, the wounding of soldiers has grave affects both on the soldier’s life and the outcome of the battle. The enemy of our soul knows that if he can keep us wounded and prevent us from healing, then the scars of the war will never heal. The difference between a healed wound or a festering injury on the battlefield of life can mean the difference between recovery or death. If we truly desire to manifest the Kingdom and expand the territory God has given us to possess, we must go from a wounded soldier to recovery on our spiritual battlefield. We have no testimony to the overcoming power that Jesus unleashed upon His cross without the scars of the spiritual war we encounter.

The biological process of wound healing requires some physiological responses.  At the moment the wound is made the body begins to increase blood flow to the region of the injury.  This increase in blood flow produces a washing of the contaminants found at the wound site.  This washing results in the removal of contamination from the wound.  Once this wound washing occurs, the process of healing can begin.  Blood clotting and infiltrations of white blood cells also occur.  These white blood cells are recruited to the wound site to destroy the invading contaminants. 

In a similar fashion, spiritual injuries begin to heal when the process of true forgiveness is allowed to wash through.  When wounded, such forgiveness allows the blood of Christ to flow into the areas of our lives once destroyed by the contaminants of unforgiveness. As Christ’s healing power begins its work over our wounded spirit, the process of scarring initiates; resentment and bitterness soon heal, and our ability to soldier on takes place.

Satan is more afraid of our scars than the wounds we carry in our spirit.

If Christ from the cross had not forgiven those that wounded him where would we be today?  When Christ said, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do,” the process of healing the wound created between Adam and God now begins to recover.  The law required an eye for an eye.  Christ could have easily invoked the Law from the cross and punished mankind for their transgression against the Son of God.  Mankind would have then suffered the death that they had inflicted upon Him. But instead, Christ offered forgiveness to all of humanity as He bore the sin and shame of all of our transgression.

When the devil sees a wounded soldier he trembles. He knows that he can attack the wounded and cause the soldier to fall under the weight of infection.  But when he sees a scar, he knows that the soldier has undergone the healing process. The soldier is stronger from the injury, and no weapon formed against that soldier can prosper.  Satan is more afraid of our scars than the wounds we carry in our spirit.

We need to be thankful for the scars for they testify of the glory of God to heal our soul.  Without the scars in our life, we have no testimony to the overcoming power of the cross working in our life.  Through the wounds we receive, and the healing that takes place

The children of Israel had a God-given decree that the land of Canaan was to be theirs. Would they remain in the wilderness or take hold of their promise?

The scripture tells us that God wasn’t going to give them all of Canaan at once. Instead, Isreal had to obey God’s specific direction by proactively conquering and possessing that particular land a task that seemed impossible to do. Isreal had grown accustomed to the temporary wilderness blessings that came in miracle form as they journeyed towards Canaan.

During their Jorden river crossing, for instance, the water would part when the priest’s feet touched the water’s edge, they ate manna daily but could not store it for future use, and when they became thirsty, they witnessed water flow from a rock amidst a dry and desolate place. In each of these examples of God’s wilderness miracles, the people of Isreal received their tempory blessing when they actively obeyed Gods instruction.

Jesus is looking for us to show initiative and be proactive about our blessings actively.

When it came time for the people of God to leave behind their tempory wilderness experiences, they were required to be proactive in attaining their permanent promise at journeys end. They struggled with letting temporary blessing go and soon failed to experience Gods lasting reward.

Just as ancient Israel finally acquired their promises through obedience, our journey into God’s provision must be obtained the same way. We can choose to settle for mere handouts or choose to manifest (prove) our own land of promise. God’s Word clearly shows His relational dynamic with people; He divinely provides but His people must reach out and possess.

It’s not uncommon that we too can become spiritually complacent or lazy just as Isreal had become. During our own wilderness experiences, we can always expect our loving God to provide and bless us but remember that these provisional experiences are tempory. When its time to live in our promise, we too must work to enter in.

There comes the point in our journey where Jesus expects us to mature in Him. We can always rely on His miracles when needed, but there reaches a certain point where we must conquer the business that Jesus has given to us. Conquering means to go forward and take siege actively. In other words, He is going to provide us with the opportunity to step up to the plate and swing, so to speak, but will always work along with us as we proactively work towards our lasting legacy.