How To Forgive When The Hurt Was So Unfair
**Understanding the distinctiongiveness vs. Reconciliation: Unlocking Healing and Setting Healthy Boundaries
Understanding the distinction between forgiveness and reconciliation is critical for spiritual and emotional well-being. The sources stress that while both are vital for a healthy life, they are fundamentally different concepts with separate requirements and outcomes.
Forgiveness: God’s Non-Negotiable Prescription for Healing
Forgiveness is presented as an absolute command by God. It is defined as God’s prescription for the hurting human heart to heal.
Why Forgiveness is Necessary for Personal Health
Initially, the sheer commitment to forgiveness led to an extensive study of over a thousand hours of biblical passages, with approximately 75% of that time spent searching for a loophole—questioning if God truly intended for everything to be forgiven. What was discovered is that forgiveness is mandatory.
A key insight is that forgiveness is primarily about the injured individual and can have very little to do with the other person. If a person waits for the offender to acknowledge their actions or apologize, they risk attaching their well-being to the person who hurt them the most for the rest of their life. Healing requires detaching the ability to move forward from the offender’s actions.
It is essential to understand that the desired “epic big conversation” where the offender falls to their knees in repentance may never happen, perhaps because they walked away, passed away, or do not feel bad about their actions. If healing is contingent upon that conversation, one may never heal. Therefore, at some point, the injured person must “stick a stake in the ground” and declare: “I have suffered over this enough; I deserve to heal, and forgiveness is my choice”.
Forgiveness vs. Enabling Behavior
Jesus’ instruction to forgive “70 times 7” does not mean remaining in close proximity to an offender and allowing abuse to perpetuate. Instead, it suggests creating enough distance so that the injured person can forgive repeatedly without being “destroyed in the process,” even if the offender never changes.
Forgiveness must never be in the context of enabling bad behavior to continue without consequence. Jesus laid down His life to accomplish a high and holy purpose, not to enable harmful actions.
The Spiritual and Physical Costs of Unforgiveness
Unforgiveness carries devastating consequences, both spiritually and physically.
- Spiritual Danger: Unattended anger and unforgiveness create spiritual vulnerability. Ephesians 4:26 warns believers not to let the sun go down on their anger, so as “not to give the devil a foothold”. Passages about unresolved anger, resentment, and unforgiveness are often connected to the enemy being nearby, whether described as “crouching at your door” (Genesis 4) or seeking a “foothold” (Ephesians 4). Unforgiveness is metaphorically described as “dropping blood in the ocean and the sharks draw near,” signaling a call for the enemy to come in and have a “heyday”.
- The Poison Analogy: Holding resentments is likened to “you drinking poison and expecting the other person to get sick”. The gift given by unforgiveness is described as a “cyanide pill” to oneself.
- Physical Illness: The somatic (body) effects of unforgiveness are severe. A Duke University study, conducted longitudinally over many years, concluded that unforgiveness was the number one killer in America. This was specific to individuals who agreed, “I will never forgive that person,” leading to issues like cardiovascular problems.
For a Holy Spirit-indwelled believer, willfully stating, “I will not forgive you,” is considered sinning against that person (violating agape love) and sinning against God.
Forgiveness as a Daily Decision and Process
Forgiveness is not just a single moment but a volitional choice followed by a process. It should be as much a part of daily life as eating, breathing, and sleeping.
Daily Practice and Scriptural Instruction
The Lord’s Prayer, given by Jesus as the essential guide for prayer, devotes significant time to forgiveness, connecting the need for “daily bread” with the need for forgiveness and deliverance from the “evil one”. This connection suggests a daily requirement for sweeping the heart clean.
Ephesians 4:26–32 provides clear instruction on how to tend to anger:
- Morning: Sweep the heart clean of any residual malice.
- Evening: Tend well to anything left over in the heart before the sun sets, bringing it before the Lord for help.
- Action: “Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander along with every form of malice”.
- Replacement: “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other just as in Christ God forgave you”.
The Healing Journey Script
The path to forgiveness starts by addressing the initial question, “Do you want to heal?”. The process involves acknowledging the magnitude of the hurt:
- Acknowledge the Weight: Writing down “evidence of how I’d been hurt”—things said, things done, and ways one was betrayed. Recognizing that carrying this heavy weight leads to feelings of confusion, chaos, inability to focus, and being stuck.
- Make the Choice: Making the decision to forgive based on obedience to God.
A powerful script used to facilitate this crucial choice, relying on faith over immediate feelings, is: “I’m now choosing out of obedience to God to forgive this person for this way that they have hurt me… and whatever my feelings will not yet allow for in this moment, the blood of Jesus will surely cover”.
The physical act of covering these written hurts with a representation of Christ’s work (e.g., red felt) can create a “beautiful picture” where the hurt is no longer staring back, but rather “the evidence of the work of Christ”.
While God desires the decision to forgive for the fact of what happened, His grace allows the process of healing to take time, possibly years. When triggers arise and anger or bitterness resurface, it indicates that “there’s more healing” required, making one aware of the ongoing impact.
Reconciliation: A Conditional Requirement
In stark contrast to forgiveness, which is a command, reconciliation is very conditional.
Conditions for Harmony
Reconciliation refers to the restoration of relationship and is contingent on far more than the injured party’s willingness. The goal of the Christian life is peace. Paul states in Romans 12:18, “If possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone”.
The condition for human-to-human reconciliation is harmony, which, in a musical analogy, means all parties must be “conformed to a key”. That key is the Key of Christ.
Reconciliation is possible when individuals are conformed to the key of Christ. Reconciliation is typically not possible when the vices of the flesh are present—including selfish ambition, vain conceit, addictions, adultery, and lying—as these create dissonance, disharmony, and chaos.
For believers, reconciliation with God is offered freely through Christ’s forgiveness, but it remains contingent on repentance—turning away from sin and turning toward Christ. The same standard applies to human relationships.