Resources for Today’s Message:
Lysa Terkeurst’s Introduction
- What do we do when someone has failed us?
Message Title: Forgiving What You Can’t Forget
In early 2016, 3 out of 5 of Lysa’s kids were getting married. In January 2016, she heard of a pastor friend of hers who was doing 21 days of prayer and fasting. She wanted to commit to it but she was nervous about the fasting because she gets “hangry”.
A friend said, you don’t have to fast from all food – just the daily habitual food that you crave often. Also, to pray when the craving happened instead of eating the food.
She expected a huge revelation from the Lord after the 21 days of fasting and prayer. Something stirred in her and she thought she heard God saying to do 7 more days. Her thought process was that even the pastor wasn’t going beyond 21 days and she decided to tell God ‘no’.
Then she wrote in her journal that she “knew” that God wanted her to pray for her marriage and to fast and pray for 7 more days. She heard God saying, “Trust my timing and love your husband.” It didn’t seem extremely profound, but she decided to go with it.
She then headed into two weeks of very busy planning with her family for the weddings. It was then the day of her oldest daughter’s rehearsal dinner. Then, she found out that her husband of over 2.5 decades was being unfaithful. It didn’t just break her, it shattered her.
1. Who is God & What Did He Say?
Sometimes, when the cast of life gets so crazy and loud, what’s really helpful is to go back to the last time that you clearly heard God speaking to you. She went back to the prayer journal and was happy that it was there, “trust my timing and love your husband.”
She wondered how heading into 3 weddings could be God’s timing. Now, looking back on it, almost 5 years later, she sees how God gave her and her husband a front row seat to 3 weddings to hear wedding vows over and over again.
We do not serve a do nothing God; He is always working. God doesn’t want to be explained away; He just wants to be invited in. Sometimes we think if we can’t conceive it, then it doesn’t make sense. We serve a limitless God. His thoughts are so much higher than ours.
Also, God doesn’t always listen to your suggestions. This can feel like the bad circumstance is reflective of our God – i.e. a bad circumstance and a bad God. We need to flip it and declare that, “My God is good to me, and my God is good at being God.”
If we make God, and the reality of who He is, our primary focus, then our circumstances can be put in their place. “My God is good to me and my God is good at being God. Therefore, I will not make the assumption that God is doing nothing.”
Our God is always doing something. Our faith falls apart when we are too certain of the wrong things. Trust His timing. God was using even 2016.
2. Trust His Timing
“Love your husband”, felt very confusing. In fact, it felt like her love was desperate – Desperate to beg him to stop doing what he was doing, desperate for him to remember the legacy they had built, and desperate for him to work harder on him.
After months of trying to control him and set up the scene for God to move, she realized later that God does His best work in the unseen. Maybe, it’s just that God is working in the unseen places, deep down in the soul. God was after more than just changed behavior in her husband. He was after his very soul. The miracle was too slow for her human eye to detect.
Love is sometimes full of grace and mercy – though sometimes, love has to get tough. There was lots of grace and mercy, but eventually, Lysa had to say to her husband (Art), “I can love you, and I can forgive you, but I cannot share you, and I cannot save you.” She had to turn Art over to his choices and it was time to truly place him in God’s hands.
3. Healing Through Forgiveness
Shortly after that, she sat in front of her counselor. Her and Art had been walking through it for about 18 months. She thought, surely after all this time, things would be repaired and good again, but everything fell apart again and she was losing hope. We can hear these messages on forgiveness and not know how it’ll turn out because we’re still living in the hurting.
This day, she tied her hair up in a messy bun. She hadn’t been washing her hair regularly and she also realized that she hadn’t put on deodorant. She went into the bathroom and put on some of his peach air freshener. Then she walked in the room smelling like a peach cobbler. The counselor asked, “Lysa, do you want to heal?” She said, yes.” He then said, “It’s a good day to start working on forgiveness.” She felt like Jim (her counselor) must’ve been high.
Lysa felt as though she had an understanding of when forgiveness was ‘possible’ and when it was ‘not possible’, and that she was in the ‘not possible’ zone. She thought forgiveness was only possible when the other person was sorry, or if reconciliation was possible. At that point Lysa and Art weren’t even in communication. He hadn’t said he was sorry, and he wasn’t even owning what he had done. Forgiving didn’t just feel ridiculous, but also unsafe. She felt like her resentments were also keeping her safe. Resentment was the only form of retaliation that she had that wouldn’t get her arrested.
Since he had not repented or desperately said, “I have learned all of the lessons.” Since he had not suffered as much as her, it felt like forgiveness was an unfair gift to give to that kind of person.
Jim gave her a stack of 3 x 5 cards to write on about her pain. She started writing down all the ways she had been hurt. She laid down card after card. There was a whole lot of pain. When the counselor’s cards were absolutely filled with all of the pain, she realized she wanted the counselor to say, “Oh, you’re right, forgiveness is not possible.” Instead, he looked back and said, “Lysa, I believe you. What happened to you was devastating and it was wrong.” It was empowering for someone else to bear witness to her pain.
If nobody else has dared to do that for you, today, I want to do that for you: “I believe you. What happened to you was wrong. It was wrong what they did. They should not have done that to you. It was wrong. I am so sorry for what happened to you. Friend, you deserve to stop suffering for what another person has done to you. The only way to sever the source of suffering is through the power of forgiveness.”
She kept attaching her ability to heal based on choices that the other person may have never been willing to make. When you do that, you’re giving permission to the one who hurt you, to hijack your ability to heal.
4. Forgiveness is God’s Gift to the Hurting Human Heart
Forgiveness is God’s gift to the hurting human heart. It’s not something we conjure up inside of ourselves. Forgiveness flows from God to us. It’s leaning in and deciding to cooperate with what God has already done. The forgiveness flows through you to that other person.
We all have a story, and we have a story that we tell ourselves. We have to listen carefully to the story we tell ourselves. It will reveal whether or not we’re still hurting. We may never get the epic moment where that person tells us they’re sorry.
If we listen to how we tell the story, if we dare to share the story with the experiential wisdom we’ve gained along the way, that makes that failure useful rather than useless, then you allow that failure to work for you rather than against you. The way the person shattered you doesn’t have to render you useless. You can have a story just like Joseph in the Bible. He was betrayed by his brothers but he had the choice to either forgive his brothers, or to sit in the bitterness and let it turn him into somebody he wasn’t supposed to be.
“You intended to harm me, but God.” – That’s stepping toward useful. “You intended to harm me.” – that statement alone is useless. God can take anything and use it to make us even more impactful for the saving of many lives. He will use it for good.
5. Feelings should be Indicators, not Dictators
When you’re still feeling so angry, it might feel too soon to forgive. That’s until one day, you allow that hurt to turn into hate. It never seems to be the perfect moment to forgive. That moment is today.
Her counselor said, “Just go card by card and say, “I forgive this person for (the fact of what they did to me).”” Your feelings will not sign on to it for a while. Hurt feelings don’t want to cooperate with Holy instructions.
6. Forgiveness is both a Decision and a Process
We must walk through the process of what happened to us. Feelings should not dictate whether or not we forgive.
She worked with her counselor to declare that, “I forgive this person for (the fact of how they hurt me) and whatever my feelings will not yet allow, the blood of Jesus will surely cover it.”
When she did that card by card, she looked back and the pain was no longer staring back at her.
Jesus came to forgive. No wonder the enemy wants to keep us from forgiveness.
Jesus has brought the blood, now we have to bring the word of our testimony.
In the middle of a heart that’s still hurting, we are empowered to forgive.
Allow your heart to be too beautiful of a place for bitterness, anger, and unforgiveness to live in it.
Also, you don’t have to have the other person standing in front of you to forgive them. Somebody may feel stuck in unforgiveness because they aren’t there. You may feel like forgiving them doesn’t count. It counts the minute you step toward being obedient to God. If that person ever decides to receive it, it will bless their heart too.
Your decision is to have a marked moment of forgiveness.
At that moment, she looked at Jim, and felt like, 6 minutes from now, her phone is going to send her a video memory, whether it be minutes, days, hours, or months, she knew that at some point, she would be reminded of her pain. Will that make her a forgiveness failure? No; that’s a lie from the pit of hell.
Forgiveness is both a decision and a process.
Now that you’ve forgiven, you have to walk through the healing process of working through the impact it had on you.
7. Every Emotional Trauma is both Fact and Impact
The trigger can hit you out of nowhere and you can feel like forgiveness just doesn’t work for you because you’re still hurting. A triggered moment of pain doesn’t mean you’re a forgiveness failure.
A trigger means there’s an emotional impact.
If the full impact would have hit you at the moment you forgave, it may have killed you. But God is good enough to allow it to seep into your life over time. The trigger is an opportunity to forgive in that moment. Stop and say, “I know what this is. It’s an indication for more healing. I forgive this person for (the fact of how they hurt me) and whatever my feelings will not yet allow, the blood of Jesus will surely cover it.”
Forgiveness is God’s provision for the hurting human heart.
Our words frame our reality. If the wounding/hurt we’ve experienced is going to move us forward, and if forgiveness will make us more useful, then the story we tell ourselves needs to make sure that we know that the pain will be used by God for both our good and the good of others.
8. Moving Forward as the Offender
What if you were the one who hurt someone? You may ask, “How can I move forward if the failure was done by me?”
God’s forgiveness can flow through you, then it can flow to you. You are not a failure that is now useless to God.
Lysa’s husband eventually came home and he had a decision on how he could walk into the room. He could see himself as a villain, or the victim. We have an enemy and it is not him. When the world found out what they were walking through, it was simultaneously the best and the worst day of his life – because everyone knew. He chooses to walk into every room as a healed man walking in victory.
Art is the safest person in any room that he stands in because he knows the gravity of pain, and he is allowing his failure to be used by God in a profound way to allow others to see glimpses of hope.
9. Daily Forgiveness
Matthew 6:9-15 New International Version (NIV)
9 “This, then, is how you should pray:
“‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name,
10 your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us today our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’
14 For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15 But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.
In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus used over half of the words focused on forgiveness.
Jesus means we are supposed to incorporate this forgiveness prayer into every day of our lives. This forgiveness thing is not just for the hard and horrific stuff. It’s supposed to be a part of our daily life, i.e., eating, breathing, sleeping, walking, talking, and forgiving.
Forgiveness is so powerful when we understand it. We’re supposed to do it before we even get out of bed in the morning. When we taste the power of forgiveness, we send it ahead into situations before we get there.
You can be offended and not live offended. You can feel hurt and not live hurt. You can feel bitter and not live bitter. Forgiveness is a powerful thing.
God sent Jesus to die on a cross to forgive us of our sins. When we die, there’s no fear of where we’re going to go. When we walk toward the light of God, when we’ve been covered by the blood of Jesus, we run to Him and step into a glorious eternity with Him. How? We believe that Jesus is the son of God. You believe it in your heart and confess it with your mouth.
Prayer: Jesus, I acknowledge you are the son of God, sent to die on a cross, to save me from my sin, and when you died, and you rose again, you defeated the power of sin and death. I believe that I can now receive you as my Lord and my Savior, for every day of my life. From now on, I am a child of God, dearly loved, forgiven, and set free.
- Text ‘Saved’ to 918-992-7623 for resources and content to help you to be empowered to be able to forgive.
You can still get “Relationship Goals” the book and study guide today for additional support for your relationships:
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SUMMARY NOTES
- Who is God & What Did He Say?
- Trust His Timing
- Healing Through Forgiveness
- Forgiveness is God’s Gift to the Hurting Human Heart
- Feelings should be Indicators, not Dictators
- Forgiveness is both a Decision and a Process
- Every Emotional Trauma is both Fact and Impact
- Moving Forward as the Offender
- Daily Forgiveness
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Abby Olurin Dames
I love Jesus, my husband, Will, my toddler daughter, Sola, and the beautiful friends and family in our lives. Me and Will are from the Bahamas, but we currently reside in Austin, Texas. We joined TC Nation as online members of Transformation Church in 2017 when we moved to Austin from Miami, Florida. In 2020, we also happily took on a more active role with the E-Fam of Elevation Church by fellowshipping with other married couples and were pleased to have the opportunity to join TC Beta Belong Groups. I believe that representing God doesn’t have to be done in “traditional spaces”. After listening to Pastor Mike's sermon, "Who's the Minister Here?", it became my mission to shed light on Christ in all arenas, including, but not limited to, corporate America, marketing, technology, and finance. I'm not perfect, but I'm progressing. I am a marketer, but first, I am a Christian, and the aim of this blog is to publicly share my sermon notes as a form of stewardship. I hope that these message notes can bring clarity to anything you may be seeking and help you to experience the peace and glory of Jesus Christ. I'm happy to pray for you as well if you ever wanted to shoot me an email. The effectual fervent prayers of many of you have helped countless circumstances in my life and in the lives of those around me. Thank you! Also, for any Amazon specific links that you see, as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
