Forgiveness is a path to healing and peace. Forgiveness is a release or dismissal of something, encompassing both God’s forgiveness of our sins and our responsibility to forgive others, mirroring God’s mercy and grace. What does the Bible say about forgiveness?
Podcast Episode 46 Transcript
Welcome to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast empowering you to take a whole person approach to your wellbeing, spirit, soul, and body. Join me, your host, Dr. Ana Lara, naturopathic doctor, entrepreneur, and a servant of Jesus Christ. We are not just a body, we are spirit and soul. It’s time to integrate medicine and spirituality into our healing. Let’s get started. Welcome back to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Ana Lara. Today I want to continue the series that I started a couple of episodes ago on healing and healing the soul. Today, I want to talk about the power of forgiveness. This is probably not something you hear many doctors discussing. Still, I’ve had several cases of patients where God really was revealing that the underlying root cause of their disease was unforgiveness. So I want to talk a couple of speaking points and at the end I’ll share some stories that I’ve witnessed on forgiveness.
Forgiveness is a path to healing and peace. I know that doesn’t sound like something you think is true, especially if the wounds, if the offenses that someone has caused you right, the hurt that someone has caused you is big. Before I continue on this conversation, I just want to say that this conversation, I am generalizing and I am very aware and being mindful that people listening to this have experienced different situations, different levels of hurt, and the depth of hurt that you’ve experienced is going to vary from person to person and experience to experience. Oftentimes, the deeper the wound is, the bigger the hurt is, the bigger the pain, the harder it is for people to forgive, especially when we haven’t been taught on what forgiveness is or we don’t know this. Understand this from a biblical standpoint, it can be very difficult for people to want to forgive.
There’s an immediate desire to want justice, to be served for those people that have hurt us, that have hurt you for them to be punished for their crime. With that in mind, I am mindfully aware that some people here in this episode may have experienced severe trauma in their childhood or in their life, whether it’s been physical abuse, psychological abuse, sexual abuse, and those wounds are deep and they’re all going to vary. So those are big offenses, right? Big areas of pain and hurt that people have experienced. We should be sensitive to that and respectful of that. I just want you to know if you’re listening or watching this, that I am sensitive to those particular situations. Then some offenses are not as deep and big, yet many people still have a hard time forgiving those offenses from others.
I first want to discuss what the Bible says about forgiveness. The definition of forgiveness is to release, or dismiss of something, encompassing both God’s forgiveness of our sins and our responsibility to forgive others, mirroring God’s mercy and grace. God’s forgiveness and the Bible emphasize that through Jesus Christ, God offers forgiveness of our sins and releases believers from the penalty of our transgressions. A couple of scriptures that I want to read as they relate to forgiveness are Matthew 6:9 – 14. The word of God says in this manner, therefore, pray our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Do not lead and do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one for yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. In Matthew, Jesus is telling his disciples that this is how we should pray in this manner, it’s asking that we are for our own forgiveness and that we are also led to be able to forgive others. So that’s a good scripture that reminds us the importance of forgiveness. The other is Matthew 18, I have several for you guys today.
It’s Matthew 18 verses 21 through 22, and the word of God reads. Then Peter came to him and said, Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me? And I forgive him up to seven times. And Jesus said to him, I do not say to you up to seven times, but up to 70 times seven, that’s a lot of times we have to forgive. And sometimes we find ourselves that we feel we’ve forgiven someone for something they’ve done that has hurt us, but then sometimes goes by and we realize that we haven’t completely healed from that. We haven’t completely surrendered and forgiven. So then you have to go back and forgive again, and you forgive again and you forgive again. We’re going to talk about some of those very, like I said, very sensitive topics and forgiveness because I know that someone’s watching this and they’re like, yeah, it’s easy for you to say to forgive when someone has killed your loved one or you were raped by someone.
I completely understand. We’re going to keep talking about the topics of forgiveness here. The second one is Ephesians scriptures, Ephesians 4:32. It says, “be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another even as God in Christ forgave you.” Trust me, there are times that we have done things to others that have offended others and hurt others, and we want to be forgiven. So that for us to forgive, we also need to exercise forgiveness for others. Forgiveness is like a muscle. The more you do it, the easier it gets, especially on those very easy offenses. The fourth scripture is Mark 1125 through 26.
The word of God says, Whenever you stand praying, and if you have anything against anyone, forgive him that your father in heaven may also forgive you for your trespasses. But if you do not forgive, neither will your heavenly father forgive your trespasses. Once again, the biblical importance of why we should forgive others who’ve caused offense to us or hurt and pain. Remember that every time, what’s really important in a lot of those moments that Jesus heals someone just as a point of reflection, as he heals someone, he also forgives them for their sins. You’ll see these in different stories like the paralyzed man, the woman caught in adultery, the woman who was anointing his feet, the prodigal son. These are all situations where, as Jesus healed them, he forgave them for their sins. Oftentimes, he would tell them, Repent, turn away from your sin.
You’re healed. Repent and turn away from your sin because God’s mercy was on them, and he was willing to heal them regardless of their sins. And remember Jesus, he was on the cross, he prayed and said, father, forgive them for they not know what they are doing. So even Jesus himself, as he was being crucified, he’s asking God the Father to forgive those who were hurting him, who were doing this to him. Some of the benefits of forgiveness, there are benefits of forgiveness to us spiritually, most importantly because you want your soul to be cleansed of any unforgiveness, but also mentally and emotionally and physically. There are benefits that I have seen in patience when they go through the process of forgiving those. Forgiveness is obviously going to help us connect more with God, with God’s heart because God’s heart is one of mercy and one of grace and kindness and compassion and love.
In all of that, he forgives us for the dumb mistakes that sometimes we make, the hurtful things to others. Sometimes we need to take inventory of the things we have done for others, forgive ourselves, ask for forgiveness, and then forgive others. Sometimes that process of forgiveness, which we will talk about more, is not all going to look the same. There’s not a cookie-cutter approach to this, but forgiveness is really going to be a surrendering of whatever you believe should be the outcome of this person for what they did to you. So this is going to allow by you forgiving, it’s going to allow us to learn to mirror God’s mercy and foster a closer relationship to God. By obeying, by forgiving, we’re obeying his commandments and we open ourselves to receive more of God’s grace and mercy mentally. What mental forgiveness does to you is that it’s going to significantly reduce stress and anxiety that you have, depression, whatever emotions that are icky in your body, it’ll help to release that.
So holding onto grudges will create resentment and bitterness, and that will weigh heavily on you mentally and emotionally. I know this from firsthand experience that if you hold onto something for too long, it starts to become unbearable and it starts to affect you the most. Sometimes that forgiveness is for you, not so much for that person. Still, it’s for you to surrender that, like I said, emotionally is another area that will help you release this burden that you’re carrying by not fostering and resentment. I’s going to allow empathy to come in. Sometimes, it takes a lot of spiritual maturity to forgive. So we’re going to continue talking about that. I want to talk about the consequences of unforgiveness. We talked about the benefits of what it does for you mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically, but what are the consequences of unforgiveness?
This is where I want to talk about some of the stories I’ve seen in my practice and what unforgiveness does to you spiritually. First and foremost, you don’t want to get stuck there. There are spiritual complications of not forgiving others. Still, relationally, if it’ll start to affect your relationships, even if it’s not the person who hurt you, you begin to spill over your pain and hurt onto others who love and care about you. It could be you’re spilling over your pain to your spouse, your children, your coworkers, just strangers, and it’s not even their fault what happened to you. They don’t know the hurt that you’re carrying. This is what unresolved grief and pain, unresolved trauma, that you’re stuck in unforgiveness, it’s going to spill over eventually to other people. So, as I said, relationally, there will be consequences. Still, also your physical health, and this is what I find so interesting, how many people who’ve experienced injustice, injustices, serious violations of their anatomy, both physically and emotionally, that they carry this unforgiveness. They start to manifest disease at some point in their life.
A lot of autoimmune conditions can be associated with trauma, especially unforgiveness. Then, there’s been connections of unforgiveness there as well. So things like emotions like bitter. When you have unforgiveness, you’re going to feel bitter, you’re going to have resentment, you be angry, there could still be grief over that experience that’s overpowering you physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Unforgiveness can really take a person captive. You become a slave to this, you become a captive to it. You are imprisoned, and it’s just torture. It’s complete torture. It’s mental, emotional and spiritual torture that you’re living out by not forgiving the person who’s hurt, the person has offended you. This does show up, like I said, physically in diseases, obviously mentally and emotionally, a lot of issues there, and it spills over into your relationship. Living with fear because you’re living with fear of being hurt again and your nervous system.
If you’ve heard any of the past episodes, when I talk about stress and the nervous system, our nervous system is designed to say you’re safe or you’re not safe. If your body is stuck on I’m not safe, and it’s because something seriously happened to you, you haven’t healed from that. There’s still unforgiveness, resentment, anger, any of that, your nervous system gets stuck and I’m not safe. Then, soon before you know what, nothing is safe going out. Relationships, everyone is just not safe. So, living with this fear of being hurt again, there is a physiological change that’s going on in your body, chemicals that are hormones and stress hormones that are being put out that shouldn’t be put out, but because we have this unresolved trauma and this unforgiveness there. I know, like I said, it’s easy to tell people to forgive, but the deeper the wound, the bigger the wound, the harder it can be for people to forgive.
There is a process of going through that and everyone’s process is different. The timeline is different for everyone as long as you get there. That’s really the goal. It’s easy to feel that the person who has hurt you doesn’t deserve or earn your forgiveness. I know I have been there where they don’t deserve to be forgiven. They did wrong. Sometimes you’re right, their actions were wrong, but forgiveness is not trying to justify. It’s not excusing them. It’s not saying that they were right and you were wrong. The forgiveness really is a surrendering that you’re saying, you know what, God, I don’t understand why this person did this and it’s hurt me a lot, but I can’t carry this burden with me anymore. So I’m willing to surrender this. Leave it in your hands. God is the one who is responsible for bringing justice and righteousness in all situations.
Sometimes it’s a process to surrender, but it is so worth it when you surrender it to God. So I want to talk about a couple of scenarios where I saw that my patience, this particular patient, her root cause of disease was linked to unforgiveness. Now you have to understand, I’m not saying that I’m an expert at this by any means, but I am very good at observing situations, analyzing things and connecting the dots. I feel like I am spirit-led in situations where God reveals something to me for a higher reason, a higher purpose. Oftentimes, it has nothing to do with me. It has to do with the individual in front of me. So in 2021, I had this patient who was very young, she was about 33 years old and came in, had cervical cancer and has spread metastasized, and it was pretty severe. The doctors had done as much as they could, and they pretty much told her there was nothing else they could do. When the patient came to me, she very debilitated.
I greeted her and she was with her husband and also her sister, one of her sisters accompanied her. We would do treatments and so forth. Still there wasn’t any real resolution. Something was off. Because several people were in the room, it was hard for me and the patient to just have a conversation between her and me. So at some point, she got to be very debilitated, wasn’t coming in anymore, and a couple of months went by and I thought maybe she passed away. I hadn’t been in contact with the family. Then I get a call months later from the husband and says, Hey, would you be willing to do a home visit and maybe do treatments here? She still wants to try. I was blown away that she was still alive because her condition, as severe as it was, there was no way that she could have lived an additional three months in that as bad as she was.
The doctors had told her that was it. It had been so aggressive, the cancer was so aggressive. So I felt in my heart that I had to say yes, though in my mind I didn’t want to. So I said, yes, let me go. Let me go check her out, see what her condition is. I haven’t seen her in months. I don’t know if we were able to do anything at this point. So as a courtesy, I just did a quick stop and visit her at her home and she was lying there very sedated, but she recognized me and she was very happy to see me, and she asked me if I could do this IV treatment on her. I said, sure. I said, I’ll have to come back later this week and do it, but I could do that. So I go back later in the week and get everything set up.
I start to set up the IV, do the IV, and she begins to have pain. It’s exactly in the area where her cancer started, which was in her uterus at this point. I told her it’s really up to you if you want to continue with this IV or not. I am going to leave it up to you. It’s your choice. I don’t want you to be in more pain. Because she decided for herself in that visit that she was not going to take any of the pain medications so that she was mentally present. When I was there, she told me that, and she did look very alert. So we were having a conversation. Her husband had left, the sister was in the house, but she was somewhere else on the other side of the house. The woman began to open up and say, I don’t know how I got here.
She had a very weak, feeble voice, very weak still, but very mentally present. She says, I don’t know how I got here. I used to eat healthy. I used to exercise. I did all organic. How did I get here? I was dumbfounded myself and I said, I don’t know. How did you get here? What happened that led you to this point? What was going on in your life before you were diagnosed with cancer? She started to just cover her head and agony and just agonizing and just started to cry. Now I’m going to stop right there because prior, before her husband left, I noticed that when he would enter the room, there was a complete shift in the room.
I could feel anger coming from her against him. I could feel it, I could see it. I witnessed every time he came in the room, she just hated that He would walk in and leave, and there was a complete shift of emotional energy in that room, palpable. We’re talking now and she’s telling me her story. She started to tell me about the abuse, the infidelity, how she caught her husband and her sister having an affair in her bedroom, and how they completely tried to make her think she was crazy. She was delusional. She was seeing things, and she started to feel manipulated mentally. She said, I thought that I was under a witchcraft spell. She, well, she was part of it as part of a narcissistic situation there. She couldn’t say that, but I could see that through her telling me the story.
I was there for three hours, three hours, and she’s telling me her story and sharing her pain. Immediately, the Holy Spirit, within the first 30 to 40 minutes of having a conversation with her, I immediately felt Holy Spirit tell me to help her, walk her through forgiveness, that this is where she was stuck and God was giving her time. God was so gracious and merciful to give her time to heal from that before she died. I thought she was holding on to life because she had children. I thought she was just holding off for another day in life, but actually God was giving her grace to work on the unforgiveness and she was talking. I could feel the bitterness, the resentment, her anger in all of that, and also the grief, right? The grief of all of that, the loss that she felt like she was just abused, and she was now, was this man okay for doing all that?
Absolutely not. He came across to me as the husband who loves and takes care of her, and he’s willing to do it all to ensure she’s alive and healthy and can make it through. That’s what he was projecting to me. But what this person was telling me through her story was that he and her sister hurt her deeply, deeply wounded her, and she could not let go of that anger of that resentment, right? The bitterness. And I started immediately once I felt in my spirit that you need to forgive them. She went in complete agony, was just tormented by the idea that I’m going to forgive this man and this woman for what they’ve done to me and look at me where I’m at. I started speaking to her, saying, This is why you need to forgive. Because our father, who died on the cross, Jesus, forgave us.
He died on that cross for our sins. He wants you to do when you leave this world. I know that’s really hard to tell someone, but that’s what the spirit was telling me, he wants you to be healed in this area before you go. He wants you to go in peace and you need your soul to be restored and healed and forgiveness is for you. It was a process. We spent about two hours. I was praying to her, praying for her, and helping her through the forgiveness. Eventually, she did. There was a shift in her. There was a shift in the room, and I could feel this peacefulness when it was set and done; she was peaceful about it. I didn’t expect this woman to do what she did, and that was that she blessed me by praying for me. She’s on her deathbed. She was full of anger and hate and this bitterness and having a difficult time forgiving. But it was as if God used her to return a blessing to me and pray for me, this is not the first time it’s happened where someone’s under a deathbed and I’m praying for them and they end up praying and blessing me. This is how good God is: his mercy will spread and touch everyone. And I knew that that would be the last time I saw her.
I thought, what just happened here? I told her that until we met again, my friend and I remember her telling me that I parted ways, just her expressing her gratitude. I sat in my car and cried because I was like, God, what did you just have me do? I am not supposed to be doing this. I felt weird, but God had allowed me not just to witness, but to be an active participant in the life of someone else struggling to forgive. I’m telling you that some of you are really struggling to forgive, and these wounds are old. They’re very old. They might be 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. They’re old and some of them are recent and they’re fresh wounds. The Lord has told me before that when I find myself stuck in forgiving someone, there was one time the Lord said, you can carry this burden for five days.
You can carry this unforgiveness for five weeks, for five months, for five years or 50 years, but you decide how long you want to carry that burden. When God told me that in that moment, I was like, I don’t want to carry this another hour. I’m ready to surrender it right now. Lord, take it off my hands. Lift this heaviness and this unforgiveness and anger off of my heart, my soul, my mind, and every cell in my body. I surrender it. I don’t want to carry this. I let it go and I let you take over it. Fill me with your peace. Fill me with your grace and your mercy. Because in that situation, with this particular situation, it had to do with my daughter and a teacher who was very inappropriate with my daughter, a female teacher, and had hurt my baby girl and I didn’t like it.
So in my mind, I wanted vengeance. I wanted to punish this grown woman for hurting my child, and it was hurting me physically. I could physically feel ill. I could feel it in my heart, in my soul. I didn’t want to carry that anymore, as I forgave her, and this burden was lifted. Then I asked for God’s spirit to fill me with his peace. His mercy is grace. Then I ask, Lord, you speak through my mouth. You let me lean on your mind and your understanding, speak through me so I can handle this situation the best possible way, the way you would handle it. Jesus, I want you to help me handle this situation the same way. Let me walk away with respect, with honor, with kindness, with compassion. It happened exactly that way. Not because I’m perfect or I’m a superhuman.
Nope. Because I wanted to go into that classroom and grab her by the hair. That was my flesh. That’s what I wanted to do as a mom. But I knew that that’s not what God was calling me to be that way. So sometimes we are the ones who really need the work to forgive. Sometimes God will put you in situations where you are meant to help others, lead them into forgiving those, even if it’s big offenses. Look, I work with a lot of women and some men as well who have confided in me their sexual abuse, the sexual trauma that they’ve experienced when they were young or maybe as teenagers. Let me tell you, those are heavy, heavy burdens. It is not just a physical trauma, a physical assault. It has been the soul of that child that has been wounded, and that kind of wound God needs to heal.
But we, as a community, can help people like that by praying specifically into those points of pain. Where’s the pain? Is it that situation? I’ll tell you, in working with a lot of sexual assault victims, oftentimes that resentment and that anger and that unforgiveness, it turns to them, I was surprised. I thought they were upset at that person for what they did. And they are. But they start to feel the guilt themselves. They start to resent themselves and be angry. I should have done something. I should have said this. I should have told someone why. What if I had done this? They start to take it out on themselves and blame themselves for what someone else did to themself to them. They start to blame themselves. They had control over that. Then now we need to help that person to forgive themselves for blaming themselves for something they didn’t do.
See, when you’re a child and you experience trauma in that time in your life, you have limitations of what resources you have access to. You had limitations of understanding what was going on. You didn’t have the way to handle that situation. But now that you’re older, you have more awareness, tools, and resources, and you can heal those wounds from childhood. Then when we turn to God for guidance to heal those wounds in our spiritual heart, the wounds in our soul, we can be freed and delivered from that pain. Sometimes it is a process. Can I tell you that healing is a process? It is sometimes not a one-time event.
Some people get a miracle and that one-time prayer or deliverance, that one-time experience it, they’re free from that and praise God for that. But for some people, it is a process. That’s okay. Be patient with yourself. Give yourself grace. Give yourself mercy and allow God to work in you. Allow God to continue to heal you, to get to the point of forgiving those who have offended you and forgiving yourself for holding yourself hostage to something that happened long time ago. There is freedom in that. I have seen it. I have worked with many women who’ve experienced being able to forgive and being freed from those traumas and men as well.
You could see it in them. They carry themselves in a whole different light because God’s light is in them and they’re freed from that, so that they’re not going to be held back by those experiences. This is just one of the many stories of where people were; they had a certain medical condition, and I could see that the root really was this unforgiveness, whether it’s to someone else or for themselves. If anything, forgive others for your own wellbeing, your peace of mind, your soul, your health, and your physical wellbeing, because it is not worth it carrying that pain. It just isn’t. You’ll be freed from that. You want to live a life that’s free. And if that happened when you were a child and now you’re 40 years old and you could live another 30, 40 years, why would you want to live the next 30, 40 years as a hostage to that experience?
Sometimes, there is some emotional release work that needs to happen in the physical body, emotions that get stuck in the physical body need to be released. That can happen in many different ways. We’ve talked about that in other episodes. Here are some steps on where to start with forgiveness that I have found have been helpful for me even as of recent. So the very first thing is to acknowledge the pain and the hurt. Acknowledge your emotions associated to that situation or that person. When you give attention to this and feel and release, it enlightens the burden a little bit. So forgiveness is not, like I said, about excusing or justifying or condoning someone else’s actions. Instead, it’s a reflection of the mercy and love that God has shown on us.
Therefore, we must learn for ourselves to do the same. If you give yourself permission to feel the pain and the emotions, it’s going to lessen, it’s going to make it easier to surrender that, to release it, and let God carry that. So it’s okay to acknowledge the injustice that this person has caused you in your life. I always say that unforgiveness is like holding a knife, right? You have the knife in your hand, the blade part on your hand, and you’re squeezing it tight. It’s hurting you. That person might not even acknowledge that. They might not even realize that they did harm. They might not be admitting that the action that you had against you is harmful because some people will justify their wrongdoing. We don’t have control of what other people think, say or do. So when we forgive, we let go of that knife, that blade we’re holding onto, and we stop allowing that to hurt us.
We let go of that experience. I know some of you’re saying it’s easier said than done. It’s a process and it works. Acknowledge the pain and let it go. The second step of working on forgiveness is to consider how the hurt and the pain has affected you. We can learn and grow from all experiences good and bad. How has this pain changed you? How detrimental was this person’s mistake to your life or someone else’s life? So someone I know, people who, their son, their daughter, their loved one was murdered by someone else. And so man, you’re talking about ending a life prematurely, and that’s very difficult to forgive. But when I hear the stories of individuals who have forgiven those that took someone else’s life, there’s so much freedom in that. There’s so much power in that. For me, whatever offend someone said to me or did to me, it’s easy for me to let that go.
How has this experience built character in you? How has it shaped you to bring something good into the world? So how can you transform, use this experience to transform you and more importantly, to transform other people’s lives? You hear people who were victims of certain crimes or certain situations and they get healed from that, and they go on to educate other people on how to prevent that from happening to their children or their loved ones or whatever the situation might be. So how can you turn that terrible experience and transform it into being a positive experience for yourself and for other people to grow? And I’m going to tell you, when you heal from whatever trauma and you forgive that experience or that person no longer has power and authority over you, you’re freed from actually what happens is that you are empowered by forgiving.
Now you can speak about that experience. You can speak about that trauma with power and authority to bring awareness to other people and to bring healing to them because you could heal through it. So that gives permission to other people to heal through that. So take into consideration consider why this offense has affected you in such a way and understanding that some experiences, like I said, some experiences are going to vary of intensity, whether it’s rape, murder of a loved one versus someone cussing you out. There’s a huge difference in that at this point in my life, if someone cussed me out, I wouldn’t care. I would just let it slide off of me and move on with my day. Those offenses before 20, 30 years ago would really upset me, but now I don’t hold onto that kind of stuff. The third step is to accept.
Accept that you cannot change the past. There’s no point of you ruminating over it, going back and dissecting that and tearing apart. No matter how much you wish this pain could go away, you cannot go back to the past and change it. The only way is to surrender it and forgive, to allow this kind of relief and surrender, right? The fourth step to help you move towards forgiveness is the word determine. Determine whether you’re ready to forgive now or do you want to hold that burden, like I said earlier, for five days, five weeks, five years, 50 years? Determine how long do you want to hold onto this unforgiveness. Or is it time to start healing through that? That might involve getting others to help you, whether it’s a counselor, a friend, getting some professional help, a pastor, or having someone help you through this. You might need help from someone else, but determine if you’re ready to surrender this and if you need help to surrender and forgive through that situation. Because like I said, and also in this I want to say before I move to the next step here is that some situations you can resolve, things you can repair, resolve this relationship. In some you just can’t. I never encourage people to go try to repair the relationship with the person who raped them.
You can forgive them. There’s some situations also that you can forgive them without having to tell them verbally. You can forgive them, and that’s enough. There’s some situations that if you do tell them and tell ’em, I forgive you, you might be surprised. They might not see that they did anything wrong, and you might be even triggered more so and upset because they don’t acknowledge that they even did anything wrong to begin. You have to determine whether to talk to that person about it or just forgive and let go. The fifth step is repair. So like I said, if appropriate, will you repair this relationship with the person who hurt you? If it’s something, maybe they stole something from you or they spread some gossip, is it repairable? Can you repair the relationship? Do you need to set new boundaries or set boundaries?
Maybe you failed to set boundaries with this person and now you need to set boundaries with them. Is this person even willing to repair the relationship? Maybe they don’t want to. This is going to really be up to you. Don’t let anyone make you feel bad of or make you feel like there’s something you have to do. You decide for yourself. The sixth step is to learn what is forgiveness. What does it mean to you? What does it look like? What does forgiveness mean to you in this particular situation? Each situation may vary a little bit, right? Learn the benefits of forgiveness. It’s really for you, that’s the greatest power there. So seven is the actual act of forgive for forgiveness is going to start with you and God, that’s it. If you decide to take it there further, that’s up to you.
But the forgiveness starts with you and with God, ask God to help you to surrender this pain and walk you through forgiveness. Forgiveness is going to free us all. It’s going to really, like I said, it’s just going to empower you to keep moving on in life. I always have to remind myself that in my walk with Jesus, I have learned that if that person knew better at the moment that they did the offense, they would have done better. We have to, like I said, I’m not excusing their behavior, but even the person who raped someone, it makes you wonder what was their life like that they think this is okay. Yeah, that completely shifts your perspective of having compassion for the one who caused harm for you. Yeah, that is really difficult to do right there. That is a sign of spiritual maturity that we are all working on because it’s very difficult to have compassion to someone who deeply hurt you and wounded you, especially if it was continuous hurt.
But if their spirit, their human spirit, this higher part of who they are, knew better. If their conscious mind knew better at the moment, they would not have done what they did to you. I truly believe that. But because we live in a world that is full of broken people, unhealthy unhealed wounds that are instilled in people, and people keep passing on their pain and they’re hurt onto others, they don’t have these wounds that are healed, they’re passing that pain. And so because of that, their hearts and their minds are deceived and they do wrong. If someone is fully healed from their wounds, they would not pass on that hurt to others. You see this continuous pattern, a young boy is sexually molested or raped by another male when they’re five or six or seven years old, and oftentimes that young boy grows up and he’ll do the same thing to another young boy.
It’s an unhealed wound that wasn’t healed, and they justify the behavior and pattern. There’s so much psychologically happening, spiritually happening there, and they keep passing this hurt and pain, but have that boy who had that trauma experience to begin with, have received the healing and understanding that this experience that happened to you was not okay. It was wrong, and we need to heal through this and forgive. They would never have passed that pain onto others. It takes a real act of compassion, and only God can help us do that. So just remember that if people knew better, they would do better. And I want to leave you with this scripture from Matthew 1128 through 30. Come to me, all you who are weary and burden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me. For I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.
For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. I love this scripture where Jesus is telling his disciples this as his yoke is easy and his burden is light, and that if we find he’s gentle and humble and heart, and we will find rest for our souls in him, there are some moons that are so deep that there’s counselors, there’s other people that are not going to help you get there, but God can. And so I want to leave you with this. There’s going to be more depth, other episodes on forgiveness and the power of forgiveness, how to get there, and maybe bring in some stories of people who have forgiven deep wounds, right? Or maybe it’s forgiving themselves in that process. How do you get there? It is a process. It’s not going to happen overnight. And if it does, great, give God the praise and the glory that you’ve been healed.
It does happen, and it can happen. I truly believe that a lot of our illnesses, whether it’s physical or mental, it stems from this place of unforgiveness. Is there someone that you have been holding a grudge, anger, or resentment that you haven’t forgiven? Maybe it’s time to take it up to the Lord and ask to help you to heal, to take you through the process of healing so that you can’t forgive and surrender all of this, because none of us should be walking around in this world holding on, carrying so much pain. Just let’s surrender it and let’s move on. Hey, I hope that this message has brought some value to you. If you liked and enjoyed it, like the video, share it with someone who can really benefit from hearing this conversation, and we’ll continue to talk on different ways to heal the soul. So until next time, everyone, be blessed. Thank you for listening to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please like, share and subscribe, help this message reach more people who may need to hear it. Leave your comments. I want to know what you think. If you’re interested in learning more about Raices, visit our website. Until next time, be blessed.