Ep. 23: The Power of Forgiveness

Why cling to bitterness when you’re the only one who tastes it?

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After my initiation into deliverance ministry, I began to meet with more people to pray for them, and while most people never manifest spiritually the way Jordan did, I did notice how many people were oppressed due to lingering bitterness and forgiveness.

I would even venture to say that unforgiveness is one of the most common unconfessed sins, even among Christians.

There’s power and freedom in forgiveness. I say this from personal experience.

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A week or two before I was set to start my job at church, I had a phone call with my mother that ended with me hurling my phone to the ground.  (This was, more often than not, how I’d end calls with my mom.)  She knew how to push my buttons.  As a child, I didn’t know any better to see the issues in our relationship, but as an adult, I had come to resent her.

That morning, as I scooped my flip phone off the floor and checked it for damage, I had a strong, clear impression:

“You need to forgive your mother.”

“No,” I argued. I couldn’t do it. There was too much pain. I could forgive anyone but her. I dismissed the impression and went about my day.

Later that evening, I went to church to attend a weekly class on healing prayer. I arrived a few minutes early and walked into the classroom to find Pastor Ed and the prayer team coaches sitting in a circle, praying before the class.

One of them glanced up at me. Not wanting to interrupt them, I quietly slipped out into the hallway to kill some time.

The coach who had glanced up at me caught up with me and explained that tonight’s session would be on forgiveness prayer. He said that the leaders had been praying about who should participate in a demonstration when I walked in. He asked if I’d like to be that person.

I replied that just hours earlier, I had gotten an impression to forgive my mother, but I didn’t know if I could do it because I didn’t feel ready to forgive her yet. The coach let me know that we can’t wait until we feel like forgiving someone because we never will, but God calls us to forgive others, and when we obey, the feelings will come.

I reluctantly agreed to be the guinea pig for the night.

The class began with a lesson on why we need to forgive those who have hurt us.  Though there were a lot of good points made, it was a verse of Scripture that really captured my attention:

Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. (Col. 3:13 NIV)

This cut me to the core. I thought, if God could forgive me for all that I’ve done, who am I to not forgive someone else? My sins against God were far greater than anything my mother ever did to push my buttons. I couldn’t receive forgiveness from God and fail to offer it to others– that would make me like the unmerciful servant in the parable (Matt. 18:21-35), and no servant is greater than his master (John 13:16).

Pastor Ed led me through the prayer.  He asked me to forgive my mother for the things she had done to hurt me, encouraging me to be specific about how they made me feel.  As I recounted my pain, revisiting every hurt and wound, I noticed that they all had something in common.

They were all linked to my sense of identity.

I won’t share too many details out of respect for my mother, who has since passed away, but in a nutshell, she had been so overprotective of me, even into adulthood, that I felt less like an individual and more like her possession. It made me feel second-class, as if I had no right to be who I was born to be, but was defined by someone else’s expectations. I had based my sense of identity on how respected I felt by others, and any sense of being disrespected would set me off.

I came to see that this was the wound beneath all the buttons I’d get pushed, no matter who was pushing them: my mother guilt-tripping me over the phone, a driver cutting me off on the freeway, or someone hurling racial slurs at me. The root of it was the resentment I’d harbored all these years.

I processed all of this as I sat there, praying out loud in front of an entire class. Maybe it was therapeutic just to be able to talk about these deep-rooted emotions, but there was more to it than pop psychology: when I verbally forgave and blessed my mother, I felt an enormous weight being lifted off me, as if a lead blanket that I never knew was there was suddenly gone. I felt a sudden sense of lightness and freedom.

I had a breakthrough.

The Bible tells us, “Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold” (Eph. 4:26-27). In the original text, the word for foothold was the Greek topon, used to mean place, license, or opportunity. When we sin, we give the devil opportunities to affect us– to push our buttons, to poke at our unhealed wounds.

If you were to have a physical wound on your arm and you failed to clean it up, treat it, and bandage it, that wound would continue to fester, and if anyone were to continually poke at it, it would only get worse. However, if you allowed it to heal, it would no longer hurt if someone were to come by and touch it. The enemy knows our deepest wounds, and one of the strategies I see them employing is to poke at the same wound throughout our lifetime, as they did with me and my issues of identity. They know which buttons to push, and through forgiveness prayer, you can get rid of some of these buttons.

After I forgave my mother, I continued to have unpleasant phone conversations with her, but they didn’t bother me the way they used to. I wouldn’t get angry, even if she said something that would have normally upset me. Over the next few weeks, I noticed that she stopped saying such things– she stopped pressing my buttons because the buttons weren’t there anymore. Within a matter of months, my relationship with my mother had improved dramatically, all without ever having to have any difficult conversations with her.

The same thing happened with my road rage issues: I no longer got upset if someone cut me off or honked at me. I’d even yield to other drivers, even if I had the right of way. And guess what? People stopped honking at me and cutting me off.

They stopped pushing my buttons because the buttons were gone.

Earlier in the night, the prayer team coach told me that you don’t wait until you feel like forgiving someone, you do it out of obedience and the feelings come later. God’s economy is not the same as ours.

We obey, and He takes care of the rest.

For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. (Matt. 6:14-15 NIV)

(to be continued)