Strategy 9

Your Hurts

Turning Bitterness to Forgiveness

If I were your enemy, I’d use every opportunity to bring old wounds to mind, as well as the people, events, and circumstances that caused them. I’d try to ensure that your heart was hardened with anger and bitterness. Shackled through unforgiveness.

Hollow and dull. That’s how my prayers felt. Like they were ricocheting off the walls of a deep, empty cave. And I wasn’t sure why. I just knew I was growing really tired of it. Because once you’ve tasted the bold, intense flavors of fervent prayer, the blandness of living with anything less than pure freedom and intimacy with God is almost more than you can stand. You miss it. You crave it. Especially, like I said, when you’ve wracked your brain and can’t figure out why it’s suddenly, mysteriously gone.

Those were some of the spiritual doldrums I was experiencing when a friend mentioned a book on prayer written in the mid-seventies and asked if I had read it. Based on her description and recommendation, sounded like it might be just what I needed. So I immediately ordered it, and it wasn’t long before God spoke to my heart through a passage of Scripture quoted in one of the early chapters of the book: “Now if anyone has caused pain,” Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians, referring to a matter that had grown divisive in the Corinthian church he was addressing, “you should rather turn to forgive” (2 Cor. 2:5, 7 esv).

Suddenly my heart burned in my chest.

But I kept reading.

“You should rather turn to forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. So I beg you to affirm your love for him. For this is why I wrote, that I might test you and know whether you are obedient in everything . . . so that we would not be outwitted by Satan; for we are not ignorant of his designs.” (vv. 7–9, 11 esv)

Forgive and comfort.

Obedience in everything.

Outwitted by Satan.

Ignorant of his designs.

This simple passage struck me. Hit me with a deep, inner conviction that only God’s Spirit can give. I realized in that moment what I’m about to share with you now in this chapter, a truth that reinvigorated my prayer life and set me back on track. It’s this: Unforgiveness is a strategic “design,” craftily implemented by your enemy to “outwit” you, to cripple your effectiveness in prayer and your power to stand against him victoriously. Which is why, if I were your enemy, I would do everything possible to keep you from forgiving anyone and everyone who’s done you any wrong.

Such was the case with me. And these verses had brought all the specifics roaring back to my attention.

The offender in question (and there was no question in my mind who it was) hadn’t done anything particularly brutal to me, nothing that would alter the whole trajectory of my life or anything. But it was enough to drive a wedge between the two of us and dig a tender spot in my heart.

After years of work and prayer and patience and sacrifice, a few exciting things were beginning to materialize in my personal life and ministry, the kinds of things that make you smile right before you fall asleep at night and then again first thing in the morning. I’d shared some of these happenings with a few close friends who I thought would celebrate with me, but this one person’s response had been . . . not rude perhaps, but critical. Far less than supportive and enthusiastic. And then as days, weeks, and months went on, she’d grown rather reclusive and quiet toward me. Distant and disengaged.

I thought maybe I was being a bit overly sensitive. But a few other people had begun to notice it too, without my needing to bring it to their attention. Even they were unnerved by the cold shoulder she was throwing me. So I guessed it really was as obvious as I’d thought. Wasn’t all in my head. And none of us could understand exactly what her problem was.

I actually thought I was handling it the best way I knew how—mostly by trying my best to be where she wasn’t, as often as possible. But on those occasions when keeping a safe distance wasn’t possible, that’s when I could tell this whole thing was becoming a bigger deal to me than I was letting on. A lot of emotion would bubble to the surface when she was around. I was stewing. The feelings inside when I thought of her or saw her weren’t doing me any good. And even though I tried to push them out of mind, fairly justified that I’d done nothing wrong to cause this kind of reaction from someone . . . still, the blockage kept showing up with this person’s name on it. And wouldn’t go away.

Then came 2 Corinthians 2:5–7.

Forgive.

Comfort.

Obedience.

Outwitted.

Designs.

God and I—we went round and round while I debated with Him (and without Him) the necessity of this bit of conviction. Because maybe, maybe, if forgiveness had been the only thing on the table, I might have been willing to oblige a bit easier. I did, in fact, at His insistence, forgive her. In my mind at least. Set her free from the debt I thought she owed me for making me feel so awful, so uneasy, for so long. I thought the Lord, seeing my sincerity in drawing up an internal declaration of forgiveness toward her, might cut me some slack and just forget the other part. You know, that part about offering comfort . . . to her?

But under the circumstances, under the specifics of His conviction, I knew He wanted more. He wanted me to show comfort to this one who had offended me. This was the only way I could be “obedient in everything” . . . in this thing. And I knew it. No, my flesh didn’t want to give this person the time of day, much less the dignity of a response. But my resistance to what God’s Word and command were saying clued me in beyond any doubt that I’d allowed a root of bitterness to spring up within my heart. And it was choking out some stuff I missed and that really mattered to me. And this was the part that was by demonic design.

So finally, one sunny day, I took my forgiveness over to her house in the form of a little meal I’d prepared. We talked. We ate together. And touched by a measure of kindness from me that could only come from the Holy Spirit (I promise you), she melted into tears in my presence.

You know what I found out that day? This will surprise you, I think. It surprised me. Even while I’d been the one growing hurt and angry by her attitude, by the minute, she’d been quietly struggling within her own heart over all of this discord too. She told me how she’d been wrestling with insecurities and other issues, enough that she was actually losing sleep and appetite. Plus, the sense of isolation she’d been increasingly feeling when others, who’d been a tad cold toward her in response to her treatment of me, had become a heavy burden on her shoulders. I began to realize what Paul meant in that passage from 2 Corinthians 2 when he said that “excessive sorrow” can overwhelm. But now, through forgiveness and a simple act of kindness, the ice was breaking, along with the enemy’s design—not only his design to ruin a friendship but also to ruin my prayer life in the process.

The next time I hit my knees, the echo of that long, lonely cavern gave way to the floodgates of God’s grace, pouring out over me in a fresh, fantastic way.

No longer “outwitted” by the devil.

Forgiveness instead.

Because forgiveness matters.

I know this personal example I’ve shared is a light one, especially when compared to the deeply wounding, life-altering offense or abuse you may have suffered. (Trust me, I could’ve called up other, more difficult illustrations from my own life too.) But even this low-level infraction makes a point and speaks to a purpose that applies to every offense that comes against us. Your enemy wants you long-term angry. And he can use even the lightest offense to do it. He wants you to be a bitter woman behind that beautiful face. He wants your heart coated with the calluses of resentment, crippled by offenses from your past. Unforgiveness is his design to “outwit” you—to keep you not only bruised and bleeding but unable to experience any power in your prayers or intimacy with your Father.

Nobody needs to tell you how bad you’re hurting from the injustices in your life. Even people who’ve suffered similar abuses or offenses as yours could never completely understand how your own rejections feel. Yours are personal and private and seemingly impossible to forgive.

But forgive anyway. Not because it’s easy but because your enemy gets exactly what he wants from you otherwise. Forgive anyway. Not lightly and quickly but ferociously and fervently. Not only for the other person but mostly for you—so you can be free and full and whole and complete.

Sit down here with me for a minute where we can almost clasp each other’s hands across the table, and listen to me closely: If you feel utterly, hopelessly, intolerably resistant toward forgiving this person or these people who’ve offended you, don’t consider yourself a random victim. The devil is behind this. He has ridden the coattails of your anger right into the depths of your soul where he has carefully calculated your demise. He’s been strategizing how to suck all the power out of your prayer life. Out of your whole life. He’s likely the same one who started the whole mess to begin with. The same one who stirred up enough sin in another person to tempt them into doing whatever they did to you, into saying whatever they said to you, into feeling however they felt about you—perhaps how they still feel about you, even now. Or even if he didn’t start it, he’s the same enemy who jumped onto the bandwagon of a bad situation in your life, hoping to make sure it didn’t merely affect your finances or your job or the status of a friendship but instead pierced deeply into your heart. Where he could keep twisting it. Inflaming it. Where almost any memory or passing thought of it could poke at you, pick at you, draw blood, inflict new damage.

Make no mistake, it is his doing. By specific design. Hurting you once wasn’t enough. Those times when the original incidents happened, times when you were mistreated or betrayed or belittled—nooo, that level of pain just wasn’t quite enough for him. He wanted more. He wanted permanent loss. Personality change. He wanted to redefine how you thought about God, about yourself, about others, even about those people who truly love you and intend only good for you. He wanted you fixated and patterned in your thinking so that few things would seem more dear or desirable to you than paying them back, getting your revenge. He wants you sobbing . . . or better yet, just seething, the kind of emotion that doesn’t come out in crying and visible reactions but instead just cooks inside of you where the heat has no place to escape, where the tears pool up and stagnate, creating a petri dish of toxic emotions that you’re forced to keep breathing. He wants you baking in unforgiveness until your spiritual life is hard and crisp around the edges. Lifeless. Comatose.

But Jesus . . . He wants you free. That’s what He created you for.

“Forgive us our debts,” He taught us to pray, “as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matt. 6:12), followed a couple of verses later by this corollary statement: “For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you” (v. 14).

Might want to go back and read those verses again carefully, despite how familiar they may be to you. These words of Jesus suggest a connection between the way we handle others’ offenses against us and the way God handles our offenses against Him.

Now the whole counsel of Scripture affirms that our salvation (our eternal security with God) is based solely on the work of Jesus on the cross. No action or inaction on our part (such as struggling to forgive someone who’s wounded you) can sever the covenant of grace He’s made with us. But something at least happens to our experience with the Father when we persist in holding others’ sins against them. Unforgiveness puts us in prime position for demonic influence and activity to take advantage of us. (See the parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18:21–35 for one descriptive example.) And anything that dampens or deadens the freedom that God’s mercy is meant to give us—can it really be worth holding onto?

Listen, God knows how to deal with sin. Our sin, their sin. When you choose to forgive someone, you’re not wiping their actions away as if the bad things didn’t happen, giving people a free pass from the harm they’ve caused. You’re just sparing yourself the burden of working two extra jobs—being judge and jury for how justice is meted out in this situation. Why not let someone relieve you of the pressure—Someone who actually knows what He’s doing? And Someone who’s just waiting right now to talk with you about it?

His forgiveness, my friend . . . is freedom.

Yes, His forgiveness. His forgiveness of you is what makes your forgiveness possible toward others. Realize you are lying back already in a vast blue ocean of forgiveness—same as me, same as all of us who’ve been redeemed through the blood of Jesus. So there’s more than enough of His forgiveness splashing around you to extinguish all the flames of rage, hatred, bitterness, or animosity your enemy may have ignited within you. Remembering what Christ’s redemption has done for you will make you eager to do it for another.

“You were dead in your trespasses and sins . . . but God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us . . . made us alive together with Christ” (Eph. 2:1, 4–5). Start from that point, and then you can much more determinedly give mercy to others because it’s so lavishly given to you.

Genuine freedom and renewed fervency are waiting for you on the other side of forgiveness. And the forgiveness you don’t have any desire to give right now can be amazingly enabled through prayer. When galvanized with the living truth of God’s Word, fervent prayer is the bucket that can dip down into the reserves of God’s strength and pull up all the resolve you need for releasing other people from what they owe you. He can produce the healing we so desperately need, before we continue down these same old broken roads that only end up hurting other people—children, grandchildren, people who had nothing to do with this matter at all, except to be within proximity of our resentful responses.

Prayer gets at the truth. The truth of what happened? Yes. If that’s really what took place, then yes. The real facts and details don’t change as you get real with God in prayer. But get ready for some other pieces of information to bubble up to the surface as well, as the Spirit and the Scripture come together in agreement on how you need to handle things. The enemy, of course, will want you to balk at this part. He’s been banking on keeping these solutions hidden from you and convincing you that anger and bitterness are the most productive, protective ways of managing the situation. And yet honest prayer, conducted with an open heart and an open copy of God’s Word, will be sure to present you with truth.

Like the truth I got that day from 2 Corinthians.

Forgive.

And comfort.

Is the Lord possibly asking you to comfort your offender as well? Maybe. Maybe not. There’s not one answer for this. I’m certainly not saying that a gesture of goodwill is always necessary or even possible. And the truth is, we’re never guaranteed a positive response when we do. Yet your willingness—your obedience, if it’s what the Lord is asking you to do—to go, to express kindness, to smile, to nod, to be generous and show concern—is a tremendous test of godly surrender and humility. It’s a way of finding out if the forgiveness you claim to feel toward someone contains roots that run deeper than the roots of resentment did.

Best of all, it brands you as a woman who is in no way going to be “outwitted by Satan” or “ignorant of his designs.”

If we want to be women of serious, fervent prayer, the Scripture will always lead us here. To forgiveness. In some form. In some fashion. Forgiveness is God’s command. And it also comes with a promise that He will provide us the companion power to pull it off. Don’t expect any other solution to work or to change anything, except for the worse. And don’t expect to experience freedom, peace, or rest from your anger until you do.

Call to Prayer

God’s Word is what you and I are going to be taking into our prayer strategy—a strategy that, yes, possibly holds the potential of benefitting your offender. And yet it absolutely ensures a benefit for you.

Freedom.

“It was for freedom that Christ set us free” (Gal. 5:1). I’ve quoted this verse before in the book, but it’s worth repeating often, in all kinds of contexts. So why don’t you underline it this time so I won’t need to say it again. This verse has followed me around through life from my teenage and college years till now, and it has formed sort of an immovable object that Satan is forever forced to work around to get to my heart. Here, just one more time for good measure . . . “It was for freedom that Christ set us free,” the Bible says. For freedom. He wants us free.

Think back to everything you know about Jesus and the many demonstrations of His love toward the hurting and mistreated—to the point of being mistreated Himself, again and again, up to and including His brutal torture and murder. Why? Because “the Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,” He said . . . “to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed” (Luke 4:18).

To set us free.

To fan fresh air into the stagnant rooms of your heart. To sweeten the taste in your mouth where bitterness and unforgiveness have soured your appetite for spiritual things.

To set . . . you . . . free.

There’s nothing bad in your life the devil won’t try to make worse. But “the merciful man does himself good” (Prov. 11:17). The merciful woman too. So upon these truths, craft a prayer strategy of freedom and forgiveness . . .

Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father who is in heaven will also forgive you your transgressions. (Mark 11:25)

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you. (Eph. 4:31–32)

Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,” says the Lord. “But if your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. (Rom. 12:19–21)

Do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not give the devil an opportunity. (Eph. 4:26–27)

Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no “root of bitterness” springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled. (Heb. 12:14–15 esv)

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. (Matt. 5:44–45)

As those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience; bearing with one another, and forgiving each other, whoever has a complaint against anyone; just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you. (Col. 3:12–13)

If he sins against you seven times a day, and returns to you seven times, saying, “I repent,” forgive him. (Luke 17:4)

. . . because your sins have been forgiven through Jesus. (1 John 2:12 nlt)

The Father’s shoulders are broad enough for you to cry on, strong enough to absorb with compassion whatever you need to vent to Him from the depths of your broken heart. But they are also able to lift you from the quicksand of old hurts and wounds, setting your “feet upon a rock” and putting “a new song” on your lips (Ps. 40:2–3), a song of . . .

• Praise: Thank Him for championing your freedom, even at the cost of your comfort.
• Repentance: Ask the Lord to forgive you for harboring unforgiveness in your heart. Confess any hatred, any bitterness, any harmful actions made in anger toward others. As you sense God’s forgiveness toward you for your sin, extend it to them for theirs.
• Asking: Record the name of the person or persons who’ve hurt you. And then speak their names out loud while asking for a heart that can genuinely forgive and release them from the debt you feel they owe.
• Yes: Commit to responding actively in any way God’s Spirit might urge you to do.

I sense courage coming from your prayer closet.

And the sweet smell of forgiveness . . . and freedom.