Several years ago, when my children were still small, God called me to surrender to Him by practicing forgiveness. It was a Sunday morning and the passage the pastor was teaching from was a familiar one, but its impact on my Christian walk was forever changed.
As was standard at my church, we followed up the morning sermon with a group discussion in our Sunday School class. The passage that morning was on Jesus washing the disciples’ feet (John 13:1-17). The discussion in class centered around the idea that this story was ultimately a call for believers to forgive others. I had never thought of this story in that way, but when I did, I immediately felt the Holy Spirit impress upon me that it was time for me to forgive an egregious sin that had been committed against me years before. I understood immediately what He was asking, but I struggled to comprehend the concrete steps of obedience that it would require. The tears began to silently fall as the discussion continued around me. After church, on the car ride home, I told my husband what God was asking of me and how I was struggling to fully grasp it with my being. It felt like He was asking me to do the impossible. In fact, if I’m honest, I wondered if He even had the right to ask it of me at all. Which I realize is theologically ridiculous considering all that He had forgiven me of, but nevertheless that was how I felt.
Has God ever asked you to release something to Him that has become a part of you? Something you know needs to be untethered but you do not know how to access that section of your spirit, heart or mind? Something that cannot simply be let go of, washed away, or rubbed out?
I spent the rest of that Sunday wrestling with the Lord, feeling hopeless and inadequate. I woke the next day with the same sense of purpose from the Holy Spirit. His instruction had not changed and yet I still remained utterly confused on how to obey. As I took my kids to preschool and found myself alone, I began to sob, as I cried out to the Lord and confessed that I understood the reason for what He was commanding of me. After all, Matthew 6:12 clearly states that we are to forgive as we have been forgiven. Where I was lost was knowing how to truly release the pain, justified anger, and incredible grievance. It was as if it were tattooed on my spirit and could not be released as I would an object, or rubbed out as I would a mark on a page, nor washed clean like grime from a weekend of camping.
I began to pray, “Lord, I know what You are asking, Your presence is so powerful, and the impression on my spirit so heavy that there can be no doubt, but I do not know how to release this unfathomable debt.” In that moment of complete brokenness and desperation the Holy Spirit spoke into my heart the Scripture from Psalm 51 where David confessed his sin after murdering Uriah the Hittite and committing adultery with Bathsheba, saying, “Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight….”
What? Against God only? This doesn’t seem like it can be correct, as it seems like he definitely sinned against Uriah and possibly Bathsheba, too (Scripture does not record how cooperative she was in this escapade). But this assertion is recorded in Scripture in just this way not once but twice. It is originally recorded in 2 Samuel 12, when Nathan confronts David over this grievous behavior, David says to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.”
This truth led to the epiphany that the sin I was struggling to forgive wasn’t committed against me, it was committed against God, as all sin violates His holiness. At this moment, as this profound truth was being made evident to me, the Holy Spirit spoke again into my heart, bringing to mind the story from Mark 2 of Jesus healing the paralytic. He tells the man his sins are forgiven and the scribes whisper in their own hearts, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” They are not wrong in their assertion; they are just mistaken about whose presence they are in. At that moment, I understood that only God can forgive sin and it is His to forgive.
Not mine. So, I prayed, “Lord, Your Word says only you can forgive sin so You must be the one to forgive this. I give it to You. You must do it because I cannot.”
What happened next is one of those moments with the Lord that you never lose but can never properly describe. I suddenly felt as if I had been trapped under an oppressive weight—a heaviness of staggering size—that was immediately and completely released. As David writes in Psalm 32:1-5:
Blessed is the one
whose transgressions are forgiven,
whose sins are covered.
Blessed is the one
whose sin the Lord does not count against them
and in whose spirit is no deceit.
When I kept silent,
my bones wasted away
through my groaning all day long.
For day and night
your hand was heavy on me;
my strength was sapped
as in the heat of summer.
Then I acknowledged my sin to you
and did not cover up my iniquity.
I said, “I will confess
my transgressions to the Lord.”
And you forgave
the guilt of my sin.
In my holding of this grievance, I was wasting away, I was groaning, and the Lord’s hand was heavy upon me. I had not the slightest inkling of what I had been living under until it was lifted and I was able to take a complete breath for the first time in as long as I could remember. I was set free from a prison I had not realized I had been locked inside. I half expected to begin floating out of my seat.
Before this release, when I would visit the memory of this sin I would grieve and hurt and be angry. No longer. Now, like a tattoo you have had removed, you can still see where it was; you are aware of its past existence but it no longer contains a message or a full picture, just a faint scar that reminds you something was once there that is no longer. It has been covered. Redeemed.
It has been many years since that Sunday morning when God called me to surrender, unto Him, the bitter unforgiveness that resided in my heart, and I can say with complete honesty that I am still free. As a result of God’s command for me to forgive the egregious sins of another, which had deeply wounded me, I discovered that forgiveness is an extraordinary gift from God that has the ability to release me from holding onto the pain of my past. What I thought was unjust for God to ask of me turned out to be the very thing He used to bring healing to my wounded heart. This is because all His commands are for our ultimate good.
Before I understood this powerful truth about forgiveness being from God alone, I thought the command to forgive was on my shoulders and I was crushed under the weight of it. But as with all gifts from God, forgiveness is more a matter of surrender and trust than it is of our physical will. He does all the heavy lifting. Give your grievances to Him, surrender them fully, and find freedom from the pain of your past.