Forgive. Forgiving. Forgiven.

So by now, most of you know I steal information from others and then blog about it J. I don’t ever want you to be deceived…most of this information has been digested and regurgitated. Gross. Okay, moving on.

Chip Ingram…Love him. Listen to any and all of his stuff. He has a talk on Forgiveness. It is really simple and it goes like this: You forgive someone and keep forgiving him/her until he/she is forgiven.

Forgive.

You have to come to a point in time when you decide to be intentional about your forgiveness. You honestly evaluate what someone owes you; because, let’s be honest, if you have been hurt and wounded, someone stole something from you. You write out the offense or talk to the person in your head. Have an imaginary conversation. Get it all out. Then, decide from that moment on that you will release the person to God to handle and you will not dwell on the situation or demand anything in return.

Think of it monetarily. Someone stole thousands, maybe even millions of dollars from you. They can never pay you back. So, you cancel the debt. You don’t pretend it didn’t happen, you just cancel it. You decided once and for all they can’t pay you back and you stop expecting them to and reminding yourself and them about it (Matthew 18).

Forgiving.

You will have to remind yourself that you have cancelled the debt millions of times throughout the ensuing days. Forgiveness is a process. It starts with the intellect and slowly infiltrates the emotions. You have to be disciplined. Anytime the feelings come back, and they will, trust me, you tell yourself you have cancelled the debt. Pray for the person (really hard) and move on with your day, living in the moment.

Forgiven.

Ultimately, maybe years down the road, you will find that when the person or the situation that hurt you is mentioned, you don’t respond emotionally. That means the forgiveness process is complete. Hallelujah! Praise God for walking you through the process and get ready to be used by Him to walk others through it.

Remember, forgiveness is always for you, not for the other person.