By: Corey Bonasso

If you are a Christian, then you know that there are seasons in life where God is clearly working on your heart. The Bible even tells us this directly, “For it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.” (Phil. 2:13) He might be working to reveal some sin that you haven’t recognized, to help you eradicate some sin of which you are acutely aware, or maybe to refresh your perspective on his grace. Whatever God does in those seasons, it typically involves some growing pains (especially when God is showing us our own sin). 

Anyone who knows me likely could tell you that my opinion of myself is favorable. I get along with myself great, I’m funny, and I’m generally an all-around nice person. Whether others agree with those conclusions is another question that I won’t explore here, but I think we can all agree that those conclusions are inflated at best (possibly downright incorrect). I, like so many, struggle with pride on a daily basis. My whole viewpoint and the way I experience the world is perceived through my own consciousness, and as a result, my views/beliefs/opinions/biases/etc… color everything in my world. I find that the times when God works on my heart, it almost always requires me to take my focus off of myself and place it somewhere external. In reality, God also commands us to do this: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.” (Phil. 2:3, emphasis added) This concept is easy to understand intellectually, but incredibly difficult to practice effectively.

One area where God has been working in my life recently has been my need to forgive. I will insert a caveat here that this is the first time in my life where I truly have delved deeply into the topic of forgiveness and studied it in depth. I am by no means an expert on the subject, and I have much more to learn. However, I still want to share my experience, hoping to benefit someone else who might need to take a hard look at their own need to forgive. Hopefully, some months or years from now I can give a positive update to this article with a success story that brings glory to God.

The Bible speaks on the topic of forgiveness frequently. The practice of forgiving is not one that is often romanticized in today’s culture. In fact, the opposite is true. In the wake of “cancel culture,” the rhetoric almost always encompasses the idea of “you have offended me and from now on I will completely disregard your opinion, your existence, and your worth.” Holding on to and punishing an offense out of righteous indignation is expected and encouraged. If a person who has a prominent voice in our society says something that garners tremendous offense, it often removes any future influence that person may have had in society. I could give so many examples of this that I won’t even bother to give any—you understand what I’m talking about. However, the Bible goes against this notion and commands us to forgive.

I’ve long had a solid understanding of how forgiveness works and the biblical way to forgive. However, this understanding has been mainly intellectual. I know the ins and outs, but I’ve never had to actually apply them in my own life. I have been blessed in that I have not had all that many incidents in my life (or so I thought) where I needed to forgive someone for a wrong done to me. That all changed in the last year or so, and I now find myself tackling this idea of forgiveness in a much more practical and experiential way. 

If I could describe in one word this new, first-hand experience of forgiving, it would be this—painful. I don’t like it. It’s hard. I want to be mad, and I want to hate. I want to hold on to this bitterness and indignation. For the better part of the last year, I understood my need to forgive, but I had no interest doing it. However, in recent months, God has been showing me why I need to forgive. If you have ever truly studied forgiveness, then you probably know that forgiveness is not for the benefit of the person being forgiven—it’s for the benefit of the person forgiving. Holding on to anger, hatred, bitterness, indignation, or malice does nothing to alleviate the pain that someone else has caused you. Even if you somehow get perfect revenge on that person who hurt you, your heart remains in a dark place because it’s grown comfortable there. 

You might be asking, “So what do I do with the anger, hatred, bitterness, indignation, malice that I have in my heart?” The simple answer is this: let it go. Again, easy to understand, so very difficult to do. The Bible is clear on this— “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.” (Eph. 4:31) As a side note, letting go of those things does not mean forgetting the offense that caused them. It is possible, and often necessary, to forgive a person who has wronged you, but also create boundaries to prevent future offenses. That looks different for different people depending on the nature of an offense, the person who has offended you, and the level of pain inflicted on you. But you can forgive someone while simultaneously guarding against further offenses.

You may say, “Why should I forgive someone when they continue to actively hurt me?” Because true forgiveness does not first require repentance. To be clear, repentance from an offender does make forgiveness easier, but you can forgive even when there is no repentance. Jesus forgave his offenders while they were in the very act of hurting him by nailing him to the cross— “And Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’” (Luke 23:34) Clinging to the anger, hatred, bitterness, indignation, and malice is clinging to the poison. It will destroy you from the inside out. Furthermore, when a person clings to unforgiveness, they eventually become the person who needs the most forgiveness from others. If you have ever known a person who is bitter and hateful, you’ve seen this first-hand. They exhibit no fruit of the spirit, no grace and certainly no forgiveness. They constantly offend everyone around them because they are focused only on themselves and their pain. They have allowed the enemy to destroy them. 

Friends, I don’t want that for anyone, especially my brothers and sisters in Christ. We must not allow the enemy to destroy us because we refuse to let go. When we let go, we don’t simply put it away from ourselves—we put it on Christ. We give all of the anger, hatred, bitterness, indignation, and malice to Christ because he took that for us. “Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.” (1 Pet. 5:6–7, emphasis added) We must be in constant prayer and repent of our own sin, asking God to grant us the strength to release our pain and give it to Christ.

Forgiveness releases you from bondage—bondage that comes from holding on to the pain. Forgiveness is the first step to healing your own heart. One way to begin forgiving an unrepentant offender is to remember how we have continually offended God (and probably others). When you allow your mind to focus on all of the ways that you have been wronged, it removes your opportunity (and eventually your ability) to focus on the ways that you have wronged others and wronged God. Many of us would say that if we have offended someone and we knew about it, we likely would repent immediately. However, I’m sure I have offended many people, and I’m certain I’ve offended God, in ways to which I am completely oblivious. I certainly hope that nobody is holding on to the pain from some hurt I have caused them. When I take an honest look at all of the ways I’ve fallen short and offended God, it makes his forgiveness of my sin so much more precious. It soothes the pain others have caused me by giving me a new perspective and a new empathy. It releases my righteous indignation because I am reminded that I have no righteousness outside of Christ’s.

Ultimately, we must remember that forgiveness is rooted in love. Christ forgave us because he loves us. “Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all offenses.” (Pro. 10:12) We are called to love everyone around us the way Christ loved us, which naturally must include forgiving them. In Ephesians 4:32, we read this, “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” Some read this list as 3 things: 1) be kind, 2) be tenderhearted, and 3) forgive one another. When I read it, I see it more as a list of 2 things: 1) be kind and 2) be tenderhearted. The third piece about forgiving one another seems to me to be a prerequisite for the other two. It is impossible to be kind and tenderhearted if you have not forgiven. A heart full of unforgiveness and bitterness cannot be kind or tenderhearted. It cannot be loving.

Friends, my prayer for you today is that if any of you are harboring anger, hatred, bitterness, indignation, malice, or unforgiveness, that God will begin a work in your heart to free you from the bondage of those things. They are from the enemy, and they prevent us loving each other the way Christ loved us. If you are harboring unforgiveness, I implore you to pray humbly and give it to Christ—to let it go.