How do I forgive someone who hurt me deeply?

Ishmael LaBiosa: Welcome to the You Ask Podcast, where the goal is to answer common questions about Christianity. Let's listen in as Pastor Rusty answers today's question. Today's question is: how do I forgive someone who hurt me deeply? Well, before I give an answer to this question, I want to say that if you have been hurt deeply, I'm sorry. Sometimes Just having someone to set with you in your hurt is part of the healing. God cares for us, he sees us in our pain, he sees us in our suffering, and wants us to know that He can sit with us there. And so most of us don't get through life without a few bumps and bruises, a few deep. Hurts. The question is, as a Christian, how are we to respond to hurts? And I would say that one of the most fleshly easy ways to respond to hurt is if with retaliation. The Bible offers us another way, and that is not retaliation, but forgiveness. Now forgiveness is Is reframed for the Christian because the Christian is not the one granting forgiveness initially. The Christian is the one gaining forgiveness. The Christian has been forgiven. And the Christian has not been given a small offense. The Christian has been forgiven an offense against God, an offense against. The perfectly innocent victim. You may be unjustly treated, and what has happened to you may be completely wrong, but our level of complete innocence is not like Jesus' and God's perfection. So I think the first step to embody in Christian forgiveness. Is actually to first embrace that you are forgiven. Some people have said to me, Well, Rusty, the reason we ought to forgive is because it's good for us. And it may be good for us to forgive. Hanging on to bitterness will certainly ⁓ harm us. There's a saying that being bitter is like eating rat poison and waiting on the rat to die. Does harm to us. And so there's some truth to that. But actually the call for forgiveness in the Bible is we are obligated to forgive because God has forgiven us. Think about a passage like Ephesians 4 32 be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you. Or Colossians 3 13, bear with each other and forgive one another. If any of you has a grievance against someone, forgive as the Lord forgave you. And the Lord's Prayer, Matthew 6, 14 and 15. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. And then we are to pray, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. So there is a strong biblical foundation here that the basis of our forgiveness is rooted in Christ's forgiveness to us. That's not actually the question, however. The question that was asked is how do I forgive? And the question of how is different than the question of why. And a lot of people struggle here. I actually think as a pastor, I think sometimes people try to forgive too fast because I actually think forgiveness is a process more than it is an event. I also just practically think it is hard to reach what I would like to call emotional forgiveness if you're in a context where you're constantly being re-wounded, re-offended by someone. It's just you're just out of sorts. And sometimes you need a little space to be able to work the process of forgiveness. Now, there are a lot of great Christian books on not the why, but the how of forgiveness. But one person that I have read, and I feel that he has done a good job, is a Christian counselor named Everett Worthington. And he developed an acrostic, and the acrostic is reach. R E A C H. And each one of these letters in REACH does not tell us the why of forgiveness, it tells us the how of forgiveness. And I would like to share those with you today so that maybe you could use this method in your own forgiveness work. If you're going to forgive, the first thing you need to determine is what are you going to forgive? And Everett says. That we are to first recall the hurt. That's what R stands for, recall the hurt. That we have to honestly face the pain without dwelling on it, dwelling on revenge or minimizing it. Sometimes, with people who have worked with forgiveness through me, and even when my own self have worked through forgiveness, I think sometimes it's actually important to settle while and to ask the question. What am I actually forgiving? What offenses have been done to me that if I grant forgiveness, this is what I am granting, this is what I am doing. And I actually have worked with people and done it myself where I'm not ready to move past this first step until I'm confident I know what I'm forgiving. And one of the best ways to do this is write it down. You can say, here are the things that have happened, and these are the things I need to forgive. It's almost like if you don't have a target, you'll hit it every time. And so I think this first important piece of recall the hurt, name what it is that has been done to you that you want to forgive. Now, the second step I think is the hardest. Recalling the hurt is painful, but the next step requires a great deal of maturity, the E in reach. Is empathize with the offender without, listen carefully, without excusing the wrong. What has been done is wrong and will forever be wrong. I like to say that we don't forget what has happened to us. We can't forget unless we have a brain disease. We don't forget, but we reframe. I think about Jesus reframing his offenders on the cross. He looks from the cross and says, Father, forgive them. For they know not what they do. This is the reality about people who harm us. Usually one of two things are true. Number one, that even though they harmed us greatly, it wasn't their intention. Sometimes people are doing the best they can do, but the best they can do, unfortunately, is not good enough to not land an offense to us. Sometimes people are out to hurt us, but they're out to hurt us, they're out to offend us because they think they're so right, but they are so wrong. And these perspectives of looking around the hurt, saying what has happened to me is wrong, but could I flip the script? Could I see this offense through my offender's eyes? What was he thinking? What was she thinking? How did they think about this situation? How did they think about me? How did they think about what they have done, why they did it? And this can bring about a much greater understanding, not only to the offense, but it can bring a great deal more understanding to the offendor. And at this particular moment, you may even You you certainly are gaining more understanding. You can say, ⁓ yes, they hurt me in a big way and they meant to do it, but boy, weren't they confused. Or weren't they misled? Or weren't they hurt by someone else and they're just passing the hurt down to me. Again, we're never excusing the wrong here, but we're looking around the hurt. And so E in reach is empathize with the offender. I think you have to set in these two, recalling the hurt. This is when I forgot forgive. Now, can I look around the hurt? Could I see it in a different way? Could I see it from different angles? And could I empathize with the offender without excusing the wrong? And then at some point in time, you do a in-reach, altruistic, that just means a selfless, an altruistic gift of forgiveness. You give the gift of forgiveness, not because the offender deserves it, but an act of grace. You say, I am forgiving you, not because you deserve to be forgiven, but because God has forgiven me, I forgive you. And it it shifts the focus here from some type of self-benefit. ⁓ I'm forgiving you because this is good for me. No, I don't think that's Christian forgiveness. To say, I'm forgiving you because God has forgiven me, and I can see you, the one who offended me, as Christ who saw me, the one who offended him. Now It would be nice if that's where it ends. But you know, these things seem to take a while. There's what I call decisional forgiveness, a choice to treat one person differently, and a choice to forgive, and like emotional forgiveness, actually kind of rooting out the grief and the negative emotions that come with hurt. And so C and reach. So we got recall the hurt, empathize with the offender, A, altruistic gift of forgiveness, C, commit to. Forgiveness, make a public or private commitment to solidify the decision. And sometimes you may need to write on that same sheet of paper that you wrote all the hurts. Today I forgive blank, whatever the name is of the person for this hurt, and date it. Say I've done this. This is this is the day. The last part in reach is an H and its hold onto forgiveness. What I've noticed is you can have a big moment of forgiveness. You can really Again to see the offender in different ways. Your heart can change towards the offender. You can see them with eyes of compassion without justifying the wrong. But then you just go in through life and something hits you. And those old feelings come back, the rage comes back, the anger comes back, the desire for retaliation comes back. And then you just kind of have to work it out again. I like to think about this last part, hold on to forgiveness, almost like skipping a rock. And this maybe is not the best analogy, but when you skip a rock, the first few hops across the pond on the rock are pretty big and rash. But as they as the rock skips, it kind of lessens and then ultimately the rock sinks under the pond. I think that's the way holding on to forgiveness, you're doing it right. You do the heavy work on the front end, you recall the hurt, you empathize with the offender, you give the altruistic gift of forgiveness, you commit, you make a decisional forgiveness moment. And then over time, as the feelings come up, as the need for retaliation, all the feelings, you you just do the quick exercise. Remember what we did, remember how we thought, remember how we reframed this. And we get ourselves back onto the track. And I think in time the hurt is resolved and things are forgiven and we move on. This is not easy. Christianity is not just about learning truths. Christianity is about living truths, which requires our heart, soul, mind, strength, emotions, all of it. And so if you've been hurt, I'm sorry. And I just want to say: the God who loves us, the Christ who forgave us, says forgiveness is the way. And I hope you take it. Thank you for listening to the You Ask Podcast. This is a ministry of Liberty Baptist Church. And we pray this podcast enables you to more faithfully live out your Christian life.