12 Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. 13 Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.14 And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.
Colossians 3:12-14
I touched on forgiveness back in December but I decided to come back to this topic as it can be very touchy.
Forgiveness can be hard. I know this. I have struggled with this. We all have at one point or another. But we are required to forgive! Just as the Lord forgave us we are required to forgive.
I’m doing a forgiveness reading plan on the YouVersion App as part of my devotions this week and came across this quote:
God freely forgives us and gives us eternal life. But he also expects us to extend that same mercy to others, with strict warnings to us if we don’t. A life of judgement, condemnation and unforgiveness is a prison.
Refusing to forgive someone puts us in prison! A prison full of anger and bitterness! We must be willing to forgive! To let go of the anger and bitterness and move forward.
Yes, I know. Some hurts are hard to move on from. But the longer a person stays unwilling to forgive, the longer it will control us. And the longer it controls us, the longer the anger and bitterness remain, causing us to hurt others.
And as the saying goes, “Hurt people HURT people!” We tend to take the hurt we’ve been dealt and lash out towards others. Sometimes these people haven’t even done anything to us but they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Holding a grudge toward the person who hurt you just isn’t right. It isn’t what God wants from us. He wants us to “let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor and evil speaking be put away from you with all malice. And be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another even as God in Christ forgave you.” (Ephesians 4:31:32)
Forgive. You’ll feel so free when you do. 🙂
All You Need is Jesus 
Amen, Leigh! It’s so true! Bitterness definitely has tripped me up multiple times, and I only felt healing when I was able to give it to God and forgive. It was freeing, and I know for those who have wanted it, my forgiveness has helped them.
I am going to add this post to my Christian bloggers to check out board on Pinterest and add it to the community spotlight for the month of June. 🙂 It will come out at the end of the month.
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Amen! We must forgive in order to be set free. The heart that forgives us the heart the will live! Blessings to you and thanks for sharing! May God continue to bless you and use you! Xxoo much love!
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Leigh, I so agree with what you said here, but I think I would modify your quote with a qualifying statement. Being hurt means someone has done something against you or you have perceived such an offense, which may or may not exist. But what we do with that hurt determines whether or not we end up then hurting others, such as you talked about. Like you said, we must forgive and not hold on to bitterness or we may end up doing to others what was done to us. Thank you for what you shared here. Sue
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This was such an eye-opening post! Thank you for being honest & open. We all deal with hurt in one way or another, how we choose to act on that hurt says a lot about our character. I know the Lord has been dealing with unforgiveness in myself.. thanks for sharing!
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