44: SOUL-L (Part 3: Unforgiveness)

[00:07] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail Podcast. You are on the trail with father-daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie, and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God.

Episode 44. We are continuing to unpack the five main areas the devil claims a right to be in our lives. Today we’re looking specifically at unforgiveness.

Hello, Father.

[00:35] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. Good to be back.

[00:37] Stephanie: Always. I love the sound of your voice. So before we get into our topic, I want us to make an exciting announcement. You have a book releasing next week, May 2nd.

[00:52] Marcus: Can you believe I finally wrote a book? Here we go.

[00:54] Stephanie: I know your first one. What? No. Okay.

[00:58] Marcus: Yeah, I think somebody asked. This is book number 17. Anyway, it’s true. Chris Coursey and I have finished our trilogy of the Four Habits series. So we have The Four Habits of Joy-Filled Marriages, The Four Habits of Raising Joy-Filled Kids, and this one is The Four Habits of Joy-Filled People. So I’m holding in my hands the author’s advanced copy. Very excited that it’s coming out officially on May 2nd.

[01:27] Stephanie: Yay. It’s available for pre-order right now. And, you know, it is never too late to grow your capacity to feel joy because your brain has the capacity to grow joy as long as you live. And it only takes 28 days to form a new habit.

So Chris Coursey’s ministry, Thrive Today, and ours, Deeper Walk, have partnered to put together a 28 day joy challenge for you. You can sign up for free at fourhabits.org. When you sign up, you’ll receive an intro email and then 28 days of simple joy exercises you can do, as well as some printable calendars you can use for a physical reminder about each day’s exercise. So we hope you will join us and build some joy together. Again, you can find that at fourhabits.org   Huzzah.

[02:19] Marcus: Yes, I’m very excited about this. The core idea of this book is that internally we all either have a fear house or a joy house. And my inner world is where I have to live. When I quiet myself and it’s just me and my thought life, is this a place of fear or is it a place of joy? And so the idea is, how does one transform a fear house into a joy house?

So they won’t be disappointed if they’re looking for an acrostic; there’s one in here. We’ve taken the word, CASA, on how to build a joy house. I’ve turned that into the four habits of Calming, Appreciating, Storytelling, and Attacking toxic thinking. This book has lots of stories. It’s got lots of exercises. It’s got some brain science. It’s got a whole bunch of fundamentals in it.

And then the 28 day challenge is cool because not only do you get the email with all this, you can print off a calendar, put it on your refrigerator or something like that, to keep it with you, and it’s a good reminder to do something every day to build a little bit more capacity for joy.

[03:19] Stephanie: I’m so excited for it. So we’ll keep you updated on more things here. Pre-orders live now. Go. Go.

[03:30] Marcus: Absolutely. It definitely helps us when we get people rating these things at Amazon who’ve actually bought the book there. So that’s a good thing.

[03:39] Stephanie: Yes. We’ll keep talking about it, but it is definitely helpful if you pre-order the book. And then when you read the book, and if you leave a review, it definitely helps boost it to other people. So every little bit helps us as we are helping you.

So, Father, let’s keep unpacking your acrostic SOUL-L.

[04:00] Marcus: Oh, I thought you meant literally! Like, my soul is an acrostic soul. I get it now. Okay.

[04:07] Stephanie: I’ve been unpacking your soul with my father.

[04:11] Marcus: I got nervous for a minute. Okay, go ahead.

[04:14] Stephanie: Yes, Soul. S-O-U-L-L. This acrostic spells out five common ways people surrender ground to the enemy. And we are walking through how to recognize these areas and how to reclaim that surrendered ground.

So today, we are onto the, “U”, Unforgiveness. I’ve talked to Christians before who were surprised that unforgiveness could give the enemy a place in their life. And, I don’t know. Let’s start there. Can you talk through some of the biblical principles for why unforgiveness is a problem?

[04:46] Marcus: Yes, I think I remember what you’re talking about. There was a lady who heard this acrostic and heard that unforgiveness could open the door to the enemy, and she’s like, “What? I’ve never heard that before.” She goes, “I have some things I need to do. Kind of like, “I need to go deal with my bitterness towards some people.” This idea, I think, surprises people because we tend to think of bitterness and unforgiveness and we have a lot of misconceptions about it.

The Bible has a lot to say. Obviously, it’s in the Lord’s Prayer: “Father, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  Another version of this has “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” And then Jesus follows up his teaching on the Lord’s Prayer with reinforcing the forgiveness part of this. “If you don’t forgive people when they sin against you, God’s not going to forgive you your sins.”

That was petrifying to me as a kid because I thought that meant if I didn’t forgive people perfectly, I was going to lose my salvation. That’s not what that means. What it means is that if I don’t forgive people, I’m going to stay in bondage. God’s not going to set me free, give me the emotional freedom I’m looking for if I’m not willing to grant the same thing to other people. So this is more of a freedom statement than a salvation statement.

It’s important to know that God took care of the sin problem on the cross, so when we’re dealing with forgiveness, what we’re doing as Christians, we have an advantage in this because we are cooperating with God, that the ultimate goal of forgiveness is reconciliation. But it isn’t reconciliation, it’s just one of the elements that goes into that bigger process.

Forgiveness: I think the simplest way for me to think about it is, forgive people their debts just as God has forgiven you of your debts. In Matthew 18, you have this classic parable of the unjust manager who asks and begs for forgiveness for this enormous debt, and then turns around and refuses to forgive his servant for a small debt. His master finds out about it, ends up sending him to jail until he pays off the debt. Why? And the word there is interesting, because specifically he says he’s handed over to the tormentors.

This is something a lot of people dealing with spiritual warfare have picked up on. And it’s this idea that if I don’t forgive people of the debts that they owe me, if I don’t forgive them those emotional debts, then I can end up in torment. That would be the idea that in this case God may forgive me in the sense of, I’m in heaven, I’m part of his family, but I might still end up living in an emotional prison and not with the freedom that I need simply because I am not forgiving others.

So we tell people all the time that forgiveness is actually a gift that God gives to you so that you can experience freedom and don’t have to be stuck in the bondage of bitterness.

[07:45] Stephanie: Yes. It always stuck with me how you said, “Bitterness is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” So it’s an emotional freedom, and then it is also a spiritual freedom, because you are giving permission to the enemy to have a place in your life if you are holding on to bitterness and resentment.

[08:03] Marcus: Right. So what that tends to look like when the enemy gets permission because of bitterness, is not so much inhabitation, where you’re rolling around on the floor and levitating and talking in strange voices, but it tends to come more in the sense that there are now thoughts in your head, voices in your head that are keeping you in bondage. You are thinking things that are just ruining your life and that are keeping you angry, keeping you in despair, keeping you in bondage to emotions you don’t want to be stuck in. There are demonic spirits that are not necessarily in you and controlling you, but they are actively engaged in keeping your mind in a place that is fostering captivity.

[08:51] Stephanie: They’re going to keep feeding the narratives. They’re going to keep feeding the tapes that are playing. They’re going to be whispering things like, “Oh, and don’t forget about that!”

[09:00] Marcus: Which is one of the reasons why there’s that classic thing, “Why does my wife always bring up everything I’ve ever done?” It’s not just, talk about the last thing, and it’s not just women who do this, but that’s just the stereotypical thing that comes up. The answer is that the reason that people do this, the reason that people will often bring up your whole history when they’ve been triggered by something in the present, is because what happened to them in the present is triggering all of the times that they felt this emotion. And so this emotion that they’re feeling is not a new thing for them. It’s like, “I felt this emotion before with you. I felt it here and here and here and here.” And so what that does is it tends to tell us that I may need to forgive people for the whole pattern of behavior that they have had in my life.

And I don’t necessarily have to go down and make a detailed list of every way in which they’ve ever offended me. It is enough, generally, to say, “I forgive them for this pattern of what they’ve been doing in my life.” Sometimes I have to forgive them for something specific because there are some things that really took it to another level when they happened.

[10:03] Stephanie: Do you have to forgive people if they have not asked for forgiveness?

[10:06] Marcus: Good question. I do remember watching Veggie Tales back in the day, and while generally that was good, I remember wishing they had done a little bit more with their one on forgiveness because they came across like, “I don’t have to forgive people unless they ask me to forgive.” And I’m like, “Well, that’s not actually the message we want to send out there to people.”

I’m glad they were at least addressing the issue, but I would take it a step further and say that the beauty of forgiveness is that you don’t have to wait for somebody to ask for it. In fact, you can forgive somebody who’s dead. And I know people have done this. They had a very abusive father who’s now passed away, but they don’t have to wait for that abusive father to come to them and say, please forgive me for what I did. Forgiveness takes one person, and that’s me.

Reconciliation is something that takes two people. So if I’m going to begin the process of reconciling with a person, then yes, they have to ask me for forgiveness in order for that to be part of that reconciliation process. But I can choose to forgive somebody. I don’t have to wait for anything from them. And that’s good news because it means I can be free regardless of what they do.

[11:18] Stephanie: Well, let’s continue that. You’ve got a really helpful acrostic that actually is FREE, F-R-E-E. So the obvious remedy for unforgiveness is forgiveness. Let’s talk about what forgiveness is, and what it is not, with FREE, can you?

[11:34] Marcus: So what it is not: the “F” of this is that forgiveness is not forgetting. This comes up both in the sense of people are like, “Well, I forgave that person, but I still remember it. It still feels painful when I think about it.” That’s not what forgiveness does. Forgiveness does not make you forget either the pain or the memory of what has happened. That’s not how that works.

On the other hand, forgiveness is not forgetting in the sense of just because you haven’t thought about it in a while, just as you have sort of forgotten about it, doesn’t mean you actually forgave. And so if God brings something up to say, “You need to forgive this person for that,”  and you haven’t thought about it for a long time, that’s kind of irrelevant, because forgiveness isn’t about forgetting.

Now, the forgetting part of this tends to come from this idea that God takes our sin and separates it as far as the east is from the west, never thinks about it again. And it creates this impression that we should be able to do the same, that we should be able to forgive somebody and take it away and never think about it again. One, it’s a metaphor. Two, it’s God. Three, it’s a part of this process. But it’s not what forgiveness in and of itself does. It’s not something we can actually choose to do. So if we are trying to forget about it, we usually just end up suppressing it and pushing it down, and that creates other problems.

[12:53] Stephanie: So forgiving is something we can choose to do. Forgetting is something we cannot choose to do.

[12:57] Marcus: Exactly.

[12:58] Stephanie: And then the “R”.

[13:00] Marcus: So the “R” is reconciliation. And again, I put it this way: that forgiving takes one person. That’s me making the choice to cancel the emotional debt that you owe me. Reconciliation takes two, because reconciliation is about rebuilding trust in a relationship and about reconnecting at some level.

So there are levels of reconciliation. For example, reconciliation doesn’t mean that I suddenly now trust you as if nothing ever happened. We can’t do that either. It would be unwise to do that. If somebody’s committed a violent crime against you. The Bible doesn’t say, well, you need to reconcile with that person in the sense of, go ahead and make them your best friend, but in the sense of forgive them for what they’ve done so that you don’t become in bondage to bitterness over it.

In reconciliation, there are levels to this, and that is there are boundaries in our trust, and setting boundaries is not in opposition to reconciliation or for forgiveness. What boundaries have to do with is both protection and also building trust and establishing trust. So if somebody has to earn our trust as we move forward, it’s a complicated thing, and I can’t do it justice in, you know, 30 seconds here.

[14:18] Stephanie: But that’s a good start.

[14:20] Marcus: Yeah. So at least people understand that forgiving isn’t reconciling. Those are two different processes.

The third one, the first “E” of the FREE acrostic, is that it’s [forgiveness] not an emotion. I’ve had people say, “I don’t think I’m ready to forgive because I don’t feel it yet.” In other words, they’re saying, I still feel bitterness. I still feel wronged. And I’m like, that’s fine. You can feel whatever you want to feel. You can feel not only what you want to feel, but, I mean, you can’t help what you feel.

The question is, would you, despite how you feel, be willing to choose to forgive? And so I’ve walked a lot of people through a prayer like this saying, and the prayer even starts off, “God, you know I still don’t like this person. You know I still hate them for what they did. But right now I ask you to forgive me for hating them. Help me with that. But, I’m also choosing to forgive them for what they did to me out of obedience to you. I’m just going to make that choice despite the fact that I don’t feel anything about it right now.”

And I’ve seen a lot of those people, in fact, most of those people find greater peace later, not just from forgiving, but then from the other things that you do related to emotional healing, which is like we talked about in Understanding the Wounded Heart: building joy, taking thoughts captive, listening prayer, as well as forgiving. I just encourage people, you don’t have to wait until you feel that you have already forgiven them in your heart. Then you don’t have to wait till you’re free from the bitterness to do this. You’re choosing to do this as a step towards getting free from all that bitterness and not letting it rule you anymore.

[15:56] Stephanie: Well, I think it’s similar to, you don’t go clean yourself up and then come to God and be like “Hey!” You come to God and be. It’s very similar.

So what does it look like to forgive from the heart? The Bible tells us to forgive from the heart.

[16:10] Marcus: Yes.

[16:11] Stephanie: How does that factor here?

[16:12] Marcus: I pondered that for a while, too, because it was like, “Well, doesn’t that mean I have to feel something first?” And when I began to realize in walking people through that, what I had them do is to say, “Because the Bible wants you to forgive from your heart, let’s try to get in touch with your emotions about this.”

That is, a lot of people just wanted to kind of do an intellectual forgiveness exercise. And I was like, “Well, before we do that, why don’t we actually go and revisit this memory a little bit? Revisit how living with your dad made you feel. Revisit how living with your mom made you feel. What are those emotions that you’re feeling?” Because part of what we’re forgiving the person for is how they’ve made me feel all my life. I’m choosing to forgive you for making me feel this way all my life.

And so I want to get them into that so that they can forgive from their heart, is the idea. I want you now, knowing the full weight here of what’s going on, you’re still choosing to forgive. So that’s the way I brought those two things together.

[17:07] Stephanie: That makes sense. All right, how about the fourth letter? The “E” or the last “E”?

[17:14] Marcus: It’s this idea of an explanation or an excuse, and that is, forgiveness is not excusing somebody by explaining away their behavior. And you hear this a lot, “Well, you know, when I stop and think about, the mom they grew up with and the family they were in, or I stopped and think about what happened to them and the abuse they went through, and I guess I can forgive them.” I say, that’s not actually forgiveness. That’s a completely different process.

It’s a valid process. I mean, it can be helpful to have those kinds of things, but that’s more dealing with our beliefs. I don’t have to know why they did something or understand it in such a way that I can justify it and say, “Well, what they did wasn’t really that bad”, because actually, when I do that, I run the risk of not forgiving them as fully as they need to be forgiven. And that is, I want to make the choice to forgive them whether I understand it or not. And have led a lot of people through a prayer that, again, started with something like, “I still don’t understand this, God. I don’t think I’m ever going to understand them, but I choose to forgive them anyway.”

[18:14] Stephanie: You’ve described before, if somebody owes you $10,000, but you explain it away, like, “Oh, I understand why they haven’t given that back.” And so you end up, when you get down to forgiving them, you forgive them for $200 or something.

[18:30] Marcus: That was Darrell Brazell who used that illustration. He’s been running a recovery ministry in a church focusing on helping men with porn issues for a long time. And one of the advice that he would give men is, if you’ve been really deep into porn, you can’t confess to your wife that now and then you look at Sports Illustrated stuff. You can’t say, “Well, you know, I accidentally found some porn online and I spent 15 minutes looking at it. Would you please forgive me?” when you’ve actually gone to Porn Hub for hours and hours and hours on many, many, many occasions, because if you confess to just a little bit of it, then she forgives you for just a little bit of it.

When you come back and you tell her the whole thing, she’s going to feel doubly betrayed because you not only betrayed her the biggest time, you lied about it. So in the same way, if we are excusing people and explaining it away, we end up forgiving them for a smaller debt than what we actually feel like they owe us. And so we want to make sure that we’re dealing with all of what’s on the table when we choose to forgive, and not just forgiving a portion of what’s happened.

[19:35] Stephanie: So then in addition to FREE, we’ve touched on it briefly, but there is healing. Forgiveness is not the same thing as healing. It’s a step in the process. So can you talk more about that?

[19:46] Marcus: Yeah, I’ve talked to people who are like, “I thought I forgave this person, but there’s still pain about this whole thing. We haven’t reconciled, and I still don’t feel good about any of this. I don’t think I did it right.”

And what they mean is I don’t think I forgave correctly or I would be over this. And I’m like, no, there’s more to healing than forgiving. You can forgive somebody and still not be over it.

Again, I’ll go back to the four tools from Understanding the Wounded Heart. Some of the recovery from it is changing the way we think about a lot of things. There’s some taking thoughts captive, there’s rebuilding some joy, there’s listening prayer, and even building some relational connection that has to go on that forgiveness in and of itself isn’t going to address.

There’s this kind of myth out there that all you need to do to feel better about your past is forgive somebody. There’s just more to it than that. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t start with forgiveness.

I remember talking to a couple one time where there had been an affair, and the wife forgave the husband for the affair, and they stayed together. But a year later, I met with them again, and she started this way: “I don’t think I did it right because I’m still really struggling with this.” Part of what we kind of uncovered that day was that what she was needing to forgive him for, at this point, was all of the consequences that she hadn’t yet dealt with. The fact that other family members looked at her differently now, all the struggles that she was having, all of the other issues that had come up.

It’s one thing to forgive for the sin itself. Now, I had her make a list of all the consequences that had come from her husband’s sin and list them out. And then she just said, “God, I choose to forgive him for all of these consequences as well.” And she once again left with peace. Now, that is, again, not all there is to healing and reconciliation and everything else, but it needed to be done. She needed to.

[21:44] Stephanie: And that’s the sort of thing that’s going to continue to need to be done because consequences will continue to pop up.

[21:49] Marcus: Yes, that is correct. Well, I know it is absolutely correct that one of the reasons that we revisit things and forgive, and can sometimes need to forgive more than once, is that sometimes we’re forgiving different aspects of what happened, and I’m coming at it from one angle or a different angle.

My only hesitation in saying that is, I don’t want people to feel like they’ve got to keep revisiting painful things to try to decipher whether or not they have really fully forgiven. I’m just saying if God keeps bringing it up as something you need to deal with, and you’ve already chosen to forgive, you might go back and say, “Is there a different aspect of this that he’s asking me to forgive?” And I’ll just leave it there for now.

[22:25] Stephanie: That’s good. Well, I don’t want to spend too much more time on this next question because we’re running out of time. But I did want to address consequences from the angle of mercy and justice, because forgiveness doesn’t mean expunged consequences. So what is the difference between forgiveness and mercy? What’s the relationship between forgiveness and justice? And I know that’s a huge topic.

[22:48] Marcus: Yes, it is. But I think the simple answer to that is, every parent has to deal with this all the time. Right? And that is, if I have to, as a parent, if my child has done something that deserves consequences, when I say to the child, “I forgive you,” that doesn’t mean there’s no consequences. It means our relationship is good. “I forgive you, I still love you, our relationship is still solid.”

Now, in terms of what happened, there are consequences simply because it’s part of discipline, it’s part of life, it’s part of training. So that’s why the Bible presents God as a parent who disciplines his children, and that if he didn’t love them he wouldn’t discipline them.

And so this idea of consequences: when, for example, I can forgive somebody and still press charges against them that sends them to jail. Now, at first that sounds like, no, that doesn’t sound like forgiveness for me. But there’s a difference between forgiving somebody and saying, “Relationally, I forgive you. Spiritually, I forgive you. But there are still consequences for what’s happened here that need to be followed through on.”

[23:59] Stephanie: Well, particularly if they’re unsafe, then forgiving them is kind of the same as reconciliation. It’s not the same as reconciliation. You’re not saying, “Okay, I forgive you, go out and hurt more people.”

[24:10] Marcus: Exactly. You don’t say to somebody like a serial rapist, “I forgive you now, so I’m not going to press charges. So go rape more people.” That doesn’t make any sense at any level. Same way, if I’ve got somebody who’s trapped in addiction and is routinely hurting themselves and hurting other people, I can’t just say, “I forgive you. We’re going to pretend this never happened.” That’s not how that works. I can forgive you and still put you in a place where there are consequences for this, for your own good and for the good of other people. So that’s why I say forgiving doesn’t always mean that there’s no consequences.

[24:45] Stephanie: All right, well, to wrap up, before we get to your final thoughts, I was just thinking, if someone is listening right now and is feeling convicted, like, “I really need to forgive that person.” Could you just walk us through right now how to do that?

[24:59] Marcus: Yeah. I tend to think of this as ABC, and that is, “A” is I Accuse the person. And they might say, “What? I thought we were forgiving.” But you start by accusing. What is it that they did that they need to be forgiven for? And it might be just that they made me feel this way.

I could be saying what I’m accusing them of is, my mom made me feel like I was worthless, or my dad ignored me and made me feel this. So I tend to word it this way: “I accuse them for __________, they made me feel _____________. They did this and made me feel that.”

So that’s kind of the formula I use.

[25:33] Stephanie: And this is internal. You’re not recommending people go…

[25:38] Marcus: No, I’m not saying go to the person and accuse them. Because again, this is something between me and God. This is something I am doing as an individual, between me and God. I’m saying, “God, you know how this person has wronged me. You know what they did to me. I’m spelling it out, and this is how it felt. And I’m putting it, all of it, out there.” And this is big.

And then I go to, kind of like, how Big is it really? This is sort of the “B”. This is big emotionally, just how big is this for me? And then I make the Choice and I say, “God, I now choose,” And say something like, “In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, I choose to cancel the debt that they owe me. I choose to forgive them. And I hand them to you. I hand all of the debt to you and I ask for the grace. I ask for your grace to help me live with the consequences they’ve created for me.”

And then I can go on from there. But after that, I’m not actually in forgiveness mode. I’m now layering things on top of the forgiveness. But I’m saying, I start by sort of laying out what it is that they’ve done, how did that make me feel? And then I’m choosing to forgive. So I’m kind of stating the crime [Accuse], if you will, stating what the wounding was, stating what the emotion was it created in me, or this group of emotions it created in me [How Big]. And then I am making the Choice to forgive.

Now, following up on that, I will often ask God to bless that person because it says, “Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who do bad things to you.” So I’ll pray, “God, would you bless them? God, would you give me grace? God, would you heal? And would you give me a new picture of how you want me to see them?”

There are other things I will layer onto a prayer like that, but we’re starting to get into other territories beyond forgiveness.

[27:20] Stephanie: Very good. Thank you. That’s so helpful. So next week, we’ll continue working through the SOUL-L acrostic with a look at how the Lies we believe give ground to the enemy, which is often where we go after dealing with the forgiveness. So, for now, any final thoughts?

[27:39] Marcus: I think you’re absolutely right. One of the most common things that happens when you have to deal with forgiveness issues is you also have to deal with lies, because it’s really, really common, if I have been wounded, that’s why I’m forgiving. I’m forgiving because I’ve been wounded. And if I’ve been wounded, then there are probably lies that I have come to believe. And so I found that dealing with forgiveness and dealing with the lies that we believe are often a one two punch that is really important in dealing with our emotional healing.

[28:07] Stephanie: All right, thank you. I look forward to that conversation next week.

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