In Touch Ministries

Dr. Charles Stanley: You can't hold on to hurts and hold on to bitterness and hold on to resentment and be right with God. What happens is you get down to pray, and you can talk to Him all you want to, but I can tell you exactly how it feels: something doesn't click.

You can say the things you used to say, and it doesn't make any difference. You cannot be unforgiving. It has nothing to do with what the other person does. It has to do rather with my relationship to the Lord and how I'm going to react and respond, how I'm going to receive or reject or handle those hurts.

Guest (Male): Do you have memories that you just can't let go of? Any smoldering resentment in your heart? How about someone you can't think well of? If you'd have to say yes, then stay with us for In Touch, the teaching ministry of Dr. Charles Stanley, to hear some liberating biblical principles for healing our hurts. Let's listen in.

Dr. Charles Stanley: Somebody hurt you a year ago, ten years ago, or a lifetime ago, and somehow deep down inside you can't shake it. Sometimes you say it never happened, but you know deep down inside it did happen. So you try to deny it, but that doesn't work.

You suppress it, and somehow it keeps popping out. Sometimes it pops out in an embarrassing fashion. You know that deep down inside something happened back there that you can really identify. In fact, you can point your finger at the person. What seemingly was merely a little hurt in the beginning somehow is solidified like concrete in your mind.

It's just there. It lays there, it hangs there, the burden of it is there. You'd like to shake it, you'd like to get rid of it, but somehow you just can't do it. You got hurt so badly that somehow you feel like you will never be able to overcome this. Well, I want to tell you, my friend, yes you can.

If you don't overcome the hurts of the past, those hurts can do great, great harm to your life. So what we have to do is we have to decide how we're going to handle this hurt. Am I going to handle this hurt in such a way that it harms me in every aspect of my life? Or am I going to learn how to handle this hurt in such a fashion that I can take it and handle it properly and be able to learn something from it, glean something from it, and grow up as a result of it, and not allow it to hurt me?

God does not want us to respond to hurts in such a fashion that we are devastated in our life, lose our witness and our testimony, or go through life bearing some kind of emotional baggage that we are never able to escape. So I want you to turn, if you will, to Ephesians chapter four.

In this fourth chapter, he's been talking about things that you and I have to deal with in our life about renewing our mind and dealing with anger and so forth. Then he says, if you'll notice in verse 30, "Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption." We grieve Him in lots of ways, and he's just talked about some of those ways by our speech and so forth.

Then he says in verse 31, "Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ has also forgiven you."

When we talk about the unforgiving spirit that develops as a result of these hurts, remember it's something we have to agree with. I don't have to become unforgiving. It doesn't make any difference what happens. Here's the thing that has helped me above everything else in my own personal life, and that is when I think about the fact that when the Lord Jesus Christ went to the cross, He took all of my sin on the cross with Him.

No matter what I've done or will ever do, He has already forgiven me of every single solitary thing. How can I hold against someone else, be unforgiving toward them, when He has not been unforgiving toward me? That person may be obnoxious, they may be obstinate, they may not want to be my friend or have anything to do with me.

How they respond is one thing. How the other person responds is one thing, but the issue is how am I going to respond? Am I going to allow an unforgiving spirit, a hurt in my life, to become a harmful thing to me? Or am I going to respond properly no matter how the other person responds?

Sometimes we say, "Well, but they did so-and-so." That's not even the issue. I'm not responsible for someone else's response. I am responsible for my responses to how I am treated by someone else, and all of us are the same.

When he says here, "put away all of these things that come into your life," what are the consequences, for example, of an unforgiving spirit? When he says, "put these things away from you, along with all malice, and be kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other even as the Lord has forgiven us." Well, what are the harms that we face?

The first thing is damaged emotions. There are many, many people, in fact, probably most people, who are damaged at some point in their life emotionally. Many people live with it. They live with damaged emotions. They don't recognize it, they don't understand what it is, they just know they're unhappy. They just know they don't have any contentment.

Somehow they just can't seem to really and truly get on with enjoying life and moving ahead. Somehow they can't lay the past behind them. I'll tell you one of the tragedies of life is to find somebody who's holding on to past hurts, holding on to past injury, and they can't let it go, won't let it go, or refuse to let it go.

It becomes their security and then, if they had to let it go, they don't know what they would do because it has become like this elephant in their life. It's this big thing in their life of somehow feeling and expressing and harboring and nurturing this kind of resentment and hostility.

One of the areas in which it causes hurt is emotional damage. When a person is feeling all these things—anger and resentment and so forth—and they can't escape them, it colors everything in your life. There's no exception to this: it colors everything in your life.

What happens is your emotions freeze. You cannot have hurts in your life that have caused you to become bitter and resentful and unforgiving and hostile and angry, as well as you may be able to suppress that. Your emotions freeze. You cannot love. You may try to, but you can't. You can't love, you can't be free, you can't be giving, you can't be generous.

Something's frozen you up. It's hung you up, it's stuck you up. Your emotions are frozen. Not only can you not genuinely love someone else, you can't accept it. Every single one of us wants to be loved, every single one of us desires to be loved, every single one of us needs to be loved, and every single one of us needs to be able to love someone else.

When I think about going through life and not being able to love someone, when I think about going through life and not having someone to love me in return, tell me what life is all about if you eliminate the emotion of love. Tell me what's life all about if you do not love the Lord and have Him loving you in return? What's life all about if you cannot share your emotion?

If you have an unforgiving spirit, you can't do it. Something freezes on the inside. Now, he says if you say you love God and hate your brother, first of all, you're lying. You cannot love God. You can't feel the overflowing of God's grace. You can't experience God's goodness. You can't receive God's soul prosperity in your life as long as there's hostility and anger and bitterness in your life and an unforgiving spirit.

I'm here to tell you there's no anger worth giving up love for. No anger, no hurt, no resentment, nothing worth giving up your love for God, His love for you, and your being able to love someone else. So what happens is we carry this emotional baggage. We freeze our emotions. We freeze our capacity to love.

Someone may try to love you and love you and love you. Somehow you don't trust them, or somehow you just can't feel it, you can't experience it, you can't receive it, because you've been hurt so badly. You just can't. You don't know why you can't. So what happens? You have to be tough.

Well, my friend, listen. You can be tough all you want to, but I'd rather be tender. He says be tenderhearted, loving one another, forgiving each other even as the Lord has forgiven us. If you're one of those persons and you've wondered, "Why am I not free to love? Why can't I just give myself away? Why can I not do that?" maybe you need to ask yourself the question: what is there inside of me that maybe I have never dealt with, that I need to lay down, that I need to face up to, that I need healing in my spirit, healing in my soul, healing in my damaged emotion? Well, it will certainly harm us.

A second area in which I think it harms us is this: it erodes our fellowship with the Lord. I cannot be right with Him, I can't be free with Him. There have been times in my life when I was not, when I was dealing with things that I knew I had to deal with, and somehow I just didn't have that freedom and liberty in my relationship to Him.

It will erode your relationship to the Lord. You can't hold on to hurts, friend. You can't hold on to hurts and hold on to bitterness and hold on to resentment and be right with God. What happens is you get down to pray, and you can talk to Him all you want to, but I can tell you exactly how it feels: something doesn't click.

You can say the things you used to say, and it doesn't make any difference. You can try to conjure up some kind of feeling, and it won't work, because you cannot be unforgiving. It has nothing to do with what the other person does. They may be forgiving and loving, or they may be hostile, angry, bitter, and resentful.

It has nothing to do with how I respond. It has to do rather with my relationship to the Lord and how I'm going to react and respond, how I'm going to receive or reject or handle those hurts. It will erode your relationship with the Lord. I mean, you would just give anything if you could just be free enough to praise the Lord and sing and just glorify God and thank Him. But you can't do it.

Why? Because there's something on the inside that's harming you, harming you internally, harming your relationship to the Lord. Likewise, it will erode and affect our relationship with other people. A bitter person, as we said a few moments ago, they can't hide it. You can't hide it. There's no way to hide bitterness, resentment, hostility. You can smile all you want to, but you can't hide it.

Anything that affects my capacity to love, anything that freezes me up, freezes up my emotions. If I have damaged emotions and I have a poison leak in my emotional tank, there is no way. Think about people who live like this. You want to walk up and they'll give you a handshake, and there's no warmth in it. It's not because they don't want to; they can't.

You want to hug them and say, "How are you doing? Praise the Lord, glad to see you, I love you, brother." They can't do that. Why can't a person just relax and say, "Well, thank you, bless you, I just love you." It's not that they don't want to. I think some people I've walked away from would think, "I wish I could feel that. I wish I could feel what he's feeling."

I'm just saying you're my friend, I love you, praise the Lord, I thank God for you. There are different ways to say that. They can't do it. I'll tell you another way it harms us. It harms us in our health. If you think that you can have hurts in your life that are undealt with, and if you don't deal with them, that ultimately it's not going to have any effect upon you, you better think again.

There's going to be a fuse blown physically in your body somewhere, somehow, unless you deal with the hurts that are there. It's going to happen. God wants to get our attention in one way or the other. He'd rather us just listen to a message, get on our face, deal with it, repent of it, and move on.

But if we don't, what happens? Instead of dealing with their hurts and having them healed, it is easier to go to the doctor. "Well, doctor, here's what: I'm just tired. I just feel bad all the time. And I hurt here, I hurt here, I hurt over here." I imagine most doctors, when people walk in, they've already got a prescription.

They just hurt over this, that, and the other, and so what do they do? They write you out a prescription. To do what? To help alleviate your pain, not heal your problem. So what happens? Agreed, it's easier to go to the doctor, get a prescription, and make you feel a little bit better.

But when that prescription runs out, what do you have to do? You have to go back and get another one. There are people who've been on drugs for years and years because they will not deal with the hurt deep down inside that may have happened way back yonder years ago in their life.

These are the kind of people who live for the moment. "Just let me feel good for the moment. I'm not worried about the future. I'm not worried about hurts. I'm not worried about the ultimate consequence to this. I just want to feel good right now."

I'm here to tell you it's devastating. It will damage you emotionally. It will erode your relationship to the Lord. It will affect your relationship to other people. It will affect your health ultimately. Somewhere along the way, some fuse is going to get blown if you and I don't do what He says.

He says, "Put away from you, let all bitterness and resentment and hostility and all these things be put away." All right, suppose there is somebody I need to forgive. How do I do that? Now listen carefully. Let's define what forgiveness is not. Forgiveness is not justifying the other person's actions. Forgiveness is not forgetting it. Forgiveness is not tolerating it, saying, "Well, everyone makes mistakes and so whatever."

It is not denying it. It is not excusing what that person's done to you. It is not saying, "Well, inevitably, time will heal this." No, it won't, unless you're willing to deal with whatever it is that caused that hurt and pain in your life. If I forgive someone, here's what I've done: I have said I deliberately and willfully lay down, put aside this debt that you owe me as a result of somehow the way you hurt me.

I'm going to lay it aside. I've put it down. No longer hold it against them anymore. Now, does that mean that everything is absolutely correct between us? Not necessarily, because you and I are not responsible for someone's response to our forgiveness. You may be forgiving, God may heal you, and the other person who did something to you may never be healed.

They might not be interested in healing. Their malice is just as strong today as it was yesterday. So they may never change. But you and I are responsible for changing no matter what the other person does. We are not responsible for another person's actions. They are responsible for their own responses. They give an account to God for their own responses.

You say, "Well, suppose it's somebody that hurt me a long time ago and they live in a distant state. Or maybe what they did to you, you could not even begin to share with anyone else under any condition. Or suppose they died. Then what?" I think of the tragedies, the things that happen between children and their parents, and then the parent—for example, the father or mother—dies, and this bitterness and resentment and hostility they say, "Now what do I do? Have I got to live with this the rest of my life? Do I have to live with this stuff in me the rest of my life? Now I can't settle it. I didn't, I couldn't at the time, and now they're gone. Now what do I do?"

Here's what you do, and this will work. You get by yourself, you set up two chairs, you sit in one of them, and you put the other person in the other chair. That person may live on your block, but they won't talk to you and they won't deal with you. That's okay. Or they may be dead. You put them in the other chair and you sit in this chair.

Then here's what you do very carefully: you express to the other person all the feelings that you have, the way that you believe they hurt you, and all the feelings that you have. Let them out. Then you say to that other person, "Because the Lord Jesus Christ, who is my personal Savior, went to the cross and paid my sin debt in full, and because He has continually forgiven me over the years, I choose to forgive you for what you have done to me."

Then you pray this prayer: "Father, I want to thank you for giving me the power and the privilege to lay down this hurt that has been there for years and years. I want to thank you for enabling me to be able to forgive my father, my mother, my sister, my brother, my son, my daughter, my friend. Thank you for making it possible for me to forgive them."

And then accept the forgiveness that you have given to the other person as done. My friend, from that moment on, the healing process will take place in your life, and what was harming you and hurting you far more deeply than you realized, the healing process will begin to take place and God will set you free of the hurts that would ultimately have harmed you and ultimately have destroyed you.

I want to encourage you. It may be that you say, "Well, I don't know about that sitting down with somebody talking to them." Try it. If you don't want to do that, then here's what you do. You write them a letter. Just write it out, all the things that you feel. Then you express in that letter, write out your prayer in that letter.

Then here's what you do: you burn it up. And with that burn goes your anger, resentment, hostility, bitterness, and all the hurts that you nurtured all those years of your life. My friend, the Father wants you free. Here's what He says. He says if you know the truth, the truth will set you free. And here's the truth that sets you free: when you and I are willing to be forgiving, even as the Father has forgiven us, we will be free of the hurt. We will be free of the harm that those hurts could cause to us if we will trust Him for it.

Father, we thank you for loving us. Thank you that you have given us the beautiful example of the Savior in all of His forgiveness of all of us down through these years. Day after day You have forgiven us. Now teach us how to handle our own damaged emotions in such a fashion that we do not let them harm us any longer.

Rather, we begin to rejoice in our relationship with You. Love and be loved by others. Give ourselves away. Generosity and love and kindness and tenderness toward others, so that we too will be living, walking examples of what love is really all about. For we ask it in Jesus' name and for His sake. Amen.

Guest (Male): Past hurt can be dealt with and resolved, but only through forgiveness. Regardless of who's at fault, remember what you heard today on In Touch. God requires His followers to take the first step and forgive. For more guidance on letting go and forgiving those who've hurt you, drop by our website intouch.org or go through this teaching again by clicking the link to Today on Radio.

That's where you can order a copy of Dr. Stanley's complete message. The title is "Healing Our Hurts." That's intouch.org. You can also call or text 1-800-INTOUCH. If you prefer to write, our address is In Touch, Post Office Box 7900, Atlanta, Georgia, 30357.

Dr. Charles Stanley: Let your time and your schedule and everything about you revolve around this: that you and I are to develop and continue to develop this ongoing, intimate, wonderful, exciting, satisfying, indescribable, wonderful, incomparable relationship with a personal God.

Guest (Male): Dr. Stanley devoted his entire life to helping us get closer to Jesus, as we all want to do. You can learn how at charlesstanleyinstitute.org.

Guest (Female): I love my In Touch Daily Devotional! But you may have wondered if the print is getting smaller these days. Is the print smaller? It couldn't be my eyes. The In Touch Daily Devotional is now available in large print! While other print seems to be getting smaller, ours is getting larger. That's so much better. The In Touch Daily Devotional, now available in easy-to-read large print. Order yours today at intouch.org/largeprint.

Guest (Male): You're listening to In Touch. Forgive and forget—is it enough? Here's a moment with Charles Stanley.

Dr. Charles Stanley: When I read about oil spills and all the fish that die and animals that die and all the cost of that and all the destruction that goes on, humanly speaking, a bitterness spill is the worst kind of spill. Because what happens is a person who is bitter, they spill it out on the most innocent kind of people.

Somehow there's some erosion that goes on inside of them and it's always leaking out. What's happening is they're hurting deep down inside. They've been deeply hurt, and what they don't realize is that hurt, because it has not been dealt with, is now become a leaky poison. Their bitterness, their resentment, their anger, their hostility, their malice, their desire to see someone else harmed and to see someone else injured as a result of it is there.

My friend, to say, "Well, you know, that happened to me years ago and oh, I forgot about that." No doubt we can forget to some degree, but here's what I want you to remember: because you forget it for a season of time does not mean it's gone. I can think in my own life, for example, that I was somewhere along in my 40s until I began to realize there was something in my life I needed to deal with.

If you'd asked me, "Well, had you forgotten about it?" I'd say, "Well, sure I forgot about that and, you know, I just act like it never happened." But I'm here to tell you, you may act like it never happened, but that is not the healing process. You don't get it healed by simply trying to forget it.

It was something that went on in my family, my relationship with my stepfather, that I wanted to forget and so I just suppressed that and acted like it never happened. I thought, "Well, I've forgiven him and that's it." Well, I may have forgiven him but I had not dealt with the relationship and I had not dealt with the things that went on between us. Until I dealt with it, there was no real healing. You may forget it for a season, but until it is healed, it will hurt you in every area of your life.

Guest (Male): Forgiving others and healing relationships begins with receiving God's forgiveness through faith in Jesus Christ. Visit us at intouch.org to learn more. Do you have a story about how God's grace has touched you through this broadcast? We'd love to hear it. Next week on In Touch, are you ready for what comes next? Dr. Stanley's series helps us be prepared for the countdown to judgment. That begins Monday on In Touch, the teaching ministry of Dr. Charles Stanley.

This program is a presentation of In Touch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia, and remains on this station through the grace of God and your faithful prayers and gifts.