How To Forgive Someone Who Hurt You DeeplySýnishorn

The Route to Healing

As God’s children, we are designed to forgive. Since we now have a new heart, it is actually in our nature to forgive. We are forgiving people, and no other response to our offenders will ever genuinely satisfy us. This is precisely why our Father urges us to forgive others just as he forgave us (Eph. 4:32; Col. 3:13).

What do we notice about how God forgave us?

•   God initiated the forgiveness, not waiting for us to apologize for every sin.

•   God made a choice to forgive us and now relates to us in light of that choice.

•   God canceled the debt, releasing us from anything we owed him.

This is what real forgiveness looks like. It is a decision that we make to cancel the debt, regardless of whether someone even admits what they did was wrong or owns up to how they hurt us.

This may seem like a hard decision to make, but remember that we are designed by God to forgive. We will be fulfilled at the core only when we choose to release others from what they “owe” us. We might think they owe us an apology. We might feel they are indebted to us and should therefore receive retaliation from us as a form of payback. But true forgiveness is a no-strings-attached, total release from anything we think they owe us or deserve as “punishment.”

(adapted from the book The Hurt & the Healer by Andrew Farley and Bart Millard)

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