Free To ForgiveSample

Day 10

Let’s continue understanding God’s requirements for true forgiveness that sets us free.

Requirement 3: Release the person from your heart-prison.

Then the master of that servant was moved with compassion, released him, and forgave him the debt. (v. 27)

We would expect that the next thing the master did after being moved with compassion was to simply forgive the servant, but he didn’t. Instead nestled between “compassion” and “forgive” are the unexpected words “released him.”

In order to release someone, they must be bound. In the case of this story, the “wicked servant” (v. 32) would soon be in prison for his debt. But as the parable isn’t really presenting an actual case but the underlying issue of forgiveness, I believe the issue of “releasing” the person from our heart-prison is one of the great missing protocols of God’s full forgiveness.

We have to choose to let go of the people who have wounded us. We do this by a conscious effort to no longer hold on to our desire to imprison them. Any idea of who you have locked away in your heart-prison? If you are like most of us, your prison holds more than one unforgiven person.

In like manner, when anyone places their full trust in the death and resurrection of Jesus as payment for their debt of sin, God sets them free (releases them) from the kingdom of darkness and transfers them into the kingdom of Jesus Christ.

When you have compassion (step 2), you have compassion on the person, not on the sin they committed. It’s because of your compassion on the person that you can release them from your heart-prison. This is truly unconditional love, isn’t it? To release them before you forgive them.

To do this, you must make a separation from the individual and the wound they gave you. The person isn’t equal to what they did to you. The wound was an act they did. To release them, you are extending compassion on the person, not on what they did to you.

This is an excerpt from The Freedom Factor: Finding Peace by Forgiving Others… and Yourself, by Dr. Bruce Wilkinson with Mark E. Strong. Used by permission.