FORGIVE YOURSELF
Sakkie Parsons
Someone wrote to me and shared with me about the change of direction, or rather the return to Jesus, that he had made in his life.
He then also shared with me how difficult he finds it to forgive himself for all the bad things he had done and how afraid he is that our Lord will still hold the wrong things he had done against him.
What follows now is what I wrote to him and what I would also like to share with you:
I would like to say something to you in response to what you wrote to me.
You write: “I still feel guilty about what I did. I am still afraid that I will be turned away, although I regularly talk to God and ask Him to forgive me.”
The wonderful glory for you and me, our Lord’s children, is this:
1 JHN 1:9 If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
He only wants us to come to Him in all sincerity and settle the matter with Him. In other words—in all sincerity, say that you are sorry, with the absolute intention not to do it anymore, even though we might perhaps do it again.
ISA 1:18 “Come now, and let us reason together,” Says the Lord, “Though your sins are like scarlet, They shall be as white as snow; Though they are red like crimson, They shall be as wool.
Satan, however, will continually try to throw our past in our faces, to try to convince us that we have not really been forgiven.
What you and I must then do is, just as Jesus did, quote Scripture against him and send him away from us in the Name of Jesus Christ.
An example that Jesus gives us of how to do this, we find in Mathew 4:3-4
MAT 4:3 Now when the tempter came to Him, he said, “If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.”
MAT 4:4 But He answered and said, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’ “
The passage from the Word that Jesus uses here as a weapon against satan, is found in Deuteronomy 8:3.
DEU 8:3 Yes, He humbled you by allowing you to go hungry and then letting you eat manna, food that neither you nor your forefathers had known before. He did this to teach you that people need more than bread to live. True life for a person comes from every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.
You see, The Word is the Weapon that our Lord has given us to defeat satan with.
EPH 6:17 And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God;
Because the Word is our weapon with which we can defeat satan, satan tries hard, and also succeeds with many people, to make sure that they do not develop a love for reading and studying the Word. So much so that many Christians do not even notice this strange phenomenon in their lives.
They will regularly spend money to buy newspapers and make time to read them too, and then throw them away. They will spend money on expensive magazines, which they also throw away once they have finished reading them. They will pay dearly for a wide variety of books which they will read from beginning to end, but when it comes to the Word of our Lord, there is simply no real desire in their hearts to read it.
Satan has, as it were, knocked their weapon out of their hands, put something else in their hands, and now he stands before them and, while he plays his evil guitar, he forces his helpless prey to dance before him to his tune and to the rhythm of his little melody.
What an absolute heartbreaking tragedy that people for whom Jesus went and hung on the cross should provide satan with this pleasure!!!
By the way, in Ephesians 6:13-17 the full armour of the Christian is displayed for everyone who wants to go and see everything you need in your battle against satan. Actually, you can simply read from Ephesians 6:12. Then you will also immediately see against whom you must put on the armour.
Finally, just this last thought:
People have committed suicide because they could not forgive themselves for what had happened in their past.
If you have asked our Lord for forgiveness with genuine repentance, He has forgiven you.
Now forgive yourself too for what you did in the past.
In other words, bury the past. Because if you do not do this, there is a real danger that your past will bury you, physically or psychologically.
Can you imagine what a great loss it would have been if Paul, who, when he was still Saul, had been an accomplice to the murder of Christians, had continued to reproach himself and believed that he could mean nothing to our LORD? No—our LORD says precisely through Paul to us:
PHIL 3:13 Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead,
PHIL 3:14 I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
Sakkie