Your Personal Jubilee’s Forgiveness Factors
Editor’s Note: The author considers this third article in the “Your Jubilee in 2010″ Series to be the most important in this five-part series, as it initiates the personal “Year of Jubilee” available to us in 2010. The five articles are: (1) “‘Jubileer’ or ‘April Fool’?”; (2) “Our National Jubilee’s Forgiveness Factors,” (3) today’s “Your Personal Jubilee’s Forgiveness Factors,” and to still to come, (4) “Getting Psyched Up for Your Personal Year of Jubilee,” and (5) “Crucial Steps into Your Personal Jubilee.” All five articles will be available at www.TheWalkShow.com immediately upon release. Ken sees this article as “at the very heart of the message” in his forthcoming book, Judo Politics—The Transformation of the Electorate that Upsets Big Brother, due to be released this Spring. If you have time for nothing else, Ken suggests that you read this article. To access the entire series, click on “Your Jubilee in 2010” Series under the Categories section to the right.
Healing and reconciliation take place essentially by means of compassion. . . . The one who takes away the consciousness of sin and gives the consciousness of forgiveness instead—he indeed takes away the heavy burden and gives the light one in its place. . . . Forgiveness . . . requires more courage to suffer than to act, more courage to forget than to remember, and perhaps the most wonderful thing about God is that he can forget man’s sins. —Søren Kierkegaard
Dear Walk Show Family,
At the beginning of a recent speech to a local gathering of believers, I started by asking, “How many of you are struggling with a personal forgiveness issue with someone who has sinned against you?” Not one hand was raised! At the end of my speech to this dear group of compulsive liars, veritably everyone in the audience came out of the woodwork to confess how much the “Jubilee message” (which is exactly the message of today’s article) applied directly to their lives!
As we have already intimated, our personal Jubilee always starts with forgiveness. Forgiveness involves the release of a debt, and it is the release of a debt that affords true “Liberty,” which, again, is the very meaning of the word, “Jubilee”!
Seven Misconceptions Concerning Jubilee Forgiveness
These articles are designed to help you through seven key misconceptions that have prevented so many individuals, and our nation itself, from entering our “Year of Jubilee.”
Misconception #1: “I Can Move Forward with My Life without Jubilee Forgiveness”
A long time ago a wise old counselor told me a story that graphically illustrates why forgiveness is so central to any progress we would wish to make as a “Jubileer” on just about any front–from personal to national. The counselor said that a teen-age counselee came to him with a jumble of problems. Tracing the problems to their apparent source, it was revealed that the boy had been abandoned before birth by his father, and as the boy reached his teenage years he began to act out his pain and anger from an intense sense of rejection.
The counselor helped the young man to see that the real problem was his lack of forgiveness toward his Dad. As the boy knew his Bible, he responded with, “The Bible tells me I have the power to bind or loose people from their sins, and that God in heaven will stand behind anything I do to bind or loose here on earth. [The boy was referring to Jesus Christ's words recorded in Matthew 18:18.]
“Therefore, I choose not to forgive my Dad, so as to hold him in his sins!”
The counselor, in turn, responded with, “Yes, you most certainly have the power to do that, yet that leaves you with one further problem.”
“What’s that?”
“You will never grow emotionally past this moment.”
I’m told that that “boy”–now a full-grown man decades later–is still a teenager emotionally today.
This leads me to an emphatic punch line to the Jubilee issue, which I wish to tell you even before we go into the whole story:
You and I will be locked out from our own personal Jubilee if we either resist God’s forgiveness and the cleansing that goes with it, and/or if we fail to release others from whatever emotional, relational, financial, sexual, political, or any other kind of debts they may have incurred with us. It’s either Jubilee forgiveness or paralysis.
Misconception #2: “God’s Forgiveness Can be Separated from Cleansing”
Most of us would agree that merely getting a free bus token to heaven could hardly be seen as the full measure of what is referred to as “conversion” to Jesus Christ. Accepting God’s forgiveness for our rebellion against Him and against His created order entails giving Him permission to reveal what that Lordship means in all areas of that created order, starting with our very lives.
The forgiveness that comes when we accept Christ’s atonement for our sins results in our spirits becoming fused with the Lord’s Holy Spirit in a process that is instantaneous and complete. The transformation of our souls and bodies, however, always involves a gradual process, for it must entail the two major components of healing: cleansing and nutrition. His Lordship incrementally extends to more and more aspects of our lifestyle. That process never finishes in this short lifespan on this earth.
Yet, many, many “believers” somehow erroneously conclude that we can accept the Lord’s forgiveness without contending for a corresponding cleansing that can only be accomplished at the expense of our self life. They are dead wrong. The truth could not be better stated than did the early 18th Century Austrian physician, Johann Schroth, when he said:
There is no victory without battle,
No healing without cleansing,
And no satisfaction without self-denial.
That we have settled for the passive acceptance of Christ’s forgiveness, but failed to deny ourselves by contending for personal cleansing, is clearly evidenced by the very terminology we employ to describe “church.” Although we all know better, most American Christians still refer to a building on the corner as “the church,” as in the uncleansed statement, “What church do you go to?”
The Creator, as well as our own spirits, have instructed us long ago that we are the house of the Lord. Yes, the church is a temple made up of living stones, and we are those stones! Yet, we still allow some uncleansed, control freak to get away by greeting us when we gather with the words, “Welcome to the house of the Lord!” May I suggest that those words issue from an unclean and uncleansed agenda?
My friend, Michael Wells, has it right when somebody asks him, “Mike, what church do you go to?” He says he always answers, “Is there another?” I think I’ll try that response for awhile myself!
Evidently the true house of the Lord desperately requires cleansing from this type of evil terminology that has been used by the deceiver and his pastoral hired hands to to rob millions upon millions of believers of their Jubilee/Liberty in Jesus Christ.
Yes, the true house of the Lord needs cleansing–room by room–often starting with our despicable terminology!
One day as a young man I was on staff at a local church’s drug-rehabilitation center. The leader, pastor Gib Martin, arrived at the house shortly after the discovery that two of the young residents, themselves professing new Christians, had been hiding drugs and drug paraphernalia under the bathroom sink! As he opened the door to the center, this mild-mannered pastor sent a shock wave through the house by shouting at the top of his lungs:
“Satan . . . will . . . not . . . run . . . this . . . house!!!”
I know Gib enough to know that he was not just speaking of the center’s building! He was referring to the real house of the Lord–including these two druggie dudes! One of these two young offenders later confessed to me, “Instantly I had had my own ‘Road to Damascus experience’! I saw the horribleness of my rebellion! When I heard Gib’s words, the revelation hit me like a bolt of lightning, and I walked out of there a totally changed man, and a free one!”
Almost forty years later that man is still walking with Jesus in the Spirit of Jubilee! His progress has always been in direct proportion to the degree in which he will allow Christ’s forgiveness to be coupled with cleansing.
A Confession about My Futile Attempts to Separate Forgiveness from Cleansing
Robin and I have invested in a succession of young men and women in our home over the years. As the decades have past, we have noticed an embarrassing pattern: Whereas Jesus said He appointed us to go out, “make disciples,” and “bear fruit that will last” (Matthew 28:19 & John 15:16), we have noted that several have left our home apparently no better off spiritually than when they first arrived. To be specific, they have left with the same demons with which they came. We may have helped them physically, financially, emotionally, mentally, or even theologically, but when we run into them years later they are found to be either the same or worse off than when they left us, which wasn’t much better than when they first arrived!
Simultaneously, we have discerned the pattern that only those who have been cleansed spiritually at the beginning of the process with us have fared well in the long run. Such cleansing does not come about by falling off a log, as it were. It entails the Holy Spirit’s conviction concerning sin, righteousness, and judgment in these dear people’s lives, followed by much more than mere confession and remorse, but an actual commitment to engage the name of Jesus Christ and His blood to defeat entrenched spiritual forces. (We go into this process in greater detail in the Judo Politics chapter entitled, “How Healthy Homophobes Can Help Set Homosexuals Free.”)
Our remaining time on this earth is so short that Robin and I have resolved that a person’s disinterest in getting cleansed right up front is reason enough for us to move on down the road without them for a season (cf., Matthew 10:14)—perhaps until they get their stomach full and come back wishing to do business with God by combining God’s Jubilee forgiveness with spiritual cleansing.
Misconception #3: “Bitterness is Logical”
A major misunderstanding concerning forgiveness was corrected for me by a wise older man, who at that time was the most powerful media mogul on the planet. Having perceived that I was bitter toward him for what I perceived at the time as a broken promise to me, John Broger gently suggested that I meditate upon three words for three days before reporting back to him. These three words changed the life of this young zealot forever:
“Bitterness is logical!”
What else could I do but comply, for the older man was my boss’ boss’ boss, and I had been assigned to work directly for him in the military mass media! So, for three days while I served as his escort officer during his keynote speeches at Campus Crusade for Christ’s Space Age Communications Conference in San Bernadino, California, I repeated to myself day and night: “Bitterness is logical; bitterness is logical; indeed, bitterness is logical!”
Finally, I blurted out: “Yes, bitterness has an iron-clad logic to it precisely because people do really nasty things to us! They lie, cheat, and steal from us, then gossip about us! They get revelations in the night to make their contractual “yes’s” into “no’s”, with a greater regularity than I would wish to report!”
By the time my three days were up, I had drawn the conclusion humankind was in desperate need for some kind of higher power to bust through the lower, apparently iron-clad logic to, as it were, a higher type of logic–a true Jubilee logic that supersedes and transcends the lower.
If you allow the lower logic of bitterness to drive you—especially when you’re still suffering 24/7 from the painful consequences of injustices committed days, weeks, months, years, or even decades ago—you should eventually find yourself needing something or Someone who can deliver you from bitterness’, lower, iron-clad logic!
Enter Jesus Christ! He and He only offers you Jubilee power over the lower, apparently iron-clad logic of bitterness that would otherwise do you in! That was precisely the message my boss’ boss’ boss in his wisdom wished me to get.
Misconception #4: “Your Sin Against Me is Bigger than My Sins that I Have Been Forgiven of by God”
A second misconception in our understanding of forgiveness entails yet one more realm of inverted logic. Decades of counseling others have convinced me that most people start out with the forgiveness thing all upside down. In specific, they fancy that the sins of others against them are much greater than their own sins against others. This mentality prevents a lot of forgiveness from ever getting underway.
Between sessions at a conference where I was speaking, an older lady accosted me to share about the bitterness she held toward her sister. It appeared even possible that her severe obesity and crippling arthritis might somehow be linked with her deep root of bitterness. Yet, the shock of all shocks came when she confessed that her sister had died 50 years previously! For a full 50 years this lady had held tightly to the inverted logic that the speck of sawdust in her dead sister’s eye was still larger than the log in her own eye (cf., Matthew 7:3)!
As I often have to do in similar cases, I referred her to Jesus Christ’s Matthew 18:21-35 parable of the servant who was forgiven by his Lord of his ten-million-dollar sins, but who wouldn’t forgive his peer for a paltry $18 offense. That parable should lead us to this uncomfortable conclusion that I think Christ wanted us thick-headed sheep to know:
Any sin that man can do to me is an $18 sin in comparison to the $10 million sins I have been forgiven of by God through Jesus Christ.
I have always found it interesting that King David, after committing adultery with his neighbor’s wife, then arranging for his neighbor to be killed in the army, actually had the audacity to pray, “Against You, and You only, have I sinned, Oh God” (Psalm 51:4)! Strange as that sounds in light of the monstrous sins David committed against his fellow man, I really think that David got it right! He saw his sins against God as infinitely larger than his sins against mankind. And, God called David, “a man after my own heart” (Acts 13:22).
What that means is that my counseling sessions really don’t get underway until the counselee inverts their knee-jerk concept of forgiveness—often on those same knees. Only when the offended confesses their greater offense against God for not forgiving others, does the real Jubilee forgiveness power kick in. This Liberty often does not come without a fight—if not with me, with the counselee’s own preconceptions, and sometimes even with the Lord!
“But, I don’t feel like forgiving so-and-so! In fact, I feel like punching their lights out!” is the type of statement I have heard so many times. To which I have learned to reply:
“Where does Jesus Christ live right now?”
“Why, He lives in me!”
“And how many of your sins—past, present, and future—has Jesus’ blood atonement forgiven?”
“Well, I guess all!”
“Then, how many of the sins that others can do to you—past, present, or even future—are covered by Christ’s forgiveness?”
“All of them?”
“Yes! So, regardless of your feelings, are you willing to allow yourself to become a channel of Christ’s forgiveness to so-and-so?”
If they have the guts and humility to reply with a “Yes!” then the real action begins!
Misconception #5: “The Penalty for My Unforgiveness is Less than for the Sins You Might Have Done Against Me”
Let’s let this sink in for a moment: When we fail to forgive one who has sinned against us, in God’s eyes we are actually committing a greater sin than any sin that they could ever possibly do against us. (“Now you’re really meddlin’, Ken!”) Even further, the non-forgiveness actually carries a higher penalty than does the sin done against you! (“Outrageous!”)
Remember, in Christ’s teaching in Matthew 18, He concluded in verses 32-35 with:
Then his master called him and said to him, “You contemptible and wicked attendant! I forgave and cancelled all that [great] debt of yours because you begged me to. And should you not have had pity and mercy on your fellow attendant, as I had pity and mercy on you?” And in wrath his master turned him over to the torturers (the jailers), till he should pay all that he owed. So also My heavenly Father will deal with every one of you if you do not freely forgive your brother from your heart his offenses (Amplified Bible).
Misconception #6: “I Have the Right to Build ‘Retaining Walls’ that Hold You in your Sin and Guilt”
As G. K. Chesterton commented, “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.” In fact, the closer we are to a person—and the more that we know about their secret weaknesses or sins—the more effective we are in personally constructing what might be called “retaining walls” between us and them so as to hold them fast in their guilt and sin.
When we fail to forgive others, we are also, in effect, getting them to focus upon us as their accusers, or “the enemy!” To the degree that you act as a stand-in for the accuser (that’s the Devil), the non-forgiven tends to focus on you as their problem instead of upon their real guilt and estrangement from God. You have effectively built a “retaining wall” around them to separate them from you and from God, while retaining them in their sins by constantly engender guilty feelings in them.
Should it not be expected that the closer we get to them, the more they will be reminded of their offenses, and the more they might wish to get away from us? Why should a judgmental, nagging wife be surprised, for instance, when her husband wants to slink off to the bar or a mistress, or both, to complain about “that old hag, old nag wife of mine”? Whereas the wife would not, the people at the bar simply accept you in your sins! Cheers!
When through forgiveness we remove the retaining wall, the people are free to be dealt with directly by God. The real guilt, not the man-made guilt feelings, can now be dealt with between God and the sinner directly, without unwanted human interference.
Although the following story about a separated couple, “Jim and Sally,” reveals the Jubilee forgiveness factors in pretty fast sequence, it nevertheless serves to illustrate the tremendous power in the process. So, at the risk of sounding simplistic, I will share it:
Sally’s borderline-alcoholic husband, Jim, first started by drinking off the paycheck. Then, he ran off with another woman, leaving the angry wife and their four children bewildered and destitute for a full year. Sally didn’t even know where Jim was, although she had heard he had left the state!
This dear lady, like most people in such a position, had the forgiveness thing all backwards. When the counselor asked her to forgive her husband, she figured it was he who had committed, as it were, “the $10-million sins” against her, when hers were only paltry, “$18 sins,” you know.
With the counselor’s help she discovered that her non-forgiveness was actually the larger sin, and that by it she had effectively retained her husband in his guilt and sins, actually helping to drive him out the door by an attitude typified by her standing in the doorway of the kitchen back door with her hands on her hips, accusing, “You drunk!” “You adulterer!” or whatever.
After quite an emotional display in the counseling session, finally Sally got on her knees in tears of repentance, whereupon she prayed a prayer something like this:
“Lord, forgive me for not releasing Jim from his debt to me [Note: this is the very essence of the Jubilee transaction—the liberty that comes from the release of a debt].”
Then, she adamantly continued as if Jim were right there in the room with her: “Jim, Jesus Christ lives in me, and He forgives you through me, so I forgive you! Even though I feel like scratching your eyes out, I’ll leave it at that: you’re forgiven—not because of how I feel, but because of what Jesus did for the two of us on the cross!”
It was as if Sally had vomited after going through both stages of seasickness—you know, the stage when you’re afraid you’re going to die, followed by the stage you’re afraid you’re not going to die! Take my word for it: it usually feels a lot better after the cleansing purge, as it did for Sally.
Removing “the Retaining Wall” that Holds Others in their Sin and Guilt
Spiritually Sally had removed the toxins, along with crushing the retaining wall she had so methodically built between her and Jim. She removed herself from the position of standing in the way of Jim’s restoration, as she freed Jim to be able to be dealt with directly by his Creator. Now, God was fully free to get out an even bigger stick, if necessary, to get Jim’s attention!
The next morning Sally received a call from an animated Jim, who was in another state. Jim exclaimed, “Sally! I had a dream about you and me last night! I was with you, and you were the most ravishing, sweetheart of a wife a man could ever find on this earth! Is that true?”
Here comes the funny part. Not at all wanting to say it, Sally found these ridiculous words welling up from within her and spouting out her mouth: “Why, yes, Jim, that’s true! Come and see!”
After they hung up, Sally panicked and started kicking herself! “What have I done? How stupid of me! Why did those crazy words pop out of my mouth?”
About seven hours later there was a knock on her kitchen door. Jim had driven non-stop from another state. He walked into the kitchen and immediately collapsed on the floor at her feet, wailing out his confession of his terrible sin—not just to her and the children, but to his Creator Himself.
With her husband’s eyes now wide open to his departure from the Creator’s perfect plan, Sally had an opportunity that surpassed her wildest dreams: there on the kitchen floor she held Jim’s hands as, for the first time in his life, he committed his life to Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior!
Last I heard of Jim and Sally they had been growing for several years in their love for one another as a family . . . with Jesus right there in the midst!
The very day I was finishing this article, yet another lady told me this story about her alcoholic husband: “I had a very vivid dream, in which I could see my husband staggering about with a beer can in his hand. Yet, in front of him stood a crazy woman who was jumping up and down with shrieks of disapproval at his actions. Then, all of a sudden I realized that I was that woman! Simultaneously, an angel of the Lord drew up next to me, and with one broad motion of his wing, swept me around to behind the angel’s back. With my husband shielded from having to look at me, he was then enabled to be directly dealt with by God. This led to his complete release and restoration–both in my dream and in our actual marriage thereafter!”
Because the power of Jubilee is not always demonstrated so suddenly, I’ll give you yet another case that shows more of the process of tearing down the retaining wall between any two people. Yet another lady, Judy, whose husband, George, had taken up with a mistress, came to me with the usual, inverted concept of whose sins were greater.
Once she got that erroneous understanding of forgiveness re-inverted, she prayed a similar Jubilee prayer. She first removing herself as the “accuser,” then released her husband to be dealt with by God’s “bigger stick.” With “the Hound of Heaven” on her husband’s trail, shortly thereafter Judy came to me with an especially loud and emotional complaint:
“I just don’t know if I can take it anymore! When George sees me, he’s started to complain to me about his bitchy mistress! It just hurts me so much to hear him talk about that witch!”
“Don’t you see what’s happening here?” I queried. She didn’t.
“Well, by the very nature of the alliance, a mistress is someone who accepts you in your sins! That’s why adulterous relationships are started so easily—sometimes even in church pews! Because all the potential mistress has to do is commiserate with you as you share what a jerk your spouse is, and what a misunderstood or abused person you really are!
“Spiritual, then physical, adultery can fire up pretty quickly when the spouse is busily building retaining walls of guilt and shame, and the tempter offers nothing but “love,” acceptance and forgiveness—initially, at least!
“But, what is happening here is that you and George’s mistress are in the process of trading places once again! You are regaining your rightful position as his mate, and she is becoming the ‘old hag, old nag’ you once were trying your best to become!”
Indeed, the mystique had melted, with the mistress eventually taking on the same judgmental, non-forgiving role that Judy had formerly used to control George, hold him in his guilt, and drive him away from herself and God. Once the wife removed the “retaining wall” which had held her husband in his sins, the mistress started building a retaining wall of her own!
Eventually, the husband saw the light, repented, and returned to his wife. Had she not embraced the suffering of exercising her Jubilee power to forgive, neither she nor her estranged husband would have ever been restored to one another.
Misconception #7: Forgiveness is a One-Stage Process
When you claim the name of Christ to once-for-all forgive offending parties, why is it that the feelings and the logic of bitterness so often reemerge soon thereafter, even welling up from time to time as if they had just happened for the first time? May I suggest it’s because forgiveness is double-faceted, or two-staged?
The first time you forgive, what you have loosed on earth is released in heaven (cf., Matthew 18:15-19). That is sudden, permanent, and takes place in your spirit, which, we are told, is of “one spirit” with the Spirit of God and the spirit of the forgiven.
The soul, however—your mind, will, and emotions—like your body, is not normally healed instantly as is your spirit; rather, it takes a slower healing process. . . . So, your soul will often require a second stage of forgiveness—one in which you must participate in continuous “washings” in what we might call “forgiveness reaffirmations” every time the memory of the wrong re-surfaces in your mind or emotions. . . and it will!
When the feelings of non-forgiveness reemerge, it is altogether too easy for disciples of Jesus Christ to falsely conclude that the forgiveness itself might not have worked! So, they stop the second-stage forgiveness-reaffirming “washings”–not in the lives of the forgiven, but in their own lives! The net result is paralysis at the least, and further bitterness and disillusionment at the worst. Either way, the work of the Jubileer is stopped dead in its tracks!
We all know that a second, multiple-forgiveness stage is necessary when we encounter re-offenses. With re-offenses, Jesus said that we should be willing to forgive 70 times 70 (cf., Matthew 18:21-23). Jay Ferris, The Walk Show’s “resident economist,” helps to clarify our response when multiple re-offenses occur:
When Jesus indicated to Peter that we should forgive seventy times seven in a single day, it can only mean that we ought to be unoffendable. It could hardly mean that we should become accountants, adding up the offenses that come our way.
However, there are still many instances wherein the offense has been forgiven and is not reoccurring, but where the forgiver still needs second-stage reaffirmations, or washings, in order to be healed. I like to think of each such forgiveness reaffirmation as being like one more pebble thrown in the stream of polluted and bitter memories. If enough pebbles get thrown in, they eventually can become the gravel that purifies the stream.
So, the Jubileer’s remedy is: forgive, forgive, and forgive. The following story may help illustrate how multiple forgivenesses can actually work. The scenario is in the aftermath of a financial sabotage, and the Jubilee remedy will be shown to be spiritual long before it becomes financial:
Just two years ago, after a particularly pernicious financial fiasco, I was awakening at 3:00 a.m. every day, suddenly finding it necessary to forgive. This enabled me to fall back to sleep by about 3:30, until I found myself awake again at 4:00! I’d have to reaffirm my forgiveness yet another time, falling asleep again around 4:30. Then, I’d need to go through the same process all over again at 5:00, 6:00, and 7:00! With forgiveness I got about a half of a night of sleep, but without it I would have probably gotten no sleep at all, plus probably fallen ill! So, that was a good start.
Eventually, however, such forgiveness “pebble throwing in the polluted stream” was necessary only about once per day. Then, once per week. Now, it’s about once per month or more. I don’t want to gloss over this, as I must note that the pain from the continuing consequences of the financial injury still persists 24/7 to this day. However, somehow it tempts me less and less to resurrect the bitterness of an unwashed, unforgiving heart.
Eventually, that’s a lot of pebbles in the stream! Just recently, I discovered this persistent forgiveness to be morphing my prayers from pebble tossing to, of all things, blessing the very people who sabotaged my finances . . . sort of like Joseph, who must have needed to cast thousands of pebbles in the forgiveness stream before his years of 24/7 pain was converted into a pure stream of blessing toward his brothers who threw him into the pit and a life of slavery and imprisonment. At last, he was able to bless them, while genuinely declaring his forgiveness in person:
You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives (Genesis 50:20).
Eventually the pebbles become the gravel in the stream bed that cleanses the bitter, polluted memories and emotions and produces a pure stream. You’ll know when the stream is pure when you have forgiven so often that you can eventually speak of your past experience without ending up in a pile of tears, anger, bitterness, or regrets! The Lord is, indeed, making all things new.
Robin and I have both worked through major forgiveness in the distant past and even quite recently—sometimes (gasp!) even toward each other! (Can you believe? Of course, she has to forgive me infinitely more than the other way around. Why, I am currently basking in her forgiveness for abandoning her while I went into the woods to write this love letter to “the other woman”—you, the bride of Christ!)
Some Caveats, Fences, Bridges, and Loose Ends
These few insights I have shared on the Jubilee forgiveness factor are not to be construed as a formula of any kind. That’s because any person’s walk in the Spirit, if blindly imitated, can easily become the next person’s death march.
Let me tell you about the man who charged the podium one night after I had sought to chip away at this theme in a speech. I kid you not, these are the exact words he blurted out: “Wow! If this forgiveness thing works as well as ‘praising the Lord’ did, I’ll really be cruising!” I pity the next victims of this Jubileer wannabee!
What I have shared are some general principles that hopefully press you toward seeking Christ’s mind on how you deal with the many tricky variations you will encounter in your diverse relationships along life’s rocky road. As Jesus said, “My sheep hear My voice.” The Apostle Paul amplified Christ’s statement with:
All who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons and daughters of God (Romans 8:14).
So, here are a few random qualifications or modifications that might help you if what I have shared above does not precisely fit your situation:
1) In Jesus Christ, be willing to embrace the legitimate suffering in Jubilee forgiveness. Dr. M. Scott Peck helped me see that all neuroses, in fact all psychoses, spring from an unwillingness to embrace legitimate suffering—the legitimate suffering of growth. Don’t be neurotic or psychotic. You will normally suffer when you forgive, so get used to suffering redemptively! In doing so, I believe you will be “filling up the fullness of the sufferings of Christ” (Colossians 1:24)—not a bad pursuit!
2) Don’t get any ideas that these stories prove anyone should be soft on sin. I recall one situation where the super-wealthy husband blew his wife away with the request that he continue to live with his wife and children part time, while setting up a separate household with his homosexual lover!
When she came for counsel, she was in the process of rolling over and playing dead as her SAD (Sexually Addicted Deviant), not gay, husband tried to abuse her yet once more in the divorce courts. A fellow counselor gave her some good advice, which I agreed with: “Get a Jewish attorney who eats bloody pork for breakfast!” She did, and she cleaned his SAD, multi-million-dollar clock! Instead of quickly becoming destitute, she and her children were set up financially for life.
That reminds me of the old Jewish Rabbi, who once said of his teaching, “If they don’t respond to grace, I hit them with the Law!” Well put! Well put!
3) By saying, “I forgive you,” remember that in no way are you stating that what the offender did was right.
4) Be wary of people who are always quick to ask forgiveness, as merely a device to ingratiate themselves back into your life so that they can resume new, creative expressions of sucking the life out of you. Co-dependents are particularly adept at this maneuver, and they sometimes need to be avoided for even years before you can independently verify that they are bringing forth fruit in accordance with their professed “repentance” (cf., Luke 3:8).
There can be a huge gap between their confession/expressions of remorse and your assessment of their true repentance. Take your time! As a rule of thumb in business-ministry relationships, my associates and I have noticed that it might be good to take five years before making that determination.
This casts you squarely upon the Holy Spirit, who is the only One with the true discernment of your situation and what you should be doing about it. You might also consult mature counselors in the making of your assessments. Again, there is no need to prematurely re-establish a relationship until you know you’re dealing with bona fide repentance, and that it’s going to be safe for you.
5) Always, the critical issue is that you are led by the Spirit, as the woman in the story above was led, to say what she said on the phone and to allow her estranged husband in the kitchen back door. The key is your participation in the Jubilee cleansing process to the degree that you can start differentiating between your own soul-driven reactions and your responses to the Spirit’s initiatives both in and through you.
One lady might be led to speak on the phone and let the estranged husband in the kitchen back door. Another might be directed to slam down the phone, bolt the door, and call the cops! Only those who are growing in the Spirit’s ways and learning to hear His voice are going to know what to do when the need to know is crucial. Indeed, the only formula is that “There ain’t no formula!” But, we have the Holy Spirit:
Your ears will hear a word behind you, “This is the way, walk in it,” whenever you turn to the right or to the left (Isaiah 30:21).
6) Remember, the closer the person you have forgiven (and continue to wash in forgiveness) is to you, the more likely it is that they will have justified their sin against you due to a perceived sin they feel you have committed against them. (“Ouch!”) So, if you do wish to initiate direct contact with them, it should only be to ask for forgiveness yourself and not to talk about their now-forgiven, washed-away, “as-far-as-the-East-is-from-the-West,” forever-eradicated, long-gone, former sin(s). Again, despite your feelings, as you embrace the legitimate suffering of Jubilee forgiveness.
7) So, should you be inclined to forward this article, please forward it to everyone except the persons you feel have sinned against you—you know, the ones you have forgiven as the first and foremost step in your own Year of Jubilee. (If you wish to be “wise as a serpent and gentle as a dove” [cf., Matthew 10:16], however, you might employ the subterfuge of enlisting a friend to forward this article to the person you’ve forgiven, making absolutely certain they first remove your contact information.)
8) Recognize that you are not fighting with flesh and blood, and that many people’s conduct nowadays is not based on seen factors, but rather unseen spiritual powers that have taken hold of their lives and reactions. In other words, some people will abuse you without even any provocation on your part, except that their enslavement to dark powers has so intensified that they will despise you simply because you are the Lord’s. This can manifest itself even where you have not “witnessed” to them in any significant verbal way. Remember, Cain didn’t kill his brother, Abel, because Abel had punched Cain’s lights out in some way; he killed his brother “because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous.” (1 John 3:1).
9) Forgive yourself! Yes, I saved “THE BIG ONE” for the last! Until you can apply everything I have said above about forgiveness to yourself, you can simply kiss your other, personal-Jubilee visions good-bye! That means you will have to go through both stages of forgiveness toward yourself:
a. exercising your divine empowerment in Christ to once-and-for-all forgive yourself, permanently releasing your spirit from self-hate in heaven as it is on earth, and
b. cleansing out bad memories and bitternesses from your soul (mind, will, and emotions) through casting self-forgiving pebble after self-forgiving pebble after self-forgiving pebble into God’s cleansing, Jubilee (Liberty) stream.
I have written a chapter that further touches on self-forgiveness in my forthcoming Judo Politics book, under the heading, “The Crux of the Problem—Falsely Atoning for Our Real Guilt.” In the meantime, by faith just quit whipping yourself with the chains of your own attempts at self-atonement. The extra blood makes you look a lot less attractive.
God-Forgiven Jubileers Forgive Debtors First, then Get Forgiven by Creditors
My whole life I have viewed the Year of Jubilee with the joys of the forgiven debtor being my focus. For some reason, I liked the idea of being forgiven of my debts, but nothing happens without the initiative of the creditor first. So, I found myself being drawn toward dealing with my debtors first as I walked toward my own personal Year of Jubilee. Finally, my Jubilee forgiveness turned from the spiritual foundation to the financial expression of that forgiveness.
Robin and I sat down and totaled up the amount of money that people had contractually promised to us, but never paid. It came to an astronomical number–approximately 60 times the financial debts we had incurred!
You can imagine that these never-received “accounts receivable” were not that easy to forgive! Yet, in our spirits we felt that this was where we were supposed to start. After all, it was Christ’s forgiveness we were talking about here, and we were now merely to become channels of His Jubilee to others. With the new desire He places in all of us to forgive the debts of others, He also includes the power to implement those desires. I just love this verse:
For God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him (Philippians 2:13—New Living Translation)
Resisting the nuclear options that had been such huge temptations in earlier days, I sent a gift instead to my single largest debtor. I then delivered an unsolicited “hold harmless agreement” to yet another party, when I just as well might have dropped a “Little Boy” on their Hiroshima.
By the time I had passed through this spiritual, then financial, Jubilee on the creditor’s side of the equation, I discovered the strangest promptings welling up from my inner being. First, my pebble tossing had morphed into prayers of blessing for my now-forgiven, forgiven, and forgiven again oppressors. Then, of all the unimaginable things, one day I started getting a real compassion for my former tormentors. It’s almost as if I had the urge to kiss their feet, so to speak, for what they had done for me!
After all, they had not only facilitated a major work in the responses of my inner heart; they had ushered me into a whole new life and career path that I may well have missed without the “gift” of their sabotage. To me, that gift was ever so valuable as the gift Joseph’s brothers gave him in throwing him into his pit.
Think about it: Joseph’s betrayal into captivity, slavery, and incarceration eventually enabled Joseph to be exalted into the very courts of Pharaoh! In turn, it provided Joseph with the opportunity to bless the very brothers who had thought they were doing him harm and save the lives of their entire clan. I began to anticipate an end result in my life that would be no less spectacular to me in my unique situation.
I now suspect that the urge to kiss their feet was really a desire to kiss my Savior’s feet, as it were–akin to what Mary Magdalene must have felt when she kissed the feet of Jesus Christ.
Once my debtors were dispensed with (a la spiritual and financial forgiveness), I turned my attention to the other, lesser factors, of my personal Jubilee: dealing with my own debts by sorting through a whole list of Jubilee options, as contained in our next email entitled, “Crucial Steps into Your Year of Jubilee.”
So, how will Judo Politics eventually bridge the gap between this personal Jubilee process and the national one that is necessary if our Constitutional Republic is to survive? Well, as a taste of what’s to come, you may have heard about the 19th century Judo Politician, British Member of Parliament, William Wilberforce, about whom the recent film “Amazing Grace,” was recently produced.
A man of the kingdom of God, Wilberforce tapped this very Jubilee forgiveness energy when he led the 50-year battle first against the slave trade and then slavery itself in the British Empire. He and his “fiercely loyal and proactive minority” were thereby enabled to accomplish bloodlessly what America fought a bloody Civil War over without really achieving success with the core, spiritual issues of racism and slavery.
Breaking the Spell over the Culture and Enculturated Church
As the Republic and the enculturated church continues to disintegrate, I am reminded of a recent TV special I saw about “Hitler and the Occult.” I believe it was in there that the narrator suggested it wasn’t until Hitler was reported to have shot himself in the bunker at the very end of WWII that “the spell was broken off the minds of the German people.” That was, as with all deception, a spell that the Germans didn’t know was there. Yet, I believe it was real, and it was not unlike the spell under which our culture and largely assimilated church are being held transfixed in the headlights today.
What if a fiercely loyal and proactive minority had awakened in Europe prior to Hitler’s invasion and had taken preemptive action? What if, for example, they had heeded that “doddering old man,” Churchill’s advice and not capitulated to P. M. Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation to Hitler? What if the French, for example, had not awaited the invasion of France before consolidating the fiercely loyal minority known as the French underground? I should think there might have been some fifty to seventy million people that could have been saved from the WWII slaughter. Call me an alarmist if you will, but I see no smaller stakes for America and the world if a few of the fiercely loyal minority don’t awaken, find one another, and become extremely proactive right this moment.
Having explored some foundational forgiveness factors and exploded some typical misconceptions for your personal Year of Jubilee, we now move forward toward “Getting Psyched Up for Your Personal Year of Jubilee,” followed by some specific, “Crucial Steps into Your Year of Jubilee.” To access the entire Jubilee series, see www.TheWalkShow.com, clicking on “Categories,” then “Your Jubilee in 2010” Series.
Pullin’ and prayin’ for and with you,
Ken
Ken Talbott
Host, The Walk Show
1-877-WALK SHOW [1-877-925-5746--locally 253-333-1813]
Ken@TheWalkShow.com
P. S. Here’s a Prayer Regarding Critics and Enemies by Bishop Nikolai Velimirovic, Serbian Orthodox Bishop, who spoke out against Nazism, was arrested, and taken to Dachau.
Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.
Enemies have driven me into your embrace more than friends have.
Friends have bound me to earth;
enemies have loosed me from earth and have demolished all my aspirations in the world.
Enemies have made me a stranger in worldly realms and an extraneous inhabitant of the world.
Just as a hunted animal finds safer shelter than an unhunted animal does,
so have I, persecuted by enemies, found the safest sanctuary,
having ensconced myself beneath Your tabernacle,
where neither friends nor enemies can slay my soul.Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless and do not curse them.
They, rather than I, have confessed my sins before the world.
They have punished me, whenever I have hesitated to punish myself.
They have tormented me, whenever I have tried to flee torments.
They have scolded me, whenever I have flattered myself.
They have spat upon me, whenever I have filled myself with arrogance.Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.
Whenever I have made myself wise, they have called me foolish.
Whenever I have made myself mighty, they have mocked me as though I were a [fly].
Whenever I have wanted to lead people, they have shoved me into the background.
Whenever I have rushed to enrich myself, they have prevented me with an iron hand.
Whenever I thought that I would sleep peacefully, they have wakened me from sleep.
Whenever I have tried to build a home for a long and tranquil life, they have demolished it and driven me out.
Truly, enemies have cut me loose from the world and have stretched out my hands to the hem of your garment.Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.
Bless them and multiply them; multiply them and make them even more bitterly against me:
So that my fleeing will have no return;
So that all my hope in men may be scattered like cobwebs;
So that absolute serenity may begin to reign in my soul;
So that my heart may become the grave of my two evil twins: arrogance and anger;
So that I might amass all my treasure in heaven;Ah, so that I may for once be freed from self-deception,
which has entangled me in the dreadful web of illusory life.
Enemies have taught me to know what hardly anyone knows,
that a person has no enemies in the world except himself.
One hates his enemies only when he fails to realize that they are not enemies, but cruel friends.It is truly difficult for me to say who has done me more good and who has done me more evil in the world: friends or enemies.
Therefore bless, O Lord, both my friends and my enemies.
A slave curses enemies, for he does not understand.
But a son blesses them, for he understands.
For a son knows that his enemies cannot touch his life.
Therefore he freely steps among them and prays to God for them.Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.
