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Even as Jesus taught, sometimes God’s own people find themselves in the hand of the tormentor
because they haven’t chosen to forgive.
It’s almost like breathing.
You can’t breathe in your next breath unless you expel your last one.
And you can’t breathe in forgiveness if you don’t breathe out forgiveness.
Now some people, you’ve got something lodged in the air passage of your spirit.
We want to do a little Heimlich maneuver and get rid of it.
You’ve got a grudge stuck in there, and you’re slowly suffocating to death, spiritually.
You can’t breathe in God’s goodness and His blessing and His forgiveness if you don’t
breathe out forgiveness.
It’s just the way we’re made.
And we want to take a moment right now and just forgive.
It doesn’t mean that you weren’t genuinely hurt;
it’s not to somehow diminish the pain that was caused to your soul.
And it may have been the very person that should have protected you is the one that violated you.
It may be a terrible thing that happened to you; but for your own good, breathe out forgiveness.
Get yourselves under the place of God’s blessing, forgiveness, and goodness.
It’s not a matter of earning it.
It’s just you can’t breathe in if you’re not willing to breathe out.
Just bow your heads for a moment.
Heavenly Father, we come before You and right now perhaps as much as at any other time we
recognize how helpless we are without You.
We thank you that Your love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.
We thank you that the Holy Spirit has been given to us as a Comforter, as a Helper; and,
Lord, we choose, the best way we know how, to release those that have sinned against us.
We forgive.
We release the bitterness from our hearts and we put things in Your hands.
God, we forgive even as You have forgiven us this unpayable debt,
something that we have no way of reconciling on our own.
You did it for us.
We bring into view the immensity of Your forgiveness and Your unmerited goodness toward us.
And with that in view we choose to forgive these lesser debts
of those that have sinned against us.
We let it go, in Jesus’ name.
Amen.