Yesterday ended is a podcast dedicated to the healing words of Jesus Christ and his story of redemption. Each podcast contains an original poem so that I can portray a confession of our faith of scripture in unique and succinct ways. Come with me on a journey to become a new creation and to declare old things dead and our life anew in Christ. What we meditate on will determine the direction and fruit of our lives. Let's live today speaking the words of life.
The victory we have in Christ can be felt in our everyday life. We can overcome depression. We can overcome fear. We can be confident. We can be free from worry. We can be free from anxiety. We can have emotional healing. We can have hope. We can be set free from our past. The Bible declares the goodness of God. The Bible is more than Christian psychology it is truth. The truth of God brings mental health, spiritual health and physical health. We can walk in peace. We can overcome the traumas of life.
Can you forget the pain others have caused you? Can you forgive the people who caused you pain? Can you let go of injustices you’ve suffered? Can you love your enemy? Welcome to yesterday ended healing the traumas of life. Does the burden of unforgiveness weigh you down? Do you still live with the pain of your past? I'm your host Dennis Dobbin and I'm here to teach you how to receive inner healing through forgiveness. Give a listen.
Can you forget the pain others have caused you? Can you forgive the people who have caused you pain? Can you let go of injustices you've suffered? Can you love your enemy? Welcome to yesterday ended healing the traumas of life. Does the burden of unforgiveness weigh you down? Do you still live with the pain of your past? I'm your host, Dennis Daubin, and I'm here to teach you how to receive inner healing through forgiveness. Give a listen. My father died when I was thirteen years old. My father was a good man, not violent, a great provider, but he was emotionally closed. He had been in World War II, and though I don't think he suffered from PTSD, he was not a big outgoing type person. He was always physically there, but he could be quiet. I never remember him playing with me. I never remember him tickling me. I only have one memory of him taking me out fishing with just the two of us. The family would go for rides together in the country on Sunday, and we always ate dinner together, almost all the time. I moved from Kansas to California when I was twenty two. Many years later my mom called me on my forty third birthday. In that conversation, she actually apologized to me for, as she put it, my dad not being demonstrative in his love to me and my brothers. Until that time I had never really considered it, but then some things fell into place. I had had a feeling of rejection, even though he was present. I didn't have the proper attachment I should have had. And then he went and died on me when I was thirteen. Several years later I was at a Christian event. I was in front when the worship band started singing. As I stood there, somebody on the prayer team for that event approached me, looked at me, and said, You're important, you're important, you're important, you're important, and forgive your dad. And then they walked away. I thought I had done with forgiving my dad, but it seems things still lingered. I was mad at my dad because he had been told by army doctors when he was twenty-five to stop smoking, but he didn't. And he died at age fifty-one. Right at the time when I started to learn about him, when he started to tell me about experiences he had in the army, but then he left me. That was my perception. I was without a father, and I was mad at him for leaving me when I was thirteen. Since that prophetic word, I have forgiven him. I have moved on. I'm no longer stuck in the past. I have received inner healing through forgiveness and been set free. Unforgiveness is like a prison cold and dark, where heart and soul are trapped in pain. Yet the key to bring our release is in our hand. It is to grant forgiveness to those who hurt us. Unforgiveness is a cancer to our soul. It is rottenness to the fruit of our lives. It is poison to the stability of our hearts, but it is powerless to the love of God. Forgiveness is not a gift to those that hurt us, it is for our sake when we erase the debts of others. Some of those that hurt us won't care if we forgive. Forgiveness on our part breaks the chain of our pain. To forgive is to burn the IOUs you have from those that hurt you. There's no longer a debt. They have a clean slate with you. Forgiveness is mandatory if we want to move forward in life. As I stated in my poem, unforgiveness is like a chain that holds us down. Unforgiveness is a prison for us. I can't remember where the quote comes from, but here's a good understanding of what unforgiveness does to you, to us. You have the unfortunate pleasure of having a rat in your house, and you hate the rat. So you go buy some rat poison, but you eat the poison. The rat doesn't care, but you're the one that's dying inside. Again, unforgiveness is a poison. Forgiveness is not optional. We are commanded not once but twice to forgive others in the church epistles. Ephesians chapter four, verses thirty one and thirty two. Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you with all malice, and be kind one to another, tender hearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you. Consider the differences between the extreme actions in verse thirty one and being kind and tenderhearted and forgiving in verse thirty-two. You go from the internal bitterness to the external speaking evil and malice. It's like a tea kettle. You turn on the heat and it starts to warm up a little bit. You're bitter. Then as you think about it, wrath and anger start to boil within you. The steam starts to come out of the kettle, and then finally it whistles, evil speaking. The opposite of all that is to be kind and tenderhearted and forgiving. We must remember that God has forgiven us in Christ. This is repeated again in Colossians chapter 3, verses 12 and 13. Therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, put on tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness, long suffering, bearing with one another, and forgiving one another. If any one has a complaint against another, even as Christ forgave you, so you also must do. Verse twelve starts out by calling us holy and beloved. That's who we are. And then we are commanded to put on tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness, long suffering, and then we are to bear with one another and forgive one another, and we are to do so as Christ forgave us. Jesus took our sin to the grave and left it there, and he won't bring it up again. We are commanded to forgive. Consider how Jesus described it in the Gospels. Mark eleven, verse twenty five. And whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him, that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses. This verse states that forgiveness from God is conditional to our forgiving others. I have heard people say that since Jesus Christ has forgiven us our sins by his sacrifice, this doesn't apply to us. I'm forgiven regardless because of what Jesus did for me. The challenge that I see in that attitude is that if you're not forgiving, you're not walking in love. We are not being kind, tenderhearted, or forgiving. We are to forgive as God and his son Jesus forgave us. And that's a commandment in the church epistles addressed directly to us. Not forgiving would be having a hard heart, not a tender one. I know there are times when we are repeatedly hurt and our hearts can become hardened. Peter asked about this situation when he asked Jesus a question about forgiveness. Matthew 18, verses 21 and 22. Then Peter came to him and said, Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times? Jesus said to him, I do not say to you up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven. Peter's jaw must have dropped open when Jesus gave him that answer. Peter probably thought he was being a wonderful person to forgive someone seven times. Forgiveness is not optional. If we want to walk in freedom and have healing within our hearts, we must forgive those who have hurt us. We must even forgive repeat offenders. Again, it's not for them, it's for us. Luke seventeen verses three and four. Take heed to yourselves. If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him, and if he repent, forgive him. And if he trespass against thee seven times in a day, and seven times in a day turn again to thee as saying, I repent, thou shalt forgive him. From these verses it seems forgiveness should be a lifestyle. It is a foundational part of our walk as a disciple of Jesus. Take into account that when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, this was part of what is now called the Lord's Prayer. Matthew chapter six, verses twelve through fifteen. And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. For if we forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. The temptation in the context is not forgiving. We need to be delivered from that evil. And again, we see the conditional structure of if we forgive, we will be forgiven. And if we don't forgive, we won't be forgiven. The reason being we are not following the commandment of the Father to love our neighbor as ourselves, or the commandment of Jesus that he gave that we are to love as he loved and gave himself for us. Jesus was so forgiving that he forgave those who were crucifying him. Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do. They knew they were crucifying a man, they just didn't know who he was. They thought they were just getting rid of some political renegade. They didn't realize they were crucifying the Savior of humanity. There is a verse in Psalms that gives us a visual mind picture of forgiveness. Psalm 103 verse twelve. As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. If you start traveling south, when you hit Antarctica and continue, you will eventually start traveling north. And when you get to the Arctic and go past it, you'll start traveling south again. But if you start traveling east and go around the globe to where you started, you'll still be going east. East and west never meet. And so God has removed our transgressions that far away from us. God really is good and his mercy endures forever. Consider a description of God also in Psalms eighty six verse five. For you, Lord, are good and ready to forgive, and abundant in mercy to all those who call upon you. The description of God as good is, if not the most used adjective to describe him. It's definitely within the top three. He is good, literally meaning he furnishes a need. And then it describes him as being ready to forgive. He's not waiting around with the ball bat for us to sin so he can clobber us. He is good, and he is abundant in mercy to all those who are calling upon him. So who are you calling? Mercy is the act of not sentencing a convicted criminal to harsh punishment. Sometimes it's even letting them go. We deserve the punishment, but we don't get it because God is abundant in mercy. And then there's the blood of Jesus. We're not covered with his blood, we are cleansed by his blood. Colossians chapter one verses thirteen and fourteen. He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins. Redemption is the act of setting free. It is the paying of a ransom, the paying of an IOU. That is the forgiveness of sins. We were set free. When we hold on to the pain and hurt from the traumas of our life, that's all we have. We have pain and hurt. When we forgive, we can be set free from that pain and hurt. It's time to let go. Unforgiveness is like a prison cold and dark, where heart and soul are trapped in pain. Yet the key to bring our release is in our hand. It is to grant forgiveness to those who hurt us. Unforgiveness is a cancer to our soul. It is rottenness to the fruit of our lives, it is poison to the stability of our hearts, but it is powerless to the love of God. Forgiveness is not a gift to those that hurt us, it is for our sake when we erase the debts of others. Some of those that hurt us won't care if we forgive. Forgiveness on our part breaks the chain of our pain. Every once in a while I will watch a movie that is all about revenge, but more and more I have tired of such a scenario. It doesn't promote the proper attitude in my life. There have been people who have done things to me that I have chosen to forgive. I've been betrayed, I've been lied to, people have stolen from me. I don't have time to hold on to that past. I want to move forward in life and be fruitful. I must forgive others, and come to think of it, there are times I must forgive myself. That's where healing comes from. Letting go of the past. That will only come if I continue the lifestyle of forgiving. It's a choice we must make.
