Forgiveness and Freedom

 – June 29, 2017 – 

To forgive or not to forgive, to be freed or be free? To reconcile or not? To bury the hatchet under ten feet of dirt, or to bury just deep enough to leave the handle sticking out? Those are the hard questions. How long we let someone else offend us is our choice.

Forgiveness is not to set the other person at ease, it’s so that we can set ourselves at ease. Unforgiveness is like a weed in your garden of thoughts.

Weeds don’t need water or fresh soil to grow, they seem to just appear. True? They become deeply rooted in a very short period of time, then they multiply! Saying you forgive someone pulls all the growth off the stem, true forgiveness pulls up the roots of that weed. There are some offenses that are tap rooted so deeply, that the only way to kill the root is to ask for help from a master gardener.

When we accept Jesus into our hearts, and build a relationship with Him, He plants a master gardener seed called the Holy Spirit in our heart. As that relationship grows, the Holy Spirit flows through our veins, cleansing all the toxins and beginning to kill all those deeply rooted weeds of unforgiveness from our soil.

When we make the decision to forgive someone else for offending us, we start to live a more freed life. Who would you rather live like, the person  who can roam freely about the stuffy mission, or the person who can walk out the front door of that mansion and smell the scents of nature? The first person is free, but the second is freed!

Relationships are all that we have that we can take with us wherever we go, and into eternity. What kind of relationships do you want to keep? Blessings to you.

(Photos of Our Daily Bread daily devotional)