Why Should We Love and Forgive Ourselves?
As I have been finishing up my next book, Ministering to Our Father, the Lord has been continuing to place people along my path who allow Him to bring to life the lessons He has been teaching me about His love. His love is so deep and wide it never ceases to amaze me how He manifests in me a different aspect of His love in every encounter He places me in. He only asks for my obedience to love Him with my whole heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love others as He loves me. This week He brought someone across my doorstep who was hurting and in need of His love. I was grateful for the opportunity to have my Father do His work in me as I attempted to let God’s love speak to them through me.
Someone asked me a question the other day about forgiveness causing me to go to my Father in prayer while searching through His word for more answers. This person asked me if we must forgive ourselves as well as others, and this question led to a conversation about whether we should love ourselves or not. I have spoken to many people over the last couple of years who have had strong opinions on both sides of this discussion, but the most valuable opinion is our Father’s in heaven. He shared His heart and thoughts with me this week and asked me to share what He told me with others, so He might also reveal His heart to those who might be struggling with forgiving themselves or others. To begin to understand how our Father feels about this, we should try to understand the meaning of forgiveness and how it affects our relationship with Him and with others.
Dictionaries today define the word forgive as a way of stopping ourselves from feeling anger or resentment towards someone for an offense against us. This is how the world defines forgiveness, but what does the bible say? All divine love comes from God, and one of the characteristics of His divine love is forgiveness. 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 says, “Love is patient, love is kind, it is not jealous; loves does not brag, it is not arrogant. It does not act disgracefully, it does not seek its own benefit; it is not provoked, does not keep an account of a wrong suffered, it does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; it keeps every confidence, it believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Lover never fails.”
Jesus said we should forgive those who trespassed against us as well, but what if they never sinned against us? We can still hold anger or resentment towards someone even if they never sinned against us by simply allowing the enemy to tempt us with his lies. By believing the lies of the enemy, we can allow bitterness or hatred to enter us causing unforgiveness to grow in us even where there was no offensive behavior against us. We can even hold unforgiveness in our heart towards God. If we blame God for something He did not do, do we still need to forgive Him?
When we forgive others, it mostly benefits our own soul, but by forgiving someone, we can restore relationships rather than causing walls and stumbling blocks to be built into them. Sometimes, the other person might not even know of our unforgiveness because they are unaware of having ever trespassed against us, or perhaps, they never sinned against us at all. God cannot sin, so if we forgive Him, who benefits from it? What are we forgiving?
Our Father wants us to love Him, but He does not need our love or forgiveness for anything because He is perfect already. He wants us to be free of unforgiveness in our heart for our own sake, not His. We also cannot forgive another man’s sin in the same way God does because only He has the authority and power to judge sin, so if we are forgiving someone else when they sin against us, what are we forgiving? Why is it important for us to not hold unforgiveness in our heart? Unforgiveness in our hearts separates us from God because it allows a seed from the enemy to be grown in us where only God’s love should be.
If we lack God’s love in us, we also lack His presence in us because God is love. If we have unforgiveness in us, we have conceived something in us, not of God. This unforgiveness comes from a seed of bitterness or hatred and grows into the fruit of unforgiveness. In the opposite way, if we have God’s love in us, we grow the fruit of His forgiveness in our heart. The enemy of God attempts to plant his seed in us to separate us from God and from His love. This is why Jesus said if we do not forgive others our Heavenly Father will not forgive us because we must love others as He loves us, and we must not go before our loving Father with the fruit of the enemy taking the place of the fruit of the Holy Spirit in our heart.
Does this mean we are to forgive ourselves as well? A better question might be, who does God tell us not to forgive? If we are to forgive everyone including our enemies, would that not include ourselves? If we are to forgive ourselves, and forgiveness is a product of love, should we also love ourselves? If we are to love ourselves, we should not love ourselves as the world loves because this would make an idol of ourselves. We are not to worship or adorn ourselves with praise because all worship and praise belong to God, but rather, we should love all of God’s creation including our own flesh, but only with a divine love as God loves us.
Many have let the enemy of God deceive them into believing they can fulfill themselves on this earth through the act of self-love. They can be deceived because this lie has an element of the truth in it, but they lack understanding about the source of this love. We are not to allow our flesh to love itself nor should our spirit allow our flesh to control it, but rather, we should let the Spirit of Christ living in us do our Father’s work in us and allow our unified spirit to love us. 1 Corinthians 6:17 says, “But the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with Him.” If He loves us, we are also loving us because we are one spirit with Him. When we love ourselves this way, we are loving the body of Christ because we are one with His body, soul, and spirit.
When we sin, we offend the Holy Spirit living in us. Ephesians 4:29-32 says, “Let no unwholesome word come out of your mouth, but if there is any good word for edification according to the need of the moment, say that, so that it will give grace to those who hear. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. All bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and slander must be removed from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.” In other words, we must love everyone, including ourselves as we are a part of everyone.
Again, we must not speak evil about ourselves but edify ourselves in love. It is “God in Christ” who is forgiving us, and we are one spirit with Him. If the Spirit of God lives in us, the love of God dwells in us, and we should be allowing His love to fully work and operate in us. This love is the love of God we read about earlier in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8, and if we take this definition of love and apply it to how we treat ourselves, we will understand how we are to love ourselves as Christ loves us.
As Paul said in Ephesians, our Father wants us to be patient with ourselves and to speak to ourselves with kindness. We should not be speaking negatively about ourselves but with words of encouragement and life. We should not be speaking pridefully of ourselves but with humility, we should give glory to God by thanking Him for the vessel He has given us to live in. We should care of it, and make sure we are doing it no harm because Christ lives in it with us.
We do not seek our own benefit by forgiving others or ourselves, but the love and forgiveness of “God in Christ” benefits us anyways. We love Him and others, including ourselves, not for the benefit of it, but simply because He is God. We show Him our love by obeying His word as Jesus said in John 14:21, “The one who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me; and the one who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will reveal Myself to him.” We do not rejoice when our flesh sins, but we rejoice when our Father’s love works in us. We believe, hope, and endure in all things regarding ourselves because we place our faith in Jesus Christ and the love of our Father.
Is there anyone in scripture we are told to not forgive? I have never seen any supporting evidence of this in scripture. As we discussed earlier, Jesus says we are to forgive those who sin against us, but does He say to only forgive those ones? Should we forgive those who do nothing to us if we hold bitterness or unforgiveness towards them based on a lie from the enemy? We should forgive them even more because we are the ones now sinning against them.
In fact, not only should we forgive them in our heart, but we should ask them to forgive us as well, so we might confess our sins to one another and be able to receive forgiveness from our Father in heaven. We should ask their forgiveness, not for our sake, but for theirs. Unless we can be sure they do not already know of our unforgiveness towards them, we should not risk it for their own sake. Do not forget, if they are a brother or sister in Christ, you are offending the Spirit of Christ in them through your unforgiveness. This is another reason for us to forgive ourselves, because the Holy Spirit in us is offended by our unforgiveness even against our own flesh as He resides in us as well.
How might we extend this forgiveness to ourselves? If our flesh sins against our spirit as Paul speaks about in Romans, can our spirit or soul hold unforgiveness towards it? We forgive other from our soul and spirit as we mentioned earlier when we saw how our spirit and the Spirit of Christ are one with each other, and it is He who is loving us and forgiving us. Our Father is doing His work in us when we allow it. Our spirit must forgive our flesh when it sins against us, so our spirit will not have to pay the eternal penalty of not being forgiven by our Father.
If we do not allow our flesh to receive the forgiveness of our soul and spirit, we are not allowing ourselves to receive the forgiveness of the Spirit of Christ who we are one with. Since our Father and the Son are One, we are also not receiving forgiveness from our Father. Our flesh sins against the Holy Spirit of Christ who is living in us as well, and as the scripture says, it grieves Him. As Christ forgives our flesh so should we because we are to love all of God’s creation, not only part of it. We are to forgive all the members of the body of Christ as we all affect each other being members of the same body. This includes us as we are unified with the body of Christ.
We forgive others for our own sake, not theirs. We can give and receive forgiveness because of the fruit of love in our life. This fruit of the Holy Spirit is in us when we belong to Christ and are loving and forgiving others as obedient children of God. If we show anything other than love, we might need to look for any hidden or obvious signs of unforgiveness in our lives. We have a barometer in us to help us find and identify unforgiveness in our heart. This is the Spirit of Christ, and if we do not feel Him grieving in us because of any sin like unforgiveness, we must ask God to impart the Holy Spirit to live in us, so we can recognize anything grieving Him and do away with it. The only thing remaining in us should be love.
