Have you ever felt like you need to forgive yourself? Have you had someone else suggest you just need to forgive yourself? Even after confessing your sin to God and knowing he promises he forgives you (1 John 1:9), do you sometimes feel like its not enough?
Randy Alcorn recently wrote a really helpful article on this and challenged his readers to think through a few issues. Let me quickly summarise them as they are important. But then I want to look at something which I think may additionally be feeding this self-forgiveness desire.
Alcorn raises four main considerations:
- Talk Back to the Devil - he is a liar and accuser and he will want you to feel that God's forgiveness is not enough, but you can refuse to listen to his deceptions
- God is not a liar - His forgiveness is enough and to not accept his forgiveness as sufficient is to say that Christ's sacrifice wasn't enough, and that absolution from ourselves is of greater importance in our lives than forgiveness from God
- Trust God's Word not your Feelings - we have to learn to trust God more than our feelings. When God's promises and our feelings don't match up, faith is about choosing to trust the one who is more trustworthy - God, not us.
- It's all about Christ - his work on the cross is sufficient and is enough. Forgiveness is about Christ's righteousness imputed to us, not our righteousness. We don't have the righteous position to be able to offer anyone full eternal forgiveness not even to ourselves. Only God in Christ provides that.
Alcorn also related a poignant quote on the topic, from Tim Keller in his Counterfeit Gods book,
"When people say, 'I know God forgives me, but I can't forgive myself,' they mean that they have failed an idol, whose approval is more important to them than God's."
When we say we need to forgive ourselves, we are setting ourselves above God, as more vital than God and more capable and authoritative than God. When we do that, we then need forgiveness not only from God for whatever sin we have committed, but for the additional sin of thinking we have any capacity at all to truly forgive ourselves.
HOWEVER…..
having said all this, do we dismiss our feelings altogether in such situations?
Feelings are vital signposts
Maybe we need to think a bit more about the role and place of feelings in our lives…
Feelings are not irrelevant, and to just say 'ignore your feelings, they are lying to you' may not help much.
Feelings are signposts to beliefs, because they are the fruit of beliefs. Feelings to a great degree are a reaction to something. We fear because we think something is a threat or bigger than or contrary to our ability to cope. We get angry when something challenges our autonomy or we see injustice. We feel loved when we feel valuable and blessed by others. We feel happy when we are surrounded by good, by what is pleasing and refreshing and we believe to be beneficial. We hurt when we believe we are harmed in some way.
Sometimes feelings can be an alert system. Since they respond almost intuitively and 'automatically' in response to when something does or does not sit well, or comfortably, sometimes we will say before making a decision: 'I just don't feel right about it although I can't yet explain it'. This should be what then triggers us to pause on making the decision, but also prompts us to find out more of maybe why we didn't feel comfortable. So we do some more research, or dig into God's word more, or pray about it further, or wait till we can know more contributing data etc.
Now these feelings can lie to us - they can deceive us. Not so much because the feelings themselves are bad, but because what we believe to be good, beneficial, just, pleasing or valuable, might be not based on God's truth about such things, but might be based on Satan's temptations to trust in a false 'good' - ie what appears to be good but is in fact against God's perfect design and thus is bad. That is what happened to Eve in the Garden of Eden. And since we are now sinners by nature, even as Christians, we still fight the presence of the old nature in these unresurrected bodies as we live on this sin-infected earth on which the great deceiver is still busy prowling about.
So we are very easily tempted to believe and be guided by false or mis-placed ideas about what is good for us and the world. When that false ideal of 'good' is not met we can feel sad or mad!
So instead of feeling sad and mad about sin,
we can easily feel sad and mad about
our own sinful desires not being met!
So yes, we can get 'feelings' all mixed up and upside-down to how God created us to have them.
But those same feelings can be 'shout-outs' to us about what is going on in our hearts which we are often not so alert to. Remember the heart is deceitful (Jeremiah 17:9), and when we listen to our heart's desires and follow our heart's desires without submitting them to God through the standard of His Word, we can be misled by the desires of our hearts. We could say that feelings are like symptoms of a deeper cause.
If we are seeking to follow God's directives through the truth of His Word, but we continue to struggle with feelings that his Word tell us are not honouring him, then its the signal to stop, think and examine our hearts to see where we have mis-placed and false beliefs, and thus expectations, that are feeding these mis-placed feelings.
Feelings for the need of self-forgiveness are therefore signposts to what?
And if there is a continued nagging of a need for self-forgiveness even after you have studied, accepted and embrace the 4 points Alcorn raises, what then?
Maybe we need to ask what is understood by forgiveness?
Forgiveness is linked to a need for cleansed guilt. It is a primarily guilt/innocence issue. It is a need for wiping the slate clean, to have no accusation standing against us. From such a forgiven state, we then hope for a re-opening of the relationship. In seeking forgiveness from God we acknowledge that he has the power to set the rules, declare guilt and thus give punishment, and he has an accusation against us for something that we did that was a violation of his desires (law/command) for us, and which has thus broken the joy of the relationship we are meant to have with him.
Forgiveness from God is his promise/word to us that he will not count that violation against us. This thus allows the fullness of relationship with him to be enjoyed. When we wrong another person, and seek their forgiveness it is a similar situation - we have done something they don't approve of and so we believe they are accusing us of contravening their requirements/instructions/rules and their good, and thus we are cut off from the full harmony of relationship with them.
So when we say we seek forgiveness from ourselves, we are saying we have set a law for ourselves, and then broken it, and so now have accused ourselves and stand guilty according to our own law. We feel we have violated or broken our own rules and we want restored relationship with ourselves.
Now that last phrase might sound peculiar - how can we lose relationship with ourselves in the first place…after all, are we two people? No. But it is helpful to realise that this is the logic underlying what is hoped to be achieved by 'forgiving yourself'.
Muddied Waters
Interestingly I don't notice Africans worrying about self-forgiveness, they seem to be more worried about forgiveness from others because traditionally it is believed that harmony with others gives them right standing with God - albeit a distant God and via the ancestors who they believe to be God's representatives/intermediaries on earth.
I believe this idea of self-forgiveness has come about because our 'modern' world thought itself 'clever' enough to live apart from God.
But in doing so, we not only set ourselves on the path of eternal destruction, but we find ourselves living the way we were never designed to live.
We were not created to be
autonomous individuals
only accountable to ourselves.
We were not designed to live only according to 'our own truth' and to only be true to ourselves.
In Western culture we might have been told to not be directed by other people's wishes, but we failed to realise that this was originally rooted in a Judeo-Christian context that permeated much of Western thinking, of being directed by God's wishes above people. But if we cut God out, and cut people out, and live only according to our own law, we get ourselves in a fix. If we are only accountable to ourselves as makers of our own laws. Then we have, by default, appointed only ourselves to be in the position of authority to forgive. We suddenly train ourselves to 'need' to forgive ourselves in order to find absolution.
Sadly, if we still believe that when we have wronged others we need to seek their forgiveness, but find we then find that forgiveness insufficient, our world does not tell us that we more importantly need God's forgiveness (since it believes God is unecessary or doesn't exist). Instead our 21st Century Western world tells us that the 'gap' we feel in the forgiveness process is because we need to forgive ourselves…. since afterall 'self' is the only final authority we have committed allegiance to.
Added to this, is the fact that we often confuse guilt and shame in how we feel. We might say we feel guilty for transgressing our own law/rules, but we might also feel ashamed for failing to meet our own standard and failing 'in our own eyes' to 'make the grade' and be who we hoped or wanted to be. In seeking forgiveness for our transgression we might be trying to restore our sense of honour - our value, worth, and significance.
But whether we assess ourselves on the basis of guilt or shame, if we have set ourselves up as our own lawmaker (what laws and boundaries we set ourselves) and our own honour-bestower (what credit we gain for meeting the standards/expectations we set ourselves), we also set ourselves up to be the ones we look to for guilt-forgiveness and shame-covering when we over-step our self-made boundaries and when we under-meet our self-made expectations.
God has made us to find honour and forgiveness from the one who sets the laws and standards in the first place. So, when we replace God with ourselves as the authority/law-maker, we may find a slight sense of 'feeling ok' once we 'forgive ourselves'. But it will leave us still 'lacking' something. It's won't satisfy the deepest realities of our lives and it will keep us from the One who can fully satisfy and the One who promises to fully forgive, cleanse, justify and sanctify.
The Big Lie
The big lie in the 'forgive yourself' mantra, is that we think we can be in the place of God and all will be well. All will not be well on earth, and all will definitely not be well in eternity.
Maybe you are busy forgiving yourself and not seeking God's forgiveness at all and have never accepted his forgiveness for all your sin for eternity. If so, I encourage you to come to God to find his ultimate forgiveness for your sins through the death of his Son Jesus on the cross.
But its more likely if you are reading this you have accepted his eternal forgiveness and have no doubt that only God can provide such forgiveness and you certainly cannot…but maybe you are still living with the legacy of the world's modern but mis-informed understanding and influence that has trained you to believe you need self-forgiveness and that without it you can't live well on this earth.
But the God who can forgive you for all eternity is the same God who forgives you now.
It is a lie and bondage of the devil that you need to forgive yourself. It is subtle idolatry that entraps you and blasphemes God.
We are not our own law,
or our own truth,
or the bestowers of our own honour.
We have been made not to find fulfilment and peace through relationship with ourself, but through relationship with God. We are not bound by laws/rules or standards of our own making, but by God's laws and standards which are not only different from ours but higher than ours. God the ultimate law maker is also the ultimate forgiver. If you have ultimate forgiveness from him, forgiveness from human beings (others or yourself) is not the measure of whether you are forgiven or not.
So….Let the truth of who God is, and that he is the ultimate law maker, and honour bestower, transform you and release you from mis-placed feelings that make you think you need to forgive yourself. Let God transform your feelings by soaking in his truth about forgiveness, so that your feelings can be changed from ones that Satan uses to condemn you and paralyse you, to ones of praise and joy to your Maker and Saviour which release you to serve him with fervour and delight!
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