Freedom has always been a big deal to me.
For the girls that I have taught throughout the years, they know this to be especially true. Ask Amy, she’s nodding her head right now as she reads this.
Galatians 5:1, “for freedom Christ has set us free”, has been something I have engrained in the girls who are “following me as I follow Christ”. Why? When the story of Jesus became not just a story but news (good news) to me, I felt alive like I had never felt before. I looked back at the first twenty years of my life, and to me, I felt like I had been dead. Life had been breathed into my bones. I was free.
So, freedom has been something I have always looked at as an incredible blessing in the life of a believer. We are free from death. We are free from the “yoke of slavery” (also Galatians 5:1).
And then entered unforgiveness.
Unforgiveness always had made itself at home in my heart, but at the beginning of this year, it was so tangible that it could not be ignored. It felt like a disease in my body… something I knew was there but wanted to get rid of so badly. When I considered my unforgiveness, there were two thoughts that always reeled through my mind:
1. God doesn’t struggle with unforgiveness.
I knew that anyone who had hurt me had been offered forgiveness by God without a second thought when they had asked. To me, this meant that when I was praying about unforgiveness in a situation, God didn’t even see the actions of the other person, but rather just my unforgiveness. Here I was trying to point fingers at another person’s sin, and it felt as though God was pointing His mighty finger down at me. He could squash me, so it wasn’t a comfortable place to be.
2. I need forgiveness.
Truth is, I have hurt a lot of people. And I need forgiveness. In fact, some of the same people that I am fighting to forgive are going to be fighting to forgive me. In Matthew 7, Jesus says that will be judged with the same measure that we use to judge others. So, I knew it was time to lay down the measure and worry about my own soul.
If the freedom of Christ made me feel alive, unforgiveness gave me a reminder taste of death. No, thank you. If it is for freedom that Christ has set me free, then it is in that freedom that I want to live. I won’t submit again to death, for life rescued me.
If you’re interested in reading my earlier blog about freedom, you can click here.
