Greetings in the Mighty name of our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us on the cross so our sins may be forgiven through the sacrifice.
I hope you’re doing well on this day; we are approximately left with 15 days to the new year and I’m so excited about it. I don’t think you’re excited as I am. Just 15 days and that’s it, we’re done with 2025. Wow what a year it has been. Are you ready to step into the new year?
But before you answer if you’re ready for the new year, let’s check something about ourselves regarding forgiveness, let’s pray first.
Father Lord Jesus Christ, we come to you on this day asking you to open and amend our hearts to your word so we’re able to forgive. Lord, we need you today and we ask in your name that the Holy spirit may teach us the word and how to action the word you’re going to teach us today. For your word is our daily bread and we cannot live without your word Lord. King Jesus, we thank you for bringing us together today and we say amen.
We should step in the new year with pure hearts not holding any unforgiveness in us so that we’re able to move forward and conquer bigger challenges than we faced this year. It is painful to move forward with unforgiveness because some of the things we are going to face will trigger that unforgiving heart and remind us of the pain we experienced, and we will shut ourselves down due to the trigger. Meaning when we don’t forgive the people who hurt us in any way we are automatically placing a time bomb in our hearts and the worst part is that we dress the time bomb with lies thinking that we will get over it.
We often quote these words: “time heals” , while forgetting that time will only help us to heal only if we allow the healing to take place by firstly forgiving whoever has hurt us. At some times, it’s not about the ones who have recently hurt us this year but about the upbringing we had that hurt us, because up bringing have a certain role that it plays to us now as we’re transacting through adulthood.
Before you forgive other people in your life, first review your upbringing and write down the things that have hurt you as you were growing up. Dig deep in your thoughts and try to remember anything that has made you sad, cry or made you question your parents/guardian or whoever played major roles in your growth. This important because some of the characters or traits that we have now cannot be broken by just prayer alone but can be broken by forgiveness and setting yourself free from the silent traumas you had as a child. Those silent traumas and pains you faced as a child tend to come back to you and you’ll pour them to your children and you won’t notice when that happens because you never gave yourself a chance to review them to ensure they don’t come back. You see forgiveness goes deep; it doesn’t only start now by forgiving those who may have wronged you in certain ways now as an adult. It starts from childhood then from there you can be able to forgive other people.
There are some traumas or pains that don’t come from people but come from the things you face in life; certain situations tend to break you and cause you to be a different person and from there your life changes to this individual who is now closed off and distanced, living life alone and always guarding your heart and that will be because of something you’ve faced alone in life. You need to forgive yourself from pains.
When it happens like that, it is when you need to forgive yourself of which that’s something we rarely talk about. So, forgiving the things that happened in your childhood is related to your self-forgiveness. The reason I say they are related is because what happened in your upbringing tends to come back now as in adult and cause you to have certain traits or characters in you and you won’t notice that because you haven’t given yourself a chance to forgive but when you look back on all and everything that hurt you as a child as you were growing up, you’ll be able to look at yourself in the mirror and say “ I forgive myself for this and that”.
Self-forgiveness comes after forgiving your past. By forgiving you’re able to confront yourself. And when you forgive yourself, you’re able to forgive other people but if you try to forgive others without forgiving yourself, it’ll be hard because there’s somethings you haven’t dealt with them personally. So, these two types of forgiveness are the basic foundation of forgiving, if you fail on those two, you will find it hard to forgive others.
One of the best things about forgiveness is that it brings peace inside of you and the ability to experience joy while others experience happiness. You will experience joy because peace goes along with joy. So, when you say you want to forgive be ready to confront the unforgiveness within you so that the seed of joy is planted in you. Yes, happiness and joy are not the same, they are different. You experience happiness when your heart doesn’t forgive because happiness is like your energy drink, it comes for a moment the Poff its gone but joy on the other hand is like a river that never goes dry and maintains you as it goes along with peace.
So, that’s why you need to start forgive in order to experience peace filled with joy. And the moment you start forgiving you become this new vibrant person filled with so much life in you and take notice that peace doesn’t make you live in your regrets, but it makes you appreciate more. The attitude of gratitude is built within you when you start forgiving in your life and you won’t break like before; you’ll actually be stronger.
Mathew 6:12 ”and forgive us our sins, as we have forgiven those who sin against us. – as you ask God to forgive you, you also need to forgive those who have wronged you”. I like how God makes it a two-way street by Him forgiving you means you need to forgive as well and it totally makes sense. Imagine if God was like us holding unto unforgiveness. Don’t think it would be a chaotic world? Even God views forgiveness as important, like God gave His one and only begotten son to die for our sins and through Jesus Christ our sins are forgiven when we confess them and repent.
Mathew 18: 21-22 - ”Then Peter came to him and asked, “Lord, how often should I forgive someone[i] who sins against me? Seven times?”22 “No, not seven times,” Jesus replied, “but seventy times seven! . Jesus was in other words was saying don’t get tired of forgiving someone regardless how many times they wrong you because you won’t keep a record of the number of times you forgave that person. Look 70*7 =490 means you’ll count up to 490 each time you forgive someone. Yes, you see that’s a huge number to be counting.
This thing of forgiveness must be in you; it must live within you. When you look at some relationships either be friendships or marriages, forgiveness is expensive to them because each time they forgive each other, when they angry or upset they tend to remind each other those times one of them did something wrong and one had to forgive another, of which that’s false forgiveness because once you forgive a person, you don’t need to remind them of anything that you forgave them for. After you forgave him/her or them just let go and by doing so you’re actually setting yourself free from all and everything that comes with unforgiveness.
Before we open more verses, lets stop right here and we go fix our hearts and start forgiving those we need to forgive and step in the new year with pure hearts not holding unforgiveness so that we’re ready for 2026.
Let’s pray; father Lord Jesus Christ we thank you today for teaching us how to forgive and to let go, there’s no one who could have done what you did for us on the cross. Lord, we thank you very much from the depths of our souls. Lord Jesus Christ, thank you, as we’re going to forgive those who’ve hurt us may you Holy spirit give us the strength and love to forgive so we may experience you more in our lives. Lord God, Lord Jesus Christ and Holy spirit Thank you as we say Amen and amen.
Shalom.