Breaking Our Personal Chains

Failing to forgive someone who offends someone we love or harms us imprisons us to that person.  Each flash of resentment becomes another link in a chain that binds us to our offender.  When we judge our victimizers, we create even more links.  Periodic mental condemnation as we reflect upon our past produces additional links in the chains.  Dr. Luke in his gospel encourages us to break these personal chains.  In the sixth chapter and thirty-seventh verse (Luke 6:37), the evangelist exhorts us: “Do not judge and you will not be judged.  Do not condemn and you will not be condemned.  Forgive and you will be forgiven.”  Accordingly, a refusal to judge and condemn and a willingness to extend forgiveness and mercy are effective spiritual tools in breaking our personal chains.

Although we are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, many of us are captive to bitterness and resentment we harbor against others.  Idle minds are the fertile ground for revenge and judgment.  Our reflections yield intense flashes of anger and thirst for vengeance.  We long for the day our victimizers get exactly “what is coming to them.”  We simply cannot wait until our ears are satisfied with the “good news” that our enemies have reaped what they have sown.  We wish we could be there to ask them, “How does it feel?”  Nonetheless, the sum of these emotions is a huge ball and a lengthy chain that incarcerate us to the past. 

Renouncing judgment is the first tool Luke suggests we use to break the chains that bind us.  “Vengeance is mine says the Lord.  I will repay.”  Galatians 6:7-8 assures us God will determine the time and method in which our victimizers face the consequences of their actions.  In turn, we relinquish our demands for retribution.  In order to break our chains, we definitely and irreversibly pardon those persons who have harmed us.  Concretely, that means we free them from any punishment they rightfully deserve.  Interestingly, in freeing them, we free ourselves.

Secondly, we show mercy to our victimizers by realizing that they too are children of Almighty God.  It happens they are broken, hurting, incomplete and self-centered people.  In an awkward sense, victims of unrequited love find it necessary to visit that agony unto someone else in order to heal from the experience.  Because they were taken for granted and their feelings and hearts trampled, they do the same to others in order to free themselves from having been the object of someone else’s self-centered living.  Moreover, it is important to realize the profound role that people’s backgrounds play in their inability to commit to meaningful relationships.  Childhood disappointment and emotional and psychological injuries deeply affect us.  Sometimes, we just wonder just how deep the wounds are.  Nevertheless, our acceptance of our brokenness enables us to extend mercy to the broken people who hurt us out of their pain and agony.

Luke reminds us of the principle of reciprocity as it relates to forgiveness.  We cannot become the recipients of forgiveness unless we are first the givers.  You cannot have one without the other.  As we forgive those persons who harmed us, we refuse to wish them ill will or to assassinate their characters.  Again, we surrender any justifiable claims we have to insist upon their chastisement.  We let go of righteous indignation.  More significantly, we begin to pray for them.  We ask for God’s “good, pleasing and perfect” will to emerge in their lives.  We ask God to heal them and make them whole.  With such inner healing and spiritual maturity, they will learn to practice “The Golden Rule.”  Loving forgiveness is the third major tool for breaking the chains that bind us.

Ironically, we must also ask for forgiveness from our victimizers!  Absolutely shocking!  Yet, it is spiritually necessary.  We mentally condescend to those persons who harmed us.  We carry around a lifetime of strife and hard-heartedness against them.  We pray for their destruction and failure.  We attempt to push them out of the grace of God.  We try to strip them of their God given inheritance as His children who rightly deserve all of the blessings we seek.  In short, we demonize these people.  In turn, God requires us to forgive them and request their forgiveness in order to complete the reciprocal process of forgiveness.

We seek forgiveness from our victimizers lest we fall prey to hating them.  Hatred clearly violates all biblical teachings: Law, Prophets, Gospels, Wisdom literature and Epistles.  God is love.  We cannot know love unless we know Him.  Further, we cannot love Him whom we have not seen if we refuse to love our brothers and sisters whom we see daily.  Our love extends even to those persons who have harmed us.  Although they are broken, we love them nevertheless.  We cannot hate them.  We seek their forgiveness to the same degree we demand them to ask for our forgiveness.

Renouncing judgment, abandoning a condemnatory attitude, showing mercy and giving forgiveness are the necessary tools for breaking the emotional and psychological chains that bind us.  Unless we utilize these spiritual tools each day, we remain bound to our pasts.  Eventually, we die in existential prisons.  Love, passion, creativity and spirituality waste away.  Instead, God offers escape from these prisons with the spiritual keys of mercy and forgiveness.  Break your personal chains!