Matthew 6:12-15 “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.  And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”

“I grew up in a relatively non-Christian home and lived a fairly simple life. My family did go to church occasionally, but I as I grew into my teen years, I often attended church alone. I may not have known all the Sunday school terms or much at all about theology, but somehow I knew from the beginning that there was a God and I knew that He was holy.

I married Arthur after nursing school and we moved two states away from my parents. We had two children and Arthur found a new job and we were transferred to the East Coast. We settled into a large mainline denomination church because we felt the children would benefit from the varied programs it offered.
July became our time for a “traditional” trip to Grantham, PA to attend a Family Conference on the Holy Spirit and the Messiah College. On our first visit we met a couple, Bill and Delores Winder. Delores was one of the speakers and told us that God wants to heal His people today. She and Bill also gave us the good news that the Lord wants to use each of us to bring healing to the many wounded and hurting people that we encounter every day.

Our first conference I told Delores that I believed the Lord wanted to release me into some form of ministry but that there seemed to be a major block of some kind. Delores simply smiled and told me to attend her lecture on healing and wait until the Holy Spirit revealed something.

Her class was an hour long, and I sat through it dreading what might be coming and feeling relieved when nothing seemed to hit. In the final moments of her class, Delores addressed the issue of “blocks to receiving the fullness of the Holy Spirit,” and in particular, the block of unhealed father/daughter relationships. As Delores spoke, my surroundings seemed to change. The people around me appeared to be moving in slow motion and there was a loud buzzing sound that filled my ears and head. My heart demanded my attention with its insistent pounding in my chest, but an overall numbness had gripped me and I could not respond. I could only sit there dazed, as the others in the room began to file out.

Eventually I had some time alone with Delores during which I finally began to speak. I told her that I had feared that the difficulty was one of incest. I said that there seemed to be a battle going on inside me as my head insisted that there was no basis for believing that incest was the problem, but my heart cried out that it was true. Delores drew a line in the sand by asking which I would believe-my head or my heart. Eventually, I managed to say “My heart,” but the conflict did not diminish.

I needed relief from the warfare, but I could not risk having anyone else know even the few details that were emerging. I returned home to a wilderness time of confusion, despair and chaos. I could not allow my husband to know the details of this place in my past, at least not yet. Arthur’s background is that of engineering and he is a very intellectual person. I did not know much about this new wound, but I knew that it oozed with feelings. Obviously, Arthur is a man, and I desperately needed a woman to minister healing in this place.

The feelings coming up were shame and a fear of exposure, guilt and despair and a fear that it was my fault. General details went hand-in-hand along with the feelings. I was seven years old when the incest occurred. I was asleep when it happened. There was a fan on somewhere. I was terribly confused about the entire event. My childhood home consisted of a bedroom for me and my sister and one for my brother. My parents slept on a hide-a-bed in our living room. I was confused by the lack of my mother’s presence and the fact that my brother and sister were not part of this memory. As the details continued to surface, I needed guidance in dealing with them, but I had such a strong aversion to sharing any of this with anyone.
I was overwhelmed with shame, guilt, denial, depression, hatred, anger, rage, and bitterness. At the center of the struggle was my need to forgive my father. In my mind, my father did not deserve to be forgiven. He was my father – the man that I trusted most in the entire world, and he should have been protecting and nurturing me. Instead, in one evil action, he stole my childhood and left me with a distorted viewpoint on life and very damaged coping mechanisms. And to be honest, it felt good to hold on to the hatred, bitterness and Unforgiveness.

Seeking forgiveness is not always easy, and I personally struggled with covering sin because I thought it was a better way for some years, while I was being healed of an emotional spiritual wound. My wrestling with bringing my sin into the “Light” began at this conference with Bill and Delores. I had to deal with an event for which I had no reference point or power to face.

On and off for seven years I wrestled with the need to forgive my father. I knew what the scriptures said and I desired to obey God, but my feelings were so intense. Until I entered healing, I did not know that I could harbor such strong emotions. The battle between obedience and feelings raged powerfully, especially during times of prayer. At the close of these prayer times, I would choose to forgive, often in spite of my feelings.
A change occurred in this battle between feelings and forgiveness about halfway through my healing. The catalyst for the change came when the Lord allowed me to understand that my sins of hatred, bitterness, and judgment were as grievous to Him as was my father’s sin. I came to the realization that my reactions to my father’s sin put Christ on the cross as surely as did my father’s original action. The Lord does not look at circumstances in order to justify our sin, which is human logic. Jesus simply tells us to follow Him and to forgive, no matter the circumstances.

Another central issue in my healing was my need to forgive God for His not living up to my expectations. I know that is an incredibly arrogant statement, and I agonized over this matter each time it came up. I knew that God is all-powerful and therefore, I reasoned, he could have stopped my father’s sin. I eventually came to embrace that fact that my father had exercised his free will, but I still judged God for not providing some manner of explanation of the incest. If I had some explanation, I might have been able to comprehend it and not have been o overwhelmed by my total lack of understanding of the event. I was so full of anger at times, that my prayer partner half-joked that God would be sending a bolt of lightening to destroy us both. He would have been totally justified in doing so, and I knew that it was “wrong” to tell God that He made a mistake. Nevertheless, the feelings were there, whether I gave them voice or not. We fool ourselves when we try to bury and hide our perception of truth. It is much better to bring our twisted misconceptions into His marvelous Light and allow Him to sort fact from fiction.

My prayer partner would allow my venting and ten would call me to confess my sin and arrogance toward God. In spite of my iniquity, never once did I sense any anger from God directed at me. Most often, I felt a great release from my intense feelings and a powerful sense of not only the Lord’s presence, but His love for me as well.

In the midst of my healing, I realized that we each have the same decision to make as the one that Adam and Eve faced. Any time we need to choose to forgive someone who has hurt us or let go or bitterness for some wrong done to us, we stand in the same place. Our choice is to nurse the grudge and remain in evil or to hide the feelings by pushing them down in an attempt to ignore them. These and similar actions keep us shrouded and far away from loving Father God.

We will not know the Father or Jesus the Son fully until this fallen creation passes away and we are in total communion with them. But we can cooperate with the Person of the Holy Spirit and His work of sanctification to the best of our ability by refusing to hide emotions and sins that we have decided are too wicked to bring to Truth. We can choose to stand on the Word of God as Truth and believe that God is good and loving. It is from the place of Truth that we will be set free in order to come to know how very much out God loves us.”

Reflection:
We so often think of “sin” as what we do and fail to do. God sees sin in a much greater way than we do. It is often our priorities, what we think and how we feel that is sinful.

Are we responsible for what we think? What about when Satan puts a thought in our mind? We cannot help that, can we?

He tells us in 2 Corinthians 10:5 “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”

We are not responsible for the thoughts that just appear in our mind, but we are responsible for what we do with these thoughts. We must learn “Spiritual Warfare.” If we take a thought and hold it in our mind, dwell upon it, it will become an action. Betty said in her testimony that “it felt good to hold onto the bitterness and anger.” Sometimes “sin” does feel good.

The bitterness and Unforgiveness that she was holding on to, was slowly, but surely, destroying her life. She was not free to serve God to the fullest of His call, until she could let go and forgive her dad.

There are many wonderful lessons in Betty’s testimony. We need to read His Word and really find out what we do (or do not do) that God looks upon as sin. We need to turn our lives over to Him and allow the Holy Spirit to make changes in us. We need the help of the Holy Spirit to direct us in the right direction.