• Forgiveness Sets Me Free.

  Contributed by Sermon Central on Dec 28, 2008 (message contributor)

    (rate this sermon illustration)

   | 2,918 views

  Scripture:  None

  Tags:  God's Forgiveness

"FORGIVENESS SETS ME FREE."

Kenneth Hart, a psychology professor at the University of Windsor (Ontario, Canada), studied sixty-six recovering alcoholics. The individuals had one thing in common: They were all angry with someone. Teaching forgiveness, Hart found, is one way to break the cycle that causes recovering alcoholics to relapse. If they release their anger through forgiveness, they no longer have a reason to use alcohol as an escape. One of the former addicts said, "Forgiveness is more for yourself than for the person you're forgiving. For me to forgive that person sets me free."

"This therapy of freedom through forgiveness is totally biblical. God is free to love us because He has forgiven our sins committed against Him. God's anger toward sin has been propitiated (turned away) by the death of Christ (1 John 2:2). Paul writes that we should forgive one another as God has forgiven us. Think how the world (your world) would change if all personal anger were immediately released through forgiveness."

[From an email from David Jeremiah Nov. 20, 2008. From David Scudder's Sermon "Stopping the Hurt Through Forgiveness"]