1 — The Wound That Wouldn’t Heal
It’s me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer.
That’s how this message begins—not with triumph but with honesty.
Because forgiveness never starts from strength; it starts from brokenness.
Maybe you know that kind of breaking.
Someone walked away, someone lied, someone took from you what you can’t get back.
If you live long enough, somebody will hand you pain you didn’t deserve.
For me, it happened in the middle of what I thought was my calling.
I was serving as country director for an NGO, overseeing humanitarian projects that mattered.
We were doing good work—feeding families, building clinics, bringing light into dark places.
Then, without warning, I was relieved of my position.
The explanation arrived on a thin sheet of paper:
> “You are being replaced because you do not have a working relationship with the U.S. Embassy.”
I stared at the words in disbelief.
A “lack of relationship”? I’d spent years cultivating one.
But reason doesn’t matter much once someone decides your story for you.
The next day—the very next day—the phone rang.
It was the U.S. Embassy.
They offered me a job.
I remember hanging up and just sitting there.
Part of me wanted to laugh. Another part wanted to cry.
I had been told I wasn’t good enough for a relationship with them, and then they turned around and hired me.
It was vindication wrapped in sadness.
You learn quickly that vindication doesn’t heal humiliation.
A paycheck doesn’t fix betrayal.
You can win the argument and still lose your peace.
So I accepted the embassy position, but the wound came with me.
Outwardly I looked fine—new badge, new office, new mission.
Inside, I was carrying a private courtroom in my soul.
Every day I retried the case.
Every night I replayed the evidence.
And every verdict I rendered kept me chained to the same bitterness.
Unforgiveness has a way of turning the lights off inside you.
It starts with replaying the injustice, then it becomes resentment, then it becomes identity.
You stop talking about what was done to you and start becoming the one it was done to.
That’s when you know you’re stuck.
I tried to pray my way past it, but my prayers had an edge.
“Lord, teach them a lesson.”
“Show the world who was right.”
Heaven was silent, and that silence forced me to face a harder truth:
I wasn’t just angry at people—I was angry at God.
Why hadn’t He stopped it?
Why let a lie replace the truth?
Why take me from a ministry I loved only to drop me in the wilderness of confusion?
If you’ve ever asked why, you’re in good company.
Moses asked it in the desert.
Job asked it on the ash heap.
Even Jesus cried it from the cross: “My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
God didn’t answer my “why” right away.
Instead, He began to lift me by degrees—softly, quietly, the way dawn lifts the night.
It started when I realized forgiveness wasn’t something I could feel first; it was something I had to choose.
Paul writes, “Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
Feelings don’t transform first—thinking does.
So I began asking God to renew my mind, to help me see the whole picture differently.
That’s when I saw what unforgiveness was doing to me.
It was draining my joy, hardening my tone, and narrowing my world until everything I saw was colored by injustice.
And the cruelest part?
The people who hurt me had moved on.
They were eating breakfast, planning meetings, living their lives.
While I was still standing at the scene of the crime, refusing to leave.
One evening I walked outside after work.
The city lights shimmered on the river, and a breeze came through the palms.
I looked up and said, “Lord, I can’t fix this. I can’t even stop feeling it. But if You’ll lift me, I’ll go wherever You carry me.”
That was the first small rise—the first breath of grace.
Nothing around me changed, but something in me did.
I began to sense that God wasn’t punishing me; He was preparing me.
That He wasn’t exposing me; He was educating me.
He was teaching me that forgiveness isn’t about letting someone else off the hook—it’s about letting me out of the trap.
And that’s when I knew this message would someday need to be preached,
because there’s a whole congregation of people sitting in pews every week smiling on the outside and dying on the inside, still tied to the one who hurt them.
And the same God who lifted me is still in the lifting business.
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2 — The Turning of the Heart
Forgiveness rarely happens in a flash.
It comes in waves—first resistance, then reason, then, by some miracle, release.
I remember opening my Bible one night to Romans 12:19:
> “Beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”
I’d read that verse for years, but this time it hit differently.
God wasn’t saying justice didn’t matter; He was saying He would handle it.
The question was whether I trusted Him enough to stop trying to do His job.
I had lived too long in a courtroom of my own making.
Every memory was cross-examination, every prayer a closing argument.
But the Holy Spirit whispered, “David, step down from the bench. There’s already a Judge on the throne.”
That’s the first real lift: when you hand the gavel back to God.
When you say, “Lord, I don’t need to win this case anymore. I just need to walk free.”
The Slow Work of Grace
Forgiveness is not amnesia.
It doesn’t mean pretending the wound never happened.
It means refusing to let the wound become your address.
I began to notice how often Jesus tied forgiveness to sight.
When He healed the blind man, He said, “Receive your sight.”
When He forgave the paralytic, He said, “Rise, take up your bed, and walk.”
Forgiveness gives us the power to rise and see again.
One morning, while driving to work, I found myself praying for the people who had dismissed me.
At first it felt artificial, but then the prayer grew its own life.
I said, “Lord, bless them.”
And to my surprise, I meant it.
That’s when I realized: forgiveness is not something you do once; it’s something you practice until it becomes real.
Seeing the Offender Differently
It’s easy to divide the world into victims and villains.
But Jesus won’t let us keep those categories.
He keeps reminding us that every villain is still a candidate for grace.
I started thinking about the people who’d written that letter.
They had families, deadlines, pressures I couldn’t see.
Maybe they were wrong—maybe they were also afraid.
When I could admit that, something softened inside me.
That’s what the gospel does—it re-humanizes the people we dehumanized to justify our hate.
When Jesus said, “Love your enemies,” He wasn’t demanding sentiment; He was inviting perspective.
He was asking us to look at others through the same mercy that saved us.
The day it really sank in was when I realized this:
> If my offender had been the only soul on earth, Jesus still would have gone to Calvary for them.
That thought broke me and healed me at the same time.
If Christ values my enemy that much, who am I to despise them?
When Justice Meets Mercy
Forgiveness does not erase accountability; it just relocates it.
It hands it to God.
It says, “Lord, I’m stepping out of the way so You can work without my interference.”
I think of Joseph in Genesis 50.
Standing before the brothers who sold him, he could have demanded revenge.
Instead he said, “You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good.”
That’s not denial—that’s redemption.
It’s the recognition that God can recycle pain into purpose.
And I think of the servant in Matthew 18, forgiven a mountain of debt who then throttled another man for a handful of coins.
Jesus wasn’t just telling an old story; He was holding up a mirror.
Every time I withhold forgiveness, I’m that man with his hands around another’s throat.
So the Lord kept pressing on me:
“David, you’ve tasted My mercy. Pass it on.”
That’s when I stopped praying, “God, change them,” and started praying, “God, change me.”
The miracle of forgiveness is not that the other person becomes better—it’s that you become free.
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3 — The Lift of Grace
When the Lord begins to lift you, it’s almost imperceptible at first.
There’s no trumpet, no grand announcement. Just a still, steady hand beneath your spirit saying, “Come on, child. Let’s stand again.”
For me, the true lift came one morning while reading the Gospels.
I had just finished the story of Peter—the man who denied Jesus three times.
After the resurrection, Jesus didn’t lecture Peter.
He built a fire, cooked breakfast, and asked one question three times: “Do you love Me?”
He didn’t drag Peter back through the details of failure; He invited him back into relationship.
That’s the heart of God.
When we fall, He doesn’t rub it in—He lifts us up.
And that’s when I realized that forgiveness was not only something I had to give; it was something I had to receive.
I had to forgive myself.
Not for what others did to me, but for what I had allowed the bitterness to do in me.
The very One I’d been accusing of silence had been speaking all along—through the quiet mercy that kept me breathing, through the people who still believed in me, through the unrelenting grace that refused to let me drown.
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The Bird That Flew Free
There’s a strange little passage in Leviticus 14 about a leper bringing two birds to the priest.
One bird was sacrificed, its blood caught in a bowl.
The living bird was dipped into that blood, carried to an open field, and released.
The image is haunting and holy: one bird dies so the other can fly free.
That’s forgiveness.
That’s Calvary.
Christ bled so you and I could rise.
We are the living bird—marked by His blood, freed by His mercy.
And sometimes that’s exactly what forgiving another person feels like.
You take the memory of what was done, dip it in the blood of grace, and then open your hands:
“Go. I release you. I wish you well. I will not hold you prisoner anymore.”
When you do that, the wind of the Spirit catches your soul, and you start to feel what I call the divine updraft—the lift of grace.
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When the Lord Is the Lifter
The psalmist said,
> “But Thou, O Lord, art a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter up of my head.” (Psalm 3:3)
It doesn’t say I lifted myself.
It says He is the lifter.
If you’ve ever stood bent under the weight of betrayal, you know how heavy it can be.
But when the Lord touches that bowed head, it rises.
The same hands that shaped galaxies can tilt your chin toward heaven.
That’s what He did for me.
He took a man who’d been dismissed, humiliated, and angry—and taught him to breathe again.
He lifted me past vindication into vision.
He turned my loss into a lesson and my wound into a witness.
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The Call to Rise
Maybe you’re here today, and you’ve carried your own letter of rejection—something that said you’re not enough.
Maybe it came from a company, a family member, or even a church.
And every time you think you’ve moved on, the memory tugs you back down.
Today, the Spirit of God is whispering the same words He whispered to me:
> “It’s time to rise.”
Not because the pain never happened,
but because grace has the final word.
You can’t rewrite the past, but you can refuse to relive it.
You can hand the gavel to God and step out of that courtroom for good.
You can pray for the one who wounded you and mean it.
And when you do, something miraculous will happen—
He will lift you.
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Appeal
I don’t know what name sits at the center of your pain,
but I know the name that can free you from it: Jesus.
He was wronged, betrayed, denied, and crucified—and still He said, “Father, forgive them.”
If He can forgive from the cross, then He can help you forgive from your knees.
So if you’re ready to stop carrying the verdict and start carrying the victory,
lift your heart right now and say,
> “Lord, lift me.
Lift me above the bitterness.
Lift me beyond the memory.
Lift me into mercy.”
And the God who lifted me will lift you too.
Because that’s who He is—
the Lifter of the fallen, the Restorer of the broken, the God who turns pain into praise.
He lifts me up.
He’ll lift you too.
