Creator's Joy

I believe another blockage for experiencing God is unforgiveness.
There’s a story in the bible that talks about a slave that has a tremendous debt with his master and is forgiven. His debt is cancelled.
Then he encounters one of his own subjects that has a much minor debt with him and refuses to release him.
When his masters hears about this he is filled with anger and withdraws the release he originally gave him.

Why?
Because God expects us to extend the forgiveness He gave us to others.
There is no greater debt anyone can have to you, no greater  assault, than your own debt with God before you were saved.
You may think you were a pretty decent person and that the persons who wronged you are more evil than you are.
But our wrongdoing to God is always greater than peoples wrongdoing towards us.

Why?
Because we are not God…
Every sin is done against God because it violates his commandments.
No matter how small your sin may seem, it’s still huge because it’s disobedience against God.
No matter how big someone’s wrongdoing to you is, it’s still small in comparison to your and their sin against God.
What determines the severeness of sin is not how many things someone does wrong but to whom the wrongdoing is done.
I’m by no means trivialising your pain but we have to put it into the right perspective.

God can and will heal our hearts but He does ask us to forgive.
If we don’t we not only resist him but risk losing our salvation.
Now you don’t have to be anxious about that.
All it takes is a willing heart.
He will enable you to forgive through his Spirit inside of you.
You just have to make the choice.

Something that helped me to forgive was the realisation that hurt people hurt people.
The people that hurt me have an unfulfilled need themselves.
We also need to keep in mind that people never are supposed to take God’s place in our lives.
Certain people are meant to fill certain needs we have, yes.
But we all have a place inside us that only God can fill.
And I believe He can even fill the empty places that others leave behind.

We just have to be very careful not to constantly blame others for our misery.
Even if they caused it in the first place, we still have a shelter we can go into to hide and recover.
It’s our own responsibility to make God our hiding place.
God always provides for us where others fail, if only we seek him.

It does not benefit us if we walk around angry and hurt with our head high in the sky because we’ve been wronged.
Sometimes I think we would be less hurt, or even not hurt at all in many cases, if we truly died to self and took up Jesus’s cross, who died for us willingly.
If we wouldn’t make life all about us, and how to get our needs met, but if we fully were devoted to living for God and others, we would not be so hurt all the time.
Then if people reject us, we would not be so offended, because we don’t live to get things from others, but to give instead.
Then if they reject us, we realise that it’s really their loss and not ours, because they really rejected our love for them, if love is what drives us.
And then we even feel sorry for them if they reject us and the love we wanted to give them.

You see God is like that.
He is not so much concerned about what we do to him when we don’t honor him the right way.
I don’t even think we can hurt God in that sense.
We might do him wrong but it’s really us who get hurt by that.
If we don’t give him the right place in our lives we are the ones that miss out on him!

When you read the laws in the old testament it says many times that obeying them is for our good!
Even now we’ve been saved through grace, it still benefits us to obey God.
Grace is never meant to take the place of laws but rather to enable us to obey them.
Because it benefits us.
God’s laws are really spiritual laws like reaping and sowing are in the natural.
They show us what leads to blessing and what takes blessing away from us.
We are still saved by grace but we all know that as believers we can still be quite miserable…
And I believe that this is more often than we realise because of our own doing or attitde.

We need to forgive others and ourselves if we want to experience God’s love for us.
We also need to let go of any offense we have against God.
Not that He did anything wrong, but we might perceive things as hurtful because we don’t understand them.
We need to let God be God and trust that He is good.

But still, even if we choose to forgive, we do need to come into his presence daily so we get healed and are able to keep forgiving, because often people don’t change and we have to keep our hearts soft.
This doesn’t mean we let them hurt us again. It means we forgive them if they do.
Sometimes we need to put up boundaries so people can’t hurt us again.
And just love them from a distance and pray for them that their own hearts get healed.

Unbelief wasn’t the only blockage I experienced.
I had experienced God’s presence before but gradually, without realising, I had stopped forgiving certain people in my life.
I had forgiven them for many years but slowly I had started to take up offense again.
Once I made the choice to keep forgiving, the heavens didn’t feel like brass anymore and I could feel God’s presence again like I had before.

Activation

Ask God who you need to forgive.
It can be yourself or even God, so to say.
Release every sin and offense into God’s hands.
Give them to Jesus who bore it on the cross.
Remember that Jesus also suffered for what others did to you.
The price for their sin was paid as much as the price for yours was.
Jesus was punished for what others did to you as much as for what you did to others or to God.
Then spend time in his presence and let him heal your heart. Daily!

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