Big Healing Book - Unforgiveness Is Itself a Forgiven Sin, So How Could It Hinder My Healing?

Unforgiveness Is Itself a Forgiven Sin, So How Could It Hinder My Healing?

A Hindrance

Although all New Testament blessings are legally yours, the Bible is clear that you CAN hinder your prayers to receive them.

1 Peter 3:7:
Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hindered.

The fact that Jesus commanded us to forgive others when we pray (Mark 11:25) would indicate that failure to do so would be a hindrance to your prayer. Unforgiveness takes the side of the Law against grace, and that is not where you want to be if you want receive healing, which is only offered through grace.

The Law Zone and the Grace Zone

Healing must be received on a grace basis. If you think you have to deserve healing with good conduct, you are in the Law Zone and you will receive nothing. If you recognize that healing is God’s gift to you, you are in the Grace Zone and you are set up to receive your healing. Unforgiveness comes from the Law Zone. You think you have the right to hold something against someone because of his conduct. If you operate in the Grace Zone, you will forgive the person who wronged you. It is hard to operate in the Law Zone with others but in the Grace Zone for yourself. You need to make up your mind which zone you want to live in. Don’t let unforgiveness keep you in the wrong zone.

Can Unforgiveness Send You to Hell?

Now we have to wade into some really interesting waters where most preachers would prefer not to go because they don’t have a decent explanation. Jesus warned in Mark 11:26 that if you don’t forgive other people’s sins, God won’t forgive yours! How can this be, when the New Testament says repeatedly that all our sins are already forgiven? Can you actually negate grace and forgiveness by failing to forgive someone? Can you actually burn in hell because you never forgave a seventh-grade bully for giving you a “flat tire” and a “wedgee” in the hallway? (For those who were never bullied, this refers to flattening the heel of your sneaker and yanking your underpants up sharply from behind.) After all, if your sins aren’t forgiven, hell is where you go!

Few things are clearer in the New Testament than the fact that Jesus redeemed you from hell. (In fact, you can even see this truth in the Old Testament because the Passover lamb, which definitely represented Jesus, had to be roasted in fire after being killed. He went to hell so that you would not have to go there.) It is also abundantly clear that exemption from hell is based on grace, not based on works that we have done or not done. Unforgiveness is a sin, but all our sins have been paid for, which would include the sin of unforgiveness! But the fact that Jesus seemed to imply that you could be lost for unforgiveness would seem to contradict this. Of course, the Bible can’t contradict itself, so there must be some explanation for this. And there is one, but it tends to upset people. If you get upset, feel free to offer a better explanation!

When Jesus taught the Jews, some of His teaching applied to the “before” side of the resurrection. The so-called Lord’s Prayer is an example. Jesus taught the Jews a prayer where they prayed to the Father “in heaven,” which was never done in the epistles after the Church Age commenced. The dozens of references to the “Father” in the epistles never refer to Him as being in heaven and there is no example of a prayer to God who is strictly “in heaven.” While He certainly is (for example, He “speaks from heaven” in Hebrews 12:25), He also indwells believers (which He didn’t at the time Jesus taught), so for God to hear you now, your prayer need not “ascend to heaven” to reach Him. They asked God to forgive them (which is unnecessary for us because we are already forgiven), to deliver them from the evil one (which is unnecessary for us because He already did deliver us out of from Satan’s kingdom), for God’s kingdom to come (which it has; Jesus said that some that He spoke to would not see death until they had seen God’s kingdom come with power) and to grant us food today (which we would not pray today, as Christ has provided all our needs already and we simply receive them). These particular petitions were never encouraged after the resurrection by Jesus or the New Testament writers. I realize that some readers may be outright scandalized by my assertion that the Lord’s Prayer is not an appropriate Church Age prayer, but if you study the New Testament, you don’t see any cases of anyone praying the Lord’s Prayer or admonishing others to pray it after Jesus rose from the dead. Jesus never even prayed it for Himself. He only presented it as an example of a nonrepetitive, unpretentious way to pray, not as a strict guideline of what content must be in every prayer. Plenty of prayers in the Epistles after Jesus’ resurrection have different contents.

The apostles’ prayers on the “after” side of the resurrection are quite different from the Lord’s Prayer. Just to cite one example, Paul prayed that people’s eyes would be enlightened to their inheritance. Jesus could not have prayed that prayer because the New Covenant that grants that inheritance had not yet been ratified, so that could not have been part of the Lord’s Prayer. Thus, we can see that New Covenant praying is not the same as pre-New Covenant praying as exemplified by the Lord’s Prayer.

The New Covenant exhorts us to prayer for leaders (1 Timothy 2:1-2), but there is no mention of that in the Lord’s Prayer. There are too many New Covenant model prayers in the epistles to cram into one quick prayer. So the Lord’s Prayer could never have been intended to be the end-all-and-be-all prayer for born-again believers.

I am not the first to put forth the idea that pre-resurrection and post-resurrection praying were to be different. The originator of this idea was Jesus Himself! He talked about the day that they would see Him again (after His resurrection). He said that in that day they would ask the Father for things in His name (John 16:23). The Lord’s Prayer does not do this. In other words, the rules for prayer would change after His resurrection and ascension to the Father. The Lord’s Prayer is written in red but it is not written to the Church in the Church Age. Some prayer rules apply now that did not apply before the resurrection. Jesus did not teach His disciples to pray in tongues, but after He rose He said that they would speak with new tongues (Mark 16:17), and the New Testament encourages us as Church Age believers to pray “with the Spirit” (in tongues) as well as “with the understanding” (1 Corinthians 14:15).

Prayer rules were not the only rules that changed after the resurrection. Before the resurrection, Jesus commanded His disciples to go only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. After the resurrection, He commanded them to go into all the world and preach the gospel. So the evangelism rules changed as well. His commands to only go to Israelites are written in red (in red-letter-edition Bibles at least). Jesus said those words. But those words are not in effect for New Covenant believers, even though they are recorded in the New Testament. We would certainly get ourselves into trouble if we took the position that His command to only to go Jews was written in red, so it must be binding on the Church today.

Thus, you can see that there is a difference between the New Testament and the New Covenant. (I can imagine some of the gasps when people read this for the first time.) Jesus’ teaching to the Jews was in books that are part of the New Testament, but not all His teaching applies to New Covenant believers, as you can see. We are to preach good news to both Jews and Gentiles.

Consider Jesus’ teaching on divorce and Paul’s teaching on divorce. The difference has led to many “Who’s right, Jesus or Paul?” discussions with the usual conclusion being, “JESUS is right; He’s the Son of God and Paul isn’t. Paul’s words aren’t written in red.” But any serious student of Scripture should know that the Bible is ALL God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16-17) and cannot contradict itself. Therefore, the only possible conclusion is that Jesus and Paul are BOTH right – even though they seem to contradict each other! After all, Jesus said that if you get a divorce for any reason other than fornication and then remarry, you’ve committed adultery (Matthew 5:32 and elsewhere). But Paul – in contradiction to Jesus’ words – allowed for divorce in cases where an unbeliever wasn’t content to dwell with a believer and wanted a divorce! Moreover, Paul asserted that if someone who was “loosed from a wife” (divorced – the term loosed refers to a violent tearing away that would have been understood as divorce by Paul’s readers) remarried, he did not sin (1 Corinthians 7:27-28)! Well, isn’t adultery a sin? If remarriage is adultery, you could not do it without sinning, could you? Jesus said it was adultery and Paul said it wasn’t. How can they both be right? The answer is that Jesus was answering questions about the Law of Moses for the Jews rather than laying down rules about divorce for the Church Age as Paul did by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Many times, the point Jesus made about the Law (such as even looking at a woman to lust after her being a sin) were to prove to people who thought that they were righteous based on the Law that they were all actually incapable of acting completely righteous. He was definitely not advancing a new, updated, stricter Law of Moses 2.0 for the Church to follow! Even under the original Law of Moses, remarriage after divorce was permitted (Deuteronomy 24:1-2).

Now that I’ve opened that can of worms, I might as well point out that Paul did not contradict himself, either. Many churches take his statement in Romans 7:2 to mean that a person cannot remarry while the ex-spouse is still alive. But Paul referred to the Law, which DID allow remarriage. Paul said that a woman is bound to her husband as long as he lives – he did NOT say that a woman is bound to her EX-HUSBAND as long as he lives! The Law to which Paul referred did not teach that a woman is bound to her EX-HUSBAND as long as he lives either (Deuteronomy 24:1-2).

The bottom line is that Paul’s instructions were written to the Church. Jesus did not even address the issue of an unbelieving spouse while speaking to the Jews about the Law. This makes sense because before His resurrection, neither spouse was a born-again Christian in ANY marriage!

Of course, fantasizing about committing sin without doing it is itself sin, as Jesus said, but it is important to remember that the church was never given the Law of Moses to follow! In fact, the church wasn’t given the Ten Commandments to follow, either! (Now we’re REALLY stepping on religious toes!) 9 out of the 10 commandments are echoed somewhere in the New Testament (the only one left out is Sabbath-keeping, and even now we are commanded to fellowship with other believers – Hebrews 10:25), but the New Testament emphasizes grace and new life, not human attempts to do the right thing according to the Law. You can read Acts 15:5-29 where the church had a big argument about whether or not Christians had to keep the Law of Moses to be saved. The conclusion was that they didn’t, and it was wrong to impose something on the Church that no one had ever been able to keep (except Jesus) as a requirement for salvation!

The church was given the law of love, not a detailed list of do’s and don’ts designed for carnal unbelievers who didn’t have the Spirit of God in them. Paul said that the Law wasn’t given to the righteous, but rather to murderers, kidnappers, homosexuals and the like (1 Timothy 1:9-10). The Law shows the unrighteous their need of salvation by bringing a knowledge of sin, but it was (and still is) incapable of imparting new life to anyone. It shows you your need to be saved, but only faith in Jesus can save you.

I have said all this to prove to you that there is a dividing line where some pre-resurrection statements of Jesus do not apply to the post-resurrection Church. Once you see this, the Mark 11:26 dilemma becomes solvable. Jesus was talking to the Jews under the same Law of Moses under which He had to live Himself. He was not threatening New Covenant believers with loss of salvation if they did not forgive everyone. Thank God that your salvation that Jesus purchased isn’t that fragile!

Also, if that isn’t enough, Ephesians 4:32 and Colossians 3:13 prove that you get forgiven BEFORE you forgive others in the Church Age, rather than forgiving others and THEN having God forgive you, as in Matthew 6:14-15 and Mark 11:26. Ephesians 4:32 and Colossians 3:13 make no sense if you have to be the first to forgive – if that were true, Christ would not have forgiven you UNTIL you forgave others!

So it would seem that the answer would be that under the New Covenant, unforgiveness cannot hinder your healing. But the truth is that it can, but for different reasons.

We should all be comfortable with the fact that we live in the age of grace, not law. But unforgiveness agrees with the Law, not grace. When we think that someone should get what’s coming to him, we are in effect judges who pass judgment under the Law. We are agreeing with the Law and disagreeing with grace. But when you agree with the Law, you agree that you deserve what’s coming to you, too! You can’t receive healing with a “Law” mentality. On the other hand, when you have a “grace” mentality, you are willing to forgive others even as Christ forgave you. You realize that based on the Law, you’re not such hot stuff yourself, and you thank God for His grace that gives you better than what you deserve and gives the other person better than what he deserves.

Another Problem with Unforgiveness

Another problem is that walking in unforgiveness can make you sick in the first place! Trying to receive healing while holding on to unforgiveness is like claiming healing from stomach trouble while drinking a bottle of drain opener or claiming healing from lung cancer while smoking four packs of cigarettes a day. Unforgiveness will poison you even worse than some natural poisons.

Here is a good scripture to remember about an unforgiving (unmerciful) attitude poisoning your body:

Proverbs 11:17:
The merciful man doeth good to his own soul: but he that is cruel troubleth his own flesh.

I knew a man with bad back trouble, including arthritis and a slipped disc. We laid hands on him but he experienced no relief. However, the moment that he forgave a CHURCH that had wronged him (at least he thought they did), his healing manifested. We had a woman come to one of our meetings who held onto bitterness against her mother for almost 30 years. She was crippled, in horrible, untreatable pain, and on disability. She was healed of what the doctors said was a hopeless condition the night she forgave her mother. (Her mother wasn’t even still alive – you don’t forgive for the OTHER person’s benefit; you forgive for YOUR benefit!)

Does this mean that you can’t possibly get healed if you’re in unforgiveness? No, but it’s like trying to get healed of cancer while being in smoke-filled rooms all evening. It makes things a lot harder. Unforgiveness poisons your environment worse than smoke. Jesus warned that we need to forgive when we stand praying (Mark 11:25). If we don’t forgive, we aren’t following God’s instructions, and it’s hard to imagine it being easy to receive healing while you’re in blatant disobedience to Jesus’ instructions.

Advantage: Satan

Paul urged people to forgive, lest Satan get an advantage (2 Corinthians 2:10-11). If someone else has the advantage, it’s harder for you to win. In the final round for the title in a chess tournament, I made a serious blunder and was down a rook and a pawn after about 10 moves. My opponent had what should have been a decisive advantage. (I then had a sudden attack of competence and played a large number of moves in a row that a computer later verified to be the best each time and I came back to win.) I’ve made sure to never make that particular mistake again – I know that playing those first moves will give my opponent the advantage. It doesn’t mean the game is over, but who would want to have to overcome a large disadvantage every time? Have at least as much sense by avoiding the mistake of unforgiveness, which gives your spiritual opponent the advantage.

Let It Go!

So don’t poison yourself with unforgiveness if you want to be healed. Let the matter go, whatever it is, and allow God’s grace to flow in your body without hindrance.