Breaking Free from Unforgiveness, Bitterness and Hurt: How to Release Hurt & Find Peace in God

Today on the podcast, we're going to talk about what is the cost of not letting go of anger or bitterness or trauma or past hurt?

What is the cost of not forgiving others and ourselves?

So we're going to dive in that today, both from a biblical and a health perspective.

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I'm an encourager, a faith led entrepreneur, a mom and a wife.

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Okay.

Hey everybody.

Welcome to today's episode.

Today, like I said, we're going to talk about what does the Bible say about letting go of bitterness and unforgiveness, anger and these sort of things.

And then we're also going to talk about what is the actual physical, mental and spiritual impact when we don't.

Because I think a lot of us, we're holding on to something deep down.

It's kind of ingrained in us and we for some some reason do not want to let go of it or we feel like it has a hold on us.

So let's talk about why it's so important for us to do the work to release this, these feelings, this resentment, the bitterness or the unforgiveness and why this is probably one of the most important things we can do to live a better life and to live a better faith fueled life.

So one of the first things I want to share with you is Ephesians 4, 31, 32.

I'm going to share with you two different readings.

One I think is from King James and one I think, let's see, does it say I think the other one might be niv, but I'm not positive.

So here is what it says.

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger with in clamor, in evil speaking be put away from you with all malice.

And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake has forgiven you.

Okay?

So we're instructed to release any feelings of resentment and bitterness, hurt and Anger.

And if you're wondering like I did, well, what do we mean by clamor potentially in this way?

And it's, I mean, there's different definitions for it, and I read about what it, what it might mean in the Bible in this context, but overall, I think it's just, you know, kind of showing up, you know, noisily or frustratingly, you know, and kind of complaining to somebody, you know, just, in other words, just seeming really agitated with somebody possibly.

That's maybe one way to explain it.

The other, one of the other readings of it is kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you.

And so first, I think it's very clear that scripture tells us to let go of these things, right?

Not to hold on to them.

The thing is, is, do you really understand what is it?

That is, what is it costing us if we don't do this, if we don't do the work?

And I first should say that I'm not saying this is easy work, and I'm not saying that it happens in an instant necessarily, but it is important.

And so let's talk about the health impact.

So there was a really interesting study in the US Called the Forgiveness Project that they did, and they looked at the link between human behavior and diseases, and they basically found a link between the difficult to treat cancers and unforgiveness.

One of the people Studying this was Dr.

Patrick.

I probably said that wrong, but he was a medical director who studied at John Hopkins.

He was one of the people involved in one of these studies.

But what they found was that 60% of adults with hard to cure cancer, it was directly related to people that had, were holding on to something where they, they weren't giving forgiveness, and so they were harboring unforgiveness.

And what it goes on to explain is that, you know, holding on to unforgiveness, holding on to anger or let's see, resentment or frustration or trauma, it increases our stress, it impairs our immune function, it increases our risk for developing chronic conditions.

And it's primarily because it's keeping our body in a fight or flight state, which increases our cortisol and other chemicals in our body that we don't want to stay elevated, and then it leads to chronic anxiety.

Okay.

And so there was a gentleman that's talking about this study and some other ones.

His name is Nelson Schumann.

Let me see if I said that.

And he's the president of Restored Freedom.

He goes on to explain that there's they actually have put in medical textbooks that unforgiveness has been classified as a disease because refusing to forgive can make people sick.

It's refusing to let go of anger or hatred.

And let's see, uh, also another doctor went on to explain that most people don't know how much a burden anger is, but holding onto these grudges harms our health.

Negative emotions, hate, grief, bitterness, it leads to more chronic diseases and worse health outcomes, both for having.

You're more likely to have long term chronic health conditions as well as if you are battling a health disease or cancer.

Your chances of improving if you haven't dealt with these things is also lower than someone that has a positive mindset and that has released these things.

Okay.

And so there's also a CBS News story on this that you can search.

And basically more studies have come out and said and looked at how attitudes and lifestyles impact our physical realm and also our spiritual realm.

And so I think it's really important to understand that this is not only an instance where the Bible is telling us to let these things go, which I would mind you, is, you know, this, that's the instruction manual, right?

So if it's telling us we need to do this, it's not telling us so that we can just follow another rule.

It's actually telling us because it's the blueprint print to how we are designed in God's image.

We weren't meant to hold onto these things, just like we weren't meant to stay in a flight or fight state at all times.

I've heard that if an animal like a deer stayed in that state at all times, within days, they would literally die.

Because they're designed to have quick spurts in the, in the animal kingdom of, you know, there's a threat, you know something's coming to try to eat that deer.

And so they have to, you know, they have to increase that fight or flight and they have to get away, but as soon as the threat is gone, then that their system goes back to a calmer state.

Our bodies were designed the same way.

And of course we can handle things for longer or in different ways.

My point is we were not meant to stay in that state.

So we were not meant to hold on to anger or bitterness, wrath, resentment, not forgiving someone for any reason.

We weren't meant to hold on to trauma and we weren't meant to stay a victim and keep repeating or replaying it, whether it's in our subconscious or conscious mind.

We were not meant to keep the negativity of these feelings.

It literally seeps in every part of our body, our, you know, our mind, our actual cells in our body.

And so it's really important that we understand this and that we do the work to address it.

That might mean doing the work on ourselves by learning more about this.

It might be by journaling, right.

Our feelings and journaling what.

What's really coming up for us, and then finding ways to release it.

Or it may be that we need to work with a professional that could be a counselor, a therapist, it could be a pastor or somebody in ministry, but we need to do the work.

And before I jump back into some scripture and then some.

Some stories about this, I had all I've also learned that are when you.

If you've heard of epigenetics, which is basically just how our genes work, our gene expression works, our thoughts or our environment, if you will.

So our thoughts are part of our environment.

They determine what genes turn on and what genes turn off or what part of the gene.

So in other words, the more negative negativity we're around, the more stress we're around, the more anger, resentment, hatred, whatever it might be that we are continuing to feel in our body.

It can either keep our genes from turning on in a good way, or it can.

It can turn on genes that might actually hurt us in the long.

In the long run.

So once again, they've shown that our cells turn on and off based on our mindset and on our thoughts and in our attitudes, right in our perceptions.

And so this isn't just about how we physically show up and do things.

It's not just about our faith.

And even for people that maybe don't have strong faith right now, that may be on their faith journey, they're still trying to have a relationship with God or even understand their faith.

All of this is relevant because every human being needs to address these things if we want to be healthier and live a better life.

All right, so let me go on and share another scripture with you that really points to this as well.

So in Proverbs 4, 20, 22, it says, My son, give attention to my words.

Incline your ears to my sayings.

Do not let them depart from your eyes.

Keep them in the midst of your heart, for they are life to those who find them in health, to all their flesh.

So once again, God continues to tell us to get in his word and to be careful what we put in right into ourselves.

And so, once again, this is even saying, we have helped you all when we Keep his saying in his words close.

Right?

And this was another one.

Then Peter came up and said to him, lord, how often will my brother sin against me?

And I forgive him as many as seven times.

Jesus said to him, I do not say to you seven times, but 77 times.

So in other words, we are meant to continue to forgive.

We are meant to continue to, to let go of the hurt that people have done to us.

Now I am not going into saying we should letting someone hurt us.

That's, that's not the point here.

It's that we are to release it, we're to let go of it just like we have been.

We are able to rid ourselves of our sin through Christ.

Right?

In other words, it's not a one time thing.

We continue as humans to sin and to not show up as in and will never be perfect.

And so it's the same where you're asked to continue to forgive the person who sinned against us.

Okay, so there's a few things that I want to read to you.

And the first is from the book through the Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Comer and his books really is about what it says.

It's about how do we live a little slower, how do we live the way that God designed us to.

But there's this area, let me just peel this back that he says, See, he's talking about, I think prayer and meditating and just how we, how that's one way we slow down having solitude, things like this.

But then he's talking about, he says, I turn my breathing into a prayer, inhaling the fruit of the spirit one at a time.

And this is just an example of small things we can do in our life to try to release the things I just talked about.

Okay?

So he says, breathe in love, breathe out anger, breathe in joy, breathe out the sadness and pain.

Breathe in peace and breathe out the anxiety and uncertainty of tomorrow.

Breathe in patience, breathe out the hurry of my life.

And I think it's.

The point is, is we have to be intentional with this process and we have to do things to start having practices to let go of these things.

And I want to share a little bit from the book, please.

Sorry.

Thanks.

From pastor and author Mark Batterson.

And there's an error, there's a section in the book that he's talking about being unoffendable and he's talking about forgiveness.

And so one thing he says is there are lots of reasons we don't forgive.

We're afraid of getting hurt all over again.

We want the other person to pay for the pain they caused.

We want them to go first.

We're afraid that forgiveness makes us look weak when it's actually the opposite.

Forgiveness gets rid of our built in excuse system.

He goes on to say, unforgiveness is like an elastic band around your ankles.

You try to make forward progress, but bitterness is holding you back.

At some point you need to cut the cord.

Don't let those who hurt you define you.

Quitting letting quit letting them live in your head, in your heart.

Rent free.

Release yourself from other people's opinions.

If it helps, seal the forgiveness with some kind of symbol.

Release a balloon.

Balloon.

Bury a shoebox with a description of the hurt inside of it.

Better yet, build a bonfire and let it break.

Burn.

It says, do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.

Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice.

Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving to each other, just as Christ, God forgave you.

And he shares something that RT Kendall said, which is the primary way we grieve the Spirit in our lives is by fostering bitterness in our hearts.

Then he flipped the script.

The absence of bitterness allows the Holy Spirit to be himself in us.

When the Holy Spirit is not grieved, he's at home with me.

And Mark Batterson goes on to say that if you've lost your intimacy with God, it's possible.

Is it possible there's bitterness in your heart?

If you've lost the peace that passes understanding, is it possible there's unforgiveness in your heart?

If you've lost the joy of the Lord, is it possible you're holding a grudge that you've or you've taken offense?

Carve out some time, sit before the Lord and ask the question, is there anyone or anything I need to forgive?

And the last part I'll share with with you about this is he says, as I see it, we have two options when it comes to the pain we inflict on others and the pain that is inflicted on us.

We can repress it or we can confess it.

Whatever you repress will eventually depress and that creates the beach ball effect I've already alluded to.

You can keep it submerged for a while, but it will eventually resurface.

All it takes is a trigger, like Fred asking Hank for a paperclip.

Unforgiveness is death by a thousand Paper cuts you guys.

How good is that?

So I think that's, you know, one of the takeaways here is, you know, do what you need to do to let it go.

And I think journaling, asking questions and then answering those when you have time to reflect is so powerful.

Taking it to God, right?

Is there anything or anyone I need to forgive?

Write that down.

But also go to God with it, you know, and have.

When you have time, when you have quiet, when you can hear from God.

And, you know, one of the things I've talked about before on some of my podcast episodes is if you journal something, maybe something that's bothering you, and you really, you know, you release it or you share it with somebody, you know, a trusted person in your life who can hear you and let you get rid of it, let you to release it.

But if you write it down, I think burning it in a fire, maybe you don't want to have a copy, you know, a record of.

Of it.

Maybe you do, but it's kind of a.

It's a freeing thing that you can do, and I think that that's really powerful as well.

Let's see.

I'm just checking what else I want to share here.

So one thing he says in this part of the book is he shares about a woman.

Let's see, I've lost it.

A woman that her family was in the concentration camps.

Here it is.

And her name was.

Oh, wait, I think it was a woman.

Yeah, her name was Corey10BO.

Boom and boom lost her father and her sister in the concentration camps.

Years later, she goes back to Germany to preach the gospel.

And she.

Man, that's.

There was actually one of the guards in the concentration camp.

And he goes up and talks to her and basically asks if she'll forgive him.

And she literally stood there and she said, I, whose sin had again again been forgiven, I could not forgive.

But she said forgiving that prison guard was the most difficult thing she had ever done.

And so, let's see.

And then Batterson goes on to say, but she knew that forgiveness wasn't a function of feeling.

It was an act of the will.

Corey Ten Boom finally reached out her hand and took his.

That's the guard.

When she did, something miraculous happened.

A current started in my shoulder and raced down my arm, sprang into my joint, into our joined hands.

And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes.

Forgive you, brother.

I cried with all my heart.

I had never known God's love so intensely as I did then.

But even so, I realized it was not my love.

I had tried, and I did not have the power.

It was the power of the Holy Spirit.

You guys, here's the thing.

It might seem hard, and most of us are probably holding onto something that maybe we haven't even allowed to surface, or maybe we think we've addressed it, but it's still lingering.

It's still.

It's still there.

It still has a hold on us, even if it's in a smaller way than maybe in the past.

But I think what we forget is that when we can forgive someone else or have someone else forgive us, it is so powerful, just like God has forgiven us for all our sins.

I have seen or listened to or read so many examples where celebrity.

But now a humanitarian photographer that I follow, he had shared that he had taken photographs of.

I forget what country it was, but there was a civil war that happened in a country.

I don't know that it was Uganda, but it was somewhere close to there.

And people's families were killed by people, you know, on the other side.

And eventually there was this event where the people, some of the people were able to come together and forgive the other people that had murdered their loved one.

What is miraculous about that is not just that they could forgive someone, right?

And you've probably heard stories where someone is killed and the family says, I forgive them that murdered their daughter or their parent.

That takes going to, I think, the Holy Spirit.

That takes a miraculous effort.

But when we do it, the peace that we're able to feel, burden that is lifted, the weight is taken off of us.

And it is for us, I think, we think, you know, I don't want to forgive them because then they'll be off the hook.

This is not about getting off the hook for anything.

This is about letting ourselves be free of the pain, free of the trauma, free of the experience, free of the hurtful words, whatever it is.

Because if we can let it go, we don't keep living there.

If we do keep it, holding on to it every day or every week or every time we're triggered, we continue to relive as if it's happening now.

That past hurt, that anger, that bitterness, that resentment, that thing we will not forgive someone for.

So we are holding on to it.

And it's being held on to in every cell of our body.

It's being held onto in our heart.

It's being held on to at the soul level, every part of us level.

And so it's imperative that we learn to let go of these things, which is what we're called to do in the Bible.

Okay, so let's see, there's another.

There's a couple other scriptures.

I won't read them all, but Luke 6, 37, Matthew 6, 14, 15.

Let me make sure that's not what I shared.

No.

And Colossians 3:13, all share about healing or forgiveness.

And let's see, the last thing that I'll share about this is this is more about healing.

But I think healing and forgiveness obviously really go hand in hand in so many ways.

Save me and I will be saved, for you are the one I praise.

And here's the other thing.

I think the more we praise God, the more we give God gratitude, the more thankful that we are, the more we will be pulled out of or moved out of a state of frustration and anger and angst and anxiousness.

And so these small practices, daily practices of gratitude, daily practices of praising, the daily practices of giving thanks, regularly asking, what is it that I have to release, you know, what is it that I'm holding on to that is hurtful or harmful to me?

You know, what is keeping my heart from being opened completely?

When we ask these things regularly, it will change our lives for the better.

And I think it's amazing how much lighter we'll feel.

And actually, I think Mark Batterson, in that section I was reading to you, explained that he had done a forgiveness exercise and kind of walked through many of the things, small, very small things, to maybe some bigger things that he needed either to ask for forgiveness for or he needed to let go of that other people maybe did.

And he said when I did that, when I walked through all those things and I took it to God, he said, all of a sudden I felt so much lighter, like a backpack had been taken off my back.

Right.

It's the same way when we take or give our burdens to God, give our anxious thoughts, give our worry to God, because he tells us we don't need to bring those into tomorrow.

Right.

And we don't need to worry about tomorrow.

So I would just encourage you, if you want to live a lighter life, you want to tap more into the Fruit of the Spirit, which I'm going to be doing a series coming up soon.

I have some other episodes that are coming out first after that, so probably in by April.

I'm going to be doing a series, nine different episodes on the Fruit of the Spirit.

So each spirit.

So we're going to talk about each one.

But the point is, is the lighter we are, the more we release these things and the more we seek God and His Word, the more we will experience the fruit of the Spirit in our own lives.

So until next time, I hope you have a great week.

If this in any way helped you or resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you.

Reach out to me.

You can do that on my website, you can email me or you can DM me on Instagram.

I'm Hristen Fitch.

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