Why We Can't Forgive Ourselves

The Prison Of Self 'Forgivelessness'

This Is Hard

There’s a strange ache that follows us after we receive the message of God’s grace and mercy. We say we believe it. We preach it. We sing about it. But when it comes time to live like it’s true, a lot of us struggle to.

Even after we can accept that God has forgiven us, what we can’t seem to do - is forgive ourselves.

Perhaps we don’t even consider it because it sounds noble, humble even, to say “I just can’t let it go.” But the longer we sit with that feeling, the more it starts to look less like humility, and more like something else.

This is a message about forgiveness, but not just divine forgiveness. This is about that lingering, daily, soul-crushing kind of guilt. The kind that still shows up years after the sin is gone. The baggage we carry that makes you think to yourself, “God might forgive me... but I can’t forgive me.”

If that’s where you are, you’re not alone. But you can’t stay there.

Because that mindset will keep you from ever truly experiencing the kingdom Jesus invites you into.

If you’re a Christian—someone who believes and professes that God has forgiven you—why is it so hard to forgive yourself?

If you’re not a Christian... why do you believe that whatever you’ve done is so bad that God won’t be able to forgive you?

What Hurts The Most

I want to tell you a story. As I do, I want to invite you to remember something from your own life. Think about one of the most painful emotional experiences you’ve ever had. Not a minor embarrassment or some awkward moment. I’m talking about the moment you felt gutted. The moment your insides collapsed. The one that made you question everything you thought you could count on. You don’t need to dwell on it long, but just hold it for a moment.

I’ll share mine. You hold yours. Maybe we’ll meet in the middle of it.

This happened to me in college, my first real heartbreak. Not puppy love, not drama. The real thing. I was in a relationship that felt serious for the first time. And then, out of nowhere, I got a late-night phone call from my best friend. He said, “Just check your computer.”

So I pulled up my Dell laptop and opened the browser. Checked my Top 8 (millennials will know). And there it was; my girlfriend and another one of our close friends - Not just together. Lock lipped for the whole world to see.

I blacked out.

I didn’t know what to do with that kind of pain, so I disconnected from everything. I retreated into a fever dream of Taco Bell, an iPod Nano, and my Boyz II Men playlist. That was my life for a while.

I don’t know what you listen to when you’re heartbroken - but when those boys belted “can somebody tell me how to get things back the way they used to be. Oh God give m the reason I’m down on bended knee” they canonized a legendary tier breakup song for a whole generation.

Time would pass. I made peace with both friends, and we laugh about it now. God brought new things into my life. Greater things than I could have ever imagined. But at the time, it wrecked me.

What made it hurt the most wasn’t the betrayal. It was the shock of who it came from. It never feels good to be cheated on or betrayed…but when it comes from your close friend, your brother…it hits differently. It was someone I loved. Someone who checked on me after I’d been in a car accident just weeks earlier. Someone I never imagined could hurt me like that.

The deepest pain came not from the offense, but from the disbelief that it would happen that way, by those people. You know this pain. It’s when the person you never imagined would hurt you is the one who does.
It’s not just the betrayal. It’s the shock. It’s the ‘second wound’.

It always cuts the deepest when the person holding the knife is the last one you expected. This is why it feels the worst when we are let down by our brothers and sisters in the faith. You don’t expect particularly polite interactions at the DMV. In fact you expect people to be a little contentious in there. But when someone is inconsiderate, disrespectful, or needlessly rude at church it feels 10x worse. Why? Because we expect better (and rightfully so) from the household of faith. We know we aren’t supposed to treat each other that way, and always the second wound that hurts the most. So many have deconstructed, given up on God, and turned from faith entirely because these wounds drive so much deeper.

It’s the “You too, Brutus?” moments in our lives. The broken promise hurts, but the moment that really breaks you is the moment when you have to wrap your mind around the disbelief that, “I can’t believe it was them.”

That’s the second wound.
And it’s always worse than the first one.

This Is Worse Than I Thought

Here’s the part we don’t talk about. There’s this uncomfortable twist that really starts cutting deep. The reason we can’t forgive ourselves is because the person who causes you the most “second wounds” in this life - is you.

In Matthew 26, Jesus is with His disciples after the Passover. He says, “You will all fall away because of me tonight.”

Peter is in classic form. Resolute and brash:

“Even if they all fall away, I will never fall away.”

Jesus says, “Peter, before the rooster crows, you’ll deny me three times.”

Peter doubles down. “Even if I have to die with you, I will not deny you.”

Every single disciple echoes him. And they meant it.
But then the mob comes. Judas kisses Jesus on the cheek. Peter pulls a sword and cuts off an ear. Jesus inexplicably puts it back on, and just like that, things begin careening out of control. Jesus is arrested, dragged into a sham trial, and the movement they gave their entire lives to begins to collapse in real time around them. And Peter... ever the bold, brash, outspoken Peter... starts to unravel.

He’s watching from a distance in the courtyard. A servant girl sees him.

“Weren’t you with Jesus?”

Peter says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Then someone else: “No, I’m pretty sure you were one of them.”

Peter swears, “I do not know the man.”

They say, “Your accent gives you away.”

Peter loses it. His emotions and his fear are in control now. He begins cursing using language no follower of Jesus would use.

“I do not *insert euphemism of choice here* know Him.”

And then... the rooster crows just as Jesus predicted - and Peter weeps. He weeps not just because he failed, but because he finally saw what he was actually capable of. He was exactly who he said he wasn’t. He saw the real Peter, and it shocked him.

A deep irony strikes you when you realize that when Peter said “I do not know the man!”, he thought he was speaking of Jesus but he was actually speaking about himself.

Peter was now confronted with the reality that he’d not considered before. He actually WAS that bad. He’s exactly who he said he wasn’t - but even worse.

In rabbinic culture, you could get the teachings of your teacher wrong and that was a big mistake. Judas seems to have been in this boat, at minimum, horribly misunderstanding Jesus mission, and trying to force the hand of God. But the even greater transgression in rabbinic culture was to publicly deny your rabbi. There was no coming back from that. In Peter’s mind he knows that according to his own code of ethics and commitment as a disciple, he has committed an even bigger betrayal than Judas by publicly denying Jesus. Perhaps Jesus own words rang painfully in his mind “ but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.”

I confess to you that I’ve been Peter, and I’m betting you have been too.

I remember sitting on the bathroom floor, crying out “God, I was doing so well. Why did I do this again? I promised I wouldn’t. I said I was past this. I hate myself.”

And then God whispered back something I’ll never forget that hit me like a bolt of lightning:

“That’s your problem. You’re still trying to keep score.”

“You still think you could be good enough.”

“But if you could have been good enough... I wouldn’t have come for you in the first place.”

You’re Shocked. God’s Not

Read verse 32 of that passage again. Jesus says to His disciples:
“After I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.”

Did you catch that? He tells them before they fail Him that they will, and that He’ll meet them on the other side. They haven’t even abandoned Him yet, but He’s already preparing their restoration? That’s who He is. That’s how King Jesus works.

When you’re alone in the dark crying to God “I can’t believe I did this...”, God is looking back at you saying “Oh but I can! And now that you know what I know, maybe you can learn from this and grow.”

I’ve realized that when I am at my worst, when I’ve fallen in ways that I didn’t want to believe I was capable of, when I’m shocked at my own badness, in that rock bottom moment between me and God there is only one of us who is surprised - and it’s not God.

When you’re staring in that mirror, disgusted...When you’re playing the memory on repeat, punishing yourself because you can’t believe you were capable of that mistake, God is not surprised. He’s not shocked. He’s not wondering if you’re still worth it. You are the ONLY one in that room who is surprised by your badness. You are the only one refusing to leave a past behind that God already redeemed. You’re the only one refusing to move into the future He’s prepared for you.

That’s not a righteousness humility. That’s pride.

When I’m in denial about the depth of my brokenness and still keeping score, I treat the cross like an extra life in a video game, or a get out of jail free card in Monopoly. I treat His sacrifice as if He came to give me another chance to get myself together, and get my life right. But that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the gospel.

Jesus didn’t come to give me a second chance to get myself right.
He came to BE my second chance.

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He Knew, And He Still Came For You

This is the moment where the lights should come on. We must continually preach to ourselves the nature of the God we serve. We know His attributes intellectually, but we need them to be pressed deep into our wounded hearts. We ‘know’ God is omniscient, but our hearts forget that because God is omniscient, He already knows the past, present, and future including every mistake. Every failure, every denial…He knows every peak and every valley of your life.

If He knew your worst moment before you committed it in the past, then He also knows the future failures you’re going to commit even before you do. And yet, despite all of this He STILL came for you.

“God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
-Romans 5:8

Before you fell, you didn't think that you were that bad. It was a blind spot for you, and it's always the blind spots that are home to the planks our own eyes can't see. Those are the fatal ones.

When you fall and realize how bad you are, now you just know what God already knew. And He has decided to love you anyway. Isn't that actually the cause for an incredible outpouring of thanksgiving?

Isn't that something to rejoice about? Shouldn't that give you an unshakable confidence in the message of the gospel. You're much more worse than you ever wanted to admit to yourself, but you are much more loved and desired by God than you ever dared to dream. You cannot shock God out of loving you.

Have you ever considered that when we fell in the garden back in Genesis 3, God was immediately prophesying about Jesus? It's because even though God didn't want the fall, and was grieved by the fall, He wasn't surprised by the fall. He was already working ahead. Jesus had already decided that He was going to come and take care of it. When Cain killed Abel, God wasn't shocked. Look at how He talks with Cain beforehand. He knows what's about to happen. In Genesis 6 when God flooded the world, He didn't say He was surprised - He said that He was grieved. When the Babel incident happens in Genesis 11, God isn’t shocked. When Moses didn't lead the way he was supposed to, He wasn't shocked. When Israel struggled and rebelled throughout their entire history, God wasn't shocked. When David committed adultery, entrapment, and murder on a mass scale, God still was not shocked. When Israel killed all the prophets, God was not shocked. When Jesus came, He constantly prophesied that He must be delivered into the hands of the gentiles to be crucified because… God was not shocked. And God was not shocked by the things you did that you think He can't forgive.

Here's what you need to remember about an omniscient, omnipotent God: God never suffers the second wound like we do.

We still can't believe some of the things we have done. But He has always had a plan for you in spite of what He knew you were going to do. When God created a world that included you He already figured your brokenness into the equation. It is your decision whether you want to accept this truth or not. He has already, and always known you from the top to the very bottom, and despite knowing the worst parts of you which you still don’t see and can’t admit, He has never wavered in His love for you.

It’s Not Humility - It’s Pride.

There’s an insidious reason why it's so hard to forgive ourselves. It’s because of the double wound that it causes. It hurts when we make a mistake always, but it kills us because we have not yet come to terms with our own badness. We have not admitted to ourselves how broken we actually are. It is our pride. It is the original sin.

You see, we didn't think that we were THAT broken to have made that kind of mistake - to have been able to make that much of a mess. We didn't think we could ever be that selfish, or that angry, or that twisted. What's more, we knew better, and we knew we should have been better, and we promised we would be better, and then we weren't better. It’s feels just like we have denied Jesus for the third time. When we made the mistake bigger than we ever thought possible - when we transitioned from fighting our addictions to managing them, we were so shocked to learn just how bad we actually are.

We have been battling this since we fell in the garden, and we all do it. We desperately strive to convince ourselves that we aren't that bad. We are so addicted to comparison that we root our self-esteem in our superiority to others. We’re intoxicated on the lie that “we aren’t as bad as them.” We say “I would never do something like that.” We tell ourselves, even if the world fell away. I would not. Even if I have to die, I would. We know we should be better and yet we haven't been. We live our lives trying to be ‘a good person’ or a ‘good Christian’… but every now and then we get a reality check. We catch a bitter glimpse of just how bad and how broken we truly are.

There is a legitimate guilt that we carry when we fall short, and that guilt is removed through repentance and restitution. But there is also an irredeemable guilt that exists. It happens when our pride twists guilt into a much darker, heavier pain: shame. That shame is there underneath every instance you say “I know God has forgiven me, but I won’t forgive myself.” When you say that, it means you are failing an idol whose approval is more important to you than God's approval is. But what idol? That idol is you.

When you say, “God has forgiven me, but I can’t forgive myself,” what you’re really saying is:

“My approval matters more than God’s.”

“My standards are higher than His.”

“His grace might be enough for the universe, but not for me.”

We have always been our own greatest idol. It's our own quest for goodness and being good enough in and of ourselves. This is nothing more than being God in our own eyes. It is exactly the original sin that we pursued in the garden.

Refusing to accept the forgiveness of God, and refusing to forgive yourself, is an act of this same pride.

If you refuse to forgive something that God has already forgiven, it makes your opinion, and your sin, and your ego bigger than the blood of Jesus and God's grace can cover.

God Is Not In Your Past

So I admit it. I am irrevocably broken. I am bad. Really, really bad. I'm in desperate need of the grace and mercy of my King, and I’m betting you are too. There is something in your life you're ashamed of. Deep down, you doubt you can be forgiven for it. It’s the thing you haven't yet found the courage to forgive yourself for. I want you to know that it shocked you, and it may still to this day, but it does not shock your God. I want you to know that you can’t believe that you did that, but God can. I want you to realize that you don't know how bad you are, and you don't even know how bad you're going to be in the future, but God does. So, when you are in those moments when you say to God, "God, I can't believe I did this." Remember, he's looking back down at you still loving you, still having come, still having died, still having got up out of the grave saying, "Oh, I can believe every bit that you did." And now that you know what I know, we can finally grow.”

I’m betting that someone reading this saying, "I wish I could forgive myself, but I don't feel God like I used to - and that has got to be evidence that He's turned his back on me…that I'm unforgivable and that's why I can't forgive myself."

I want to suggest to you that maybe the reason you don't feel God like you used to, maybe the reason He seems absent, maybe the reason you haven't sensed His presence in your life for such a long time is because you never forgave yourself when He forgave you.

You made that mistake 5 years ago. That happened 10, 20, 50 years ago. That happened when you were a little boy or a little girl.

That happened a long time ago, and you repented and God forgave you then. Then God moved on to prepare things that He had coming for you next. But you didn't go with Him. He said, "I am going before you to Galilee” and you said, "I'm going to stay right here."

You stayed, and you dwelled, and you listened to the voice of the enemy. You listened to the accuser and you have been grinding yourself into dust again, and again, and again day, after day, after day. You have remained trapped in your past, and the only reason that you don't feel God, or see God, or sense God there is because God doesn't dwell in your past.

Once He forgives. The Bible says He “remembers it no more”. You don't feel him because He isn't there! You let God forgive you, and you never let you forgive you! And so, you are living in your past when the living God is a God of the present and the future.

You are literally choosing to wear the chains that He died to take off of you because you are back dwelling on, and ruminating on that moment and that mistake. You have refused to leave. It is idolatry.

It's not that God isn't there for you anymore. It's not that He's deserted you. It's just that He's not going to validate the punishment that you're putting on yourself when He already went to the cross to pay the price for it. He's not going to validate your self-punishment when he said, "It is finished.” The irony of this is that you haven't left the past because you think that mistake means you aren’t good enough. But what it really says to God is that His sacrifice wasn't good enough to deal with your brokenness. And THAT is exactly why God is not going to dwell with you in that place. Because His sacrifice was good enough. It is the perfect sacrifice, the only sacrifice to take away sin.

Sometimes the biggest unforgivable sin is the one you refuse to allow God to forgive you for.

Do not let your pride fool you into cheapening the actions of the One who sacrificed it all so that you don't have to live in this prison any more. If you know that God has forgiven you, do you honestly believe that He at the same time would send you these feelings of guilt and shame, that He would prepare for you a psychological cage from which you could never escape? Of course not! So if God's not sending those feelings to you, then where are they coming from? And further, why would you trust them more than what you already know about the God who sacrificed it all to come to get you?

You might say you are waiting on God to feel forgiven but, but it is far more likely that God is waiting on you. You are waiting to feel forgiven, but he is waiting on you to accept forgiveness.

Whatever shame that you are carrying today, I want you to know that God is not shocked by your brokenness. In fact, He knows more about you than you even know about yourself, and He has still been planning, and moving, and arranging things for you. He has gone before you into Galilee! He has paid the price in full. He has taken on the debt of your brokenness and your sin Himself, and He stands there with open arms for each and everyone that will meet him in a place of repentance, a believing heart, and an acceptance of what He has done on their behalf.

Here’s the secret to forgiving yourself. Trade the shock that you feel when you think about how broken you actually are for the shocking reality that Jesus knew all of this about you ahead of time, and He still chose to die for you because He loves you, and He is never going to stop loving you.

-Marcus