Letting Go of Hurts, Hang-Ups + Offenses in Your Marriage

I thought this would be the shortest episode ever because I wanted to go all Truth, no love of: "If you refuse to forgive others, your Father in heaven will not forgive you." And then the Holy Spirit gently nudged me (punched me in the face) and reminded me of the love part...

So let's dive into forgiveness and letting go God's way wrapped in both Truth and love.

Transcript

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Welcome back to the High Level Wife Podcast. I'm Chelsea Holm, and here we do Marriage God's way. And I thought, you know, this was probably gonna be the shortest episode ever because it's about holding on to hurts, hangups, and offenses, right? And harboring unforgiveness and resentment. And immediately I wanted to be like, God says forgive, he forgave you. Does he hold your offenses against you? No, he does not. End of episode. Forgive each other, right? And the Holy Spirit gently uh punched me in the face and was like, empathy, girl, empathy. We gotta show empathy. We gotta hold people's hearts and we gotta bring that love. And God is whoop! Yeah, you hear that thunder? I hope you can hear that. It's it's intense. I yeah, I love I love storms. I am that typical Midwesterner. I wanna sit on the porch and I want to watch it coming, and I my mom gets scared every time, even though she watches on the porch too. But I always say, like, if there's a tornado coming and I'm riding a tornado to see Jesus, I am Yee Han all the way. Okay? All right. Anyway, um, but I was just talking to my friend yesterday, and I said, I really struggle to show empathy. Um, and I was talking to my mom about it, and she's like, Yeah, you've been that way since you were a child. And my friend challenged me actually on this. She said, I would caution you on agreeing that you have no empathy and you don't know how to show empathy. She said, Because my thought on this is that you actually do, you simply need to ask the Holy Spirit what that looks like for you to show empathy specifically in the way that God designed you, and specifically in alignment with the heart of God, right? Um, my friend, she is such a merciful girl. She shows so much empathy. And so we were talking about, um, but the problem with empathy without truth, right, is that then you overlook all offenses and you you get complacent to call people out of sin, right? Because there's no truth, there's simply all grace. Um, whereas I tend to be in the camp of all truth, very little grace. Um, and I I I'm a very feisty individual. If you've listened to me long enough, you know that. Um, and and I was explaining to her, I because she said, you know, like, well, what does empathy look like for you? Like, how do you typically show it? And I said, Well, I don't. And then she's like, Yeah, no, no, no. And so we had that conversation. And she's like, I think you do. I think you just need the Holy Spirit to reveal to you how you specifically do that and to refine you and grow you and convict you in any ways that that is not in alignment, right? Um, and I said, You're right, because I I care about people so much and I love people so much that if I see you are about to fall off a cliff, I will yank your arm out of socket trying to pull you back, right? And so this whole this whole idea of not being able to let go, right? Fully let go of hurts that have been done to you, hurts you've experienced. Um, the truth part says your father has forgiven you of everything. Jesus took on everything for you so that you could be made alive and walk free, right? He doesn't hold anything against you. And that grace, receiving that grace compels us into faith with works to deploy the grace that we have just uh received, to deploy and give generously that same metric of grace and mercy to those around us, right? And the truth says, forgive, or your father in heaven will not forgive you. Okay, and so I hope you hear the fullness of the character of God in here, that he is holy. Sin and God do not coexist. Godliness and ungodliness do not coexist within the father, right? Remember the two um Aaron's two sons that were priests that brought their own strange fire to the Lord, not in a way that he commanded, but in their own understanding, and they were immediately consumed by their own strange fire that they brought. They didn't do what they were supposed to, they did the opposite, in fact, okay? So we need to understand that you know, um, who was a guy? He the ark was falling, the ark of the covenant was falling, and he reached out to grab it, and immediately he was killed. Why? Because God is holy, and understanding his holiness should strike fear in our hearts. Awe, perfect awe, and perfect reverence. Perfect reverence, not fear that we run away, but fear that we understand the fullness of God's character. That is, he is perfectly holy, he is perfect justice, and he is also perfect love and forgiveness. He is both consistently, and these things don't contradict one another. We simply lack the understanding as humans to fully conceptualize it. And that is why we have awe and reverence for God, this perfect fear. And so then when we turn around and apply that to unforgiveness towards others or inability to let go, here's a few things as walking through many years of hurts in my own marriage, um, also me hurting my husband, but that's for him to speak about. I'm gonna speak about the hurts that that I endured, right? I read a book very early on when it was revealed that um anyway, I won't go into the details of everything, but there was a lot of infidelity, and I read a book and it was about forgiveness, and I really wish I think it was just called forgiveness, but there was a prime example in there of what forgiveness looks like and how you forgive whether or not someone receives it from you or not. You forgive regardless of if it's warranted or not, and it never is, right? Like you forgive regardless of if there is a response or a um if someone comes to you first, right? Like you go first, you forgive first, you forgive quickly. And it was this image of like someone steps on your toes and hurts your toes and their pancake toes, right? And maybe they're still standing on your toes, and yet you forgive them. You don't wait for them to get off your toes, you don't wait for your toes to stop hurting, you forgive them. And the whole point of the book was that forgiveness does not equal not remembering. Forgiveness is an act of mercy that is undeserved. What's that sound like, right? Like grace that we received. We we were able to take on and be covered in the blood of Jesus sacrifice, perfect sacrifice for us once and for all, and to receive that, to stand now in his righteousness. I am righteous. You can say that if you stand covered in the blood of Jesus, right? And it also recognizes that we are human and we, unlike God, who is not human, right? Jesus did become human, flesh, he became flesh and dwelt among us, but um, we are fully human and we remember things. Our bodies remember things, right, to keep us safe. Um, our brains, our memories, we remember things. And sometimes they can blindside us out of nowhere. Sometimes the enemy uses these by planting thoughts in our heads to bring them back up, planting a song that reminds us of something, you know, right? Like putting these things in our path to remember and bring up that hurt again. But it's this daily intentional, so it's this forgiveness, right? Offering that gift, whether someone receives it or not, it doesn't matter. And then it's this daily discipline of intentionally not dwelling on it or holding it, of intentionally laying it back down. So it's not feeding those thoughts, it's not nurturing that animal of offense, that pet of offense. It's not going down the rabbit trails of experiencing that pain over and over and over again. It's choosing intentionally and daily by the power of the Holy Spirit by staying rooted and grounded in the love of Christ, having a right view of God, right view of self, and therefore right view of others, to be able to extend forgiveness quickly and immediately, and also to have the discipline to walk in the spirit daily to continue laying those things down and letting those things go. The only way that you don't let them go is if you don't intentionally, right? Like if you don't discipline with intention, right? You don't become fit by hoping or not trying or not thinking about it, right? You become fit when you daily and intentionally discipline your body, your mind, your mouth, all of those things. Um forgiveness is no different. Letting go, fully letting go means recognizing when you haven't fully let go and letting it go again. It means not holding it against them, not holding it over them, not bringing it up as uh a weapon to be used again, not bringing it up as a way to hold power over somebody. Also, letting go means not holding on to it so that you still have something that you can lean on as an excuse. Think about that. Not letting go is benefiting you in some way, shape, or form. So it's having the humility in partnership with the Holy Spirit to pray the hard prayer of reveal the healing that you want to bring into me and expose with your light what needs to be pruned and refined. It's getting to the thing of the thing that's actually the thing. Why are you holding on to it? What is in it for you? What are you getting? What is your flesh getting? What is your self-protection getting? Fuel for continuing in the same patterns? Is that it? What is it? You have to be honest. If you are not willing to be honest, if you are not willing to look in the mirror and ask the hard questions, then you will continue to hold on to it and not be able to let it go. But as someone who has walked through years, decades of hurts over those years, in the same vein, on repeat, you absolutely can let go. Here's the thing, and and I'll tell you, this is the thing about forgiveness that people don't understand is you will either unintentionally walk in agreement with it and stay that way, or you will intentionally be aware of the trap of unforgiveness and entering into that agreement. Because I will tell you, after years now of forgiveness and being healed of these things, and God bringing that healing and that release, the enemy still brings stuff up, memories still pop up, and you have to immediately shut it down. I do not entertain that. I have zero tolerance for entertaining any thoughts in that vein. And if you have to, saying, Holy Spirit, drop an atom bomb in my thoughts right now in the name of Jesus and give me peace. This is where memorizing the word of God is so important, or reading the word of God to take every thought captive to Christ. That's a daily thing. When there's been hurt, sometimes that's an hourly thing, right? Sometimes it means that you need to change certain things about your environment. You need to change certain things that you're looking at, listening to, consuming, certain circles that you're in, certain people that you've given authority and influence over your life needs to be removed and revoked because they do not build up your marriage or build up your husband. They are more than happy to play a part and a voice and a role in tearing it all down. These things need to be removed. Your marriage is a garden, and there are weeds that will take over, and some of them are more nefarious than others, and they will run wild unless you get to that source, that that that spot of the root system starting and rip it out, right? If you have any kind of um plants or garden beds or like flower beds around your house, you know how much of a pain it is if you don't weed all spring versus if you daily go out there and pull the weeds, it's never overwhelming. Right? Yeah, it's annoying. Like, ah, there's another weed. I was just walking, uh I was just I had just put down some new mulch in our one of our front beds. I didn't finish the thing, but I had just put some down, and sure enough, today there was a a chute of grass that had popped up through there, and so I pulled it out, and you know what? All I had to do was kind of shake it a little bit, and you know, the the roots came right out because they haven't been able to take root through the what is it called? Garden paper, tarp, whatever that is, landscape paper. Um, and so then it's much easier to maintain versus not doing anything. And in the beginning, there's a lot of heavy lifting. I remember la was it last year uh or the year before? I think it was last year. We're coming up on a year where Zach was in Kansas for that whole year. Um, and now he's been home for almost a whole year. And it was me, myself, and I with the Holy Spirit running the show here, right? I was both mom and dad for a whole year for the most part. Um, and it was really challenging. And, you know, that also meant me doing yard work, which is my husband's like domain of where he loves it. He finds so much peace in tending the ground. Um, whatever. Uh I like the pretty flowers. I don't like the whole maintenance and cultivation of it because it's a pain in my butt. So I let a lot of things go because they just weren't a priority at the time. But then when I when I did get to landscaping in the fall, it was such a pain. I had to take out all the old mulch. Uh the weeds were so bad through the the landscaping paper or whatever the heck it's called. Um, I had to rip that fully out, and I had to later new and the new mulch, and it was a lot of work. But now, guess what? It's very easy maintenance because the weeds can't get through the new tarp, and I pull them as immediately as I see a new one come out, so they're not able to propagate. I don't know if that's the right word, but they're not able to dig that root system in deeper and spread out, right? Because I'm always getting the one from the main hub, the main root, and ripping it out immediately, right? And so that's what it is for hurts and hangups and offenses in marriage. We have to fully let them go. It takes work. A lot of times, it is a lot of upfront inner work in partnership with the Holy Spirit and truth and disrupting patterns and walking in new ones and identifying and having awareness of self-protection and how that is inhibiting you from being able to have oneness and unity and intimacy within marriage, and being willing with courage to expose those things and lay them down, right? It's being emotionally naked, right? It's being uh spiritually naked and it's being physically naked, right? We have that that triage of aspects within marriage as one flesh. And so I know this is gonna be challenging. And if your reaction is, yeah, but okay, anything after the butt discredits everything else, okay? So we got to get rid of the butt. We don't like the big butt. Okay, we got to get rid of that and we gotta cut it out. We're gonna have to do some heavy lifting. So I wanna leave you with this is not the shortest episode ever. The Holy Spirit just took off here with this, but if you are holding on to an offense, now is the time. God is calling you to let it go. And it is going to take diligent, daily, intentional work. But you will get to a point when you've done this for long enough where it's easy maintenance now. And when the enemy crops something up, it's really easy to identify and not doing that, right? We don't tolerate that anymore. But in the beginning, it does take a lot of work and heavy lifting. But when you do it under the yoke of Jesus, which is easy and the burden is light, it's the only way you can do it. That's not on your own understanding. Okay. It's not in your own strength or your own power. It's not in your own truth, right? It's it's in the Lord, the big T truth. And it's the only way. So if this challenged you, sit with it. Sit with the Holy Spirit in it and see what he is revealing to you that needs healing, that he wants to heal, and needs exposing, that he is exposing now. See you on the next episode.