Sips from the Fountain
Learning to drink from Jesus, the Fountain of Living Water, isn’t as hard as I thought, especially when you just start with sips, and those will change everything.
Sips from the Fountain
When the Hardest One to Forgive is Yourself
Is any discussion about forgiveness complete until we talk about the hardest person to forgive…myself? It just seems like it makes so much sense to punish ourselves enough that we will never want to do that particular offense again.
It may seem counterintuitive to forgive ourselves, but it’s actually completely aligned with the gospel. In fact, we are empowered to forgive ourselves only through Jesus’ payment for all the wrongs that we’ve ever done, past, present, and future.
Does that sound too good to be true? I thought so too! Check it out.
Do you ever feel like life can get too complicated and maybe even overwhelming? Yeah, me too, and it's okay. My name's Martha Gannot, and in this podcast we're going to talk about life, love, faith, family relationships, all kinds of things, and we're going to drink from what God wants to pour into us, one small sip at a time, because when it's the fountain of living water, small sips make all the difference. Sometimes it'll be just you and me, sometimes we'll have a friend join us. If we could have lunch together today, this is what I'd want to talk about. Hey, hey, hey, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast.
Speaker 1:We have had such an amazing time talking about this subject of forgiveness. I feel like we don't talk about it a lot in our culture and it's so powerful. So many of you guys have reached out to me with your own stories of forgiveness and your own challenges with forgiveness. It's just been really amazing. So I just want to say thank you to you guys for engaging, for being willing to look at this topic, and today we're going to talk about one of the biggest challenges that I've actually experienced in my life when it comes to forgiveness, and that is forgiving myself. I guess it doesn't help a lot for me personally that it just seems like there's always plenty of content right. So often I've actually found myself, consciously or unconsciously, beating myself up. I don't know if that resonates with anyone else, but I think it might be pretty common.
Speaker 1:Where I actually first saw this dynamic so clearly wasn't actually with me, it was with one of my sons. My older son was a soccer goalkeeper while he was growing up and when they played a much better team, even though the ball had to make it all the way down the field and through all the other players on the team. When Aaron let a ball through, he felt the weight and the responsibility of it, understandably. Remember one game they had lost by more than 10 goals or so, which is a lot because he was a good goalkeeper. So if 10 of them made it through, that means he had been pummeled the whole game, and when he got in the car he promptly commenced to beating himself up too. I let him vent for a while and then I said something like this Okay, so now you have a choice. You see, when you beat yourself up over something, it uses a lot of energy because you have to do the beating and survive it simultaneously, it's exhausting, or you actually have the power to choose to do something else with your energy. So in this ballgame there were things that you literally couldn't do anything about, you couldn't change them, and there were things that you could have done differently. So you know, you actually do have the ability to choose to use your energy to take a good hard look at this ballgame and identify the things that you could have done something differently about.
Speaker 1:We took the next few minutes to do that. We talked about what had happened that had nothing to do with Aaron's play. We talked about true errors, low skill moves, that kind of thing, and that's all I'm going to say about that, because I don't really know enough sports words to keep going past that. Anyway, you get it. Then I asked him what he could do to improve those areas in his play. We talked through that and then I said, okay, it's done.
Speaker 1:From this point on, if you beat yourself up, it's not going to do anything to help you or to change the past or the future. It's only going to hurt you. And then we also talked about extending the same grace to his team members at the next practice, when everyone would be tempted to beat each other up too. What if he could teach them this dynamic too? Because once you've identified the things that you know you could have impacted, then you realize that it's a waste of time and energy to beat yourself up at all, even where you were wrong. Plus, when you beat yourself up, you leave yourself wounded and beaten for when it's time to evaluate what you can do something about. What if all of us, we took our energy and we focused on the things that we could have done differently? We make right anything we've done that was wrong, that we need to make right, and then we make a plan for how we'll you know, quote train moving forward so that we improve enough to play differently under the same conditions. Plus, if you're not beaten up as you evaluate the things you could change, you don't have to take time to recover and heal. You're all set up ready to take that energy and move forward in a productive, life-giving, game-changing. See what I did there Game-changing way.
Speaker 1:I have a brother-in-law who is sports experienced. He does know sports words and he said that when he was playing team sports, if they ever heard the other teams start to criticize each other, it was like smelling blood in the water. Then they knew, no matter how much better that team was, that they could beat them, because they were already tearing each other down. They were going to beat themselves. It is a powerful principle, this thing of beating up yourself or beating up your own. How much would this change our games right, if we extended grace to ourselves and we did the same for others in our world?
Speaker 1:I think for me personally. I guess I just thought that if I punished myself enough, I would change. If I made the consequences painful enough for myself, I would never do that again. When I say it out loud, it kind of seems like the most ridiculous form of behavior modification, because it actually keeps me at the surface of my issues instead of allowing me to look deeper at the why behind that behavior. It keeps me from asking the Lord to change whatever it was that caused me to do badly. Or maybe I thought that somehow my self-inflicted punishment would even out the debt of the hurtful things I've done to those I love and to everybody else. But at this end of life and parenting I'm realizing that punishment never actually worked for what I really wanted with myself, or with my kiddos, or with the rude guy in traffic or with my kiddos, or with the rude guy in traffic.
Speaker 1:Punishment just presses my values onto you heavily enough that you're forced to act according to them for the moment or for as long as I leverage power over you. So if I make you sit down on the inside, you're still standing up right. This is one of the reasons that prison doesn't solve the crime problem. In fact, prison is where criminals go to learn more about how to be criminals, but that's another topic for another day. I think you get my point. If I exert enough power over you to get you to impose my values on yourself while yours never changed, here's a question I have how will you stand up to people that you should stand up to when that time comes? How will you resist doing things that are wrong when the pressure is high? If I've conditioned you to cave to power? So punishment, then it's using control and power to make you do what I want you to do, or to make me do what I wish I wanted to do.
Speaker 1:Now, side note here I want to make a point that I'm not talking about discipline. Those are different things discipline and punishment. We can talk more about that later. As my sportsy brother-in-law says hear what I am saying, not what I'm not saying. So anyway, instead, whether it's my children or the rude guy in traffic or a criminal or me on the inside, I want to change the me that made that bad choice, because I want to be different. And punishment never really accomplishes that goal.
Speaker 1:I get it that there are times it's the only tool available, but it is a blunt force blow where what's needed is a very vulnerable heart change, and that generally only happens when the heart feels safe. Plus, if you walk with God, the truth is, jesus actually already paid the price for all the punishment that ever was or will be needed for your children, for the rude guy in traffic, for every prisoner, for you and for me. In fact, hang with me here. But when we beat ourselves up, when we punish ourselves, if you think about it, we're kind of saying that Jesus' death wasn't actually enough to cover what we've done or will do. Ouch, I didn't realize that I was taking being God back into my own hands every time I started punishing myself. So when I pause to let that sink in, I don't have to beat myself up any more, ever again. He took all of that so that I could lean back into his kindness, let his grace wrap all around me, healing every wound, even the ones I caused.
Speaker 1:It's the kindness of God that draws men to repentance, says Romans 2.4. Instead of kicking in my own system, of forcing myself to change, I find that as I draw into his heart, my own heart starts changing. So I don't do those things anymore because my heart is different. I'm becoming what I'm beholding in him, what I'm beholding in Him. That, I think, is the mind of Christ, when I start thinking the way he thinks, even about myself.
Speaker 1:So now listen to this time-tested scripture from that different perspective. And since we're mostly talking about grace for ourselves today, let's make it personal, for God so loved me that he gave his only son so that when I believe in him, I won't perish but I'll have eternal life. For God didn't send the son to me to judge me, but so that I might be saved through him. John 3, 16 through 17. Today, what if you let yourself accept again that he died for every wrong thing you've ever done? What if you let that debt to yourself go and breathe that amazing, fresh air of forgiveness again and again and again?
Speaker 1:There's plenty for today. There's plenty for all of your yesterdays and there's plenty for tomorrow. I hope that that message is as life-giving for you as it was for me. Hey, you guys, thanks for hanging out with us today. I hope you got some refreshment from this sip from the fountain. If you're curious to hear more, or if you like what you've heard, you can go ahead and subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen to yours or follow our Instagram account, sips from the Fountain or our Facebook page by the same name. Special thanks for Cover Art Photography to the Sarah D Harper, and I can't wait to hang out with you guys next time. Thanks so much. Love y'all. Thank you.