If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. 1 John 3:20

Last time we began talking about repentance as an outgrowth of our topic of forgiveness. Obviously, it’s natural for the repentant person to just want to “move on”. But true repentance doesn’t indulge that wish, and so those who want to succeed in leaving their sin behind are completely honest about how they are doing at walking out their repentance.

This can lead to the opposite problem: Repentant people need to forgive themselves. We serve a merciful God who delights in restoring people, while not placing them in circumstances they are not able to bear.

God offers repentant people a restored relationship with Him and a new (and perfect) plan for lives.

Hosea’s promise to repentant Israel went like this:
“He will heal us”, “He will bind up our wounds”, “He will revive us”, He will restore us”. He makes it so we can “live in his presence” (6:1-2). After healing comes living. Repentant people accept responsibility for past failures but do not drown themselves in guilt. They focus their attention on present living in Jesus.

Even if we’ve gotten pretty good and consistent about offering forgiveness to others, forgiving ourselves can be more difficult. Understanding why self-forgiveness is difficult can give us clues to make it easier:

1. To be unable to forgive ourselves is to have believed in ourselves in the first place. Admitting our sin literally challenges our belief that we’re somehow ‘above’ sin (or some kinds of sin). It can be a real identity crisis to come face to face with the truth that we are (still) sinners, just like everyone else—even those people who we may have indulged in a little spurning because of their sins.

2. To be unable to forgive ourselves can expose our beliefs in the identity of God. If we have repented of our sins, and taken them before Jesus, then we are forgiven. Now we need to come to realize the power of that and stop associating our “old failure” with our “new creation” image and believe what God says. “Therefore if anyone be in Christ, they are a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Cor 5:17). When we don’t forgive ourselves it’s difficult to walk in that truth.

3. To be unable to forgive ourselves can set us up for other problems in relationships, health, and wellbeing. God may forgive our sins, but our conscience won’t if we don’t let it go. If we try to forgive ourselves for something without releasing the underlying emotion or false beliefs we’ve attached to it, we may find the forgiveness just “doesn’t take”. False beliefs like “I’m always doing the wrong things” or “I’ll never be leave this habit behind” work inside us to defeat any chance of forgiving ourselves. No matter how hard we try to forgive, we continue to beat ourselves up for whatever happened— because our conscience tells us to.

4. When we try to forgive ourselves, we’re trying to release something that feels like it is part of us. We’re releasing who we were in the moment that we sinned. That’s different from forgiving what someone else did. We’re releasing a part of our past that the enemy uses to build our false identity around. It’s hard to forgive ourselves because our repentance has become central to how we (wrongly) define ourselves. That is why it is so critical to see ourselves as new creations. We frequently hear that truth but sermons and teachings imply that we are hopelessly “old creations” that are just forgiven by a longsuffering God who’s waiting for us to get our act together. The result is we don’t think and act in that new creation mentality and leave the old behind.

5. To be unable to forgive ourselves stems from our natural aversion to being vulnerable. Seeing ourselves as flawed, even sinful, is scary. Even our educational system tells us that anything that is not “right,” deserves some form of punishment (a bad grade). So we try to avoid mistakes at all costs, and when we do blow it, our first impulse is to hide it. In order to forgive ourselves, we first have to admit to ourselves that we blew it. We have to take ownership—and that feels almost counter to our sense of survival! The psalmist says, “because of my iniquity, and my bones waste away” (31:10). And that’s about how it feels to someone who can’t forgive themselves. It’s not a healthy lifestyle.